Abstract
This article examines how state eldercare provision influences care workers’ subjectivities and claims for dignity and self-worth. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted in South Korea, I argue that migrant and native-born care workers construct different ideals around what is “good” versus “bad” care through the marking of ethnic and professional boundaries. South Korean women employed as state-certified care workers emphasize the expertise and skill they provide as professional caregivers, and as such, demand expanded rights and protections from the state. In contrast, Korean-Chinese migrant women, who share a similar ethnic background but migrated from China to South Korea, emphasize their value as fictive-kin who can provide wholehearted care as informal workers. These divergent strategies not only result in the use of ethnicity to mark clear boundaries between the care work provided by each group, but they also (re)produce ethnically-segmented, two-tiered labour markets institutionalized by eldercare policies.
Introduction
On 16 May 2016, the South Korean National Assembly passed an amendment to the Long-Term Care Insurance for Senior Citizens to improve the working conditions of state-certified eldercare workers, officially classified as yoyangbohosa workers. 1 Members of the Seoul Supporting Center for Elder Care Workers had fought since 2011 – organizing numerous press conferences, public protests, and political delegations – to secure greater employment protections for yoyangbohosas, including regulations against exploitative labour market intermediary agencies. As part of my participant observation, I attended a member event with yoyangbohosas who gathered that evening to celebrate their hard-fought victory. However, in the midst of the festivities, I was surprised to overhear a side conversation about Korean-Chinese migrant workers, commonly referred to by South Koreans as Joseonjok. Two women were engrossed in conversation about the terrible employment practices and legal violations taking place at a nursing home where Joseonjok women “work 24 hours and seven days a week, eating and sleeping [at the nursing home]”. When I expressed sympathy for their long work hours and tough working conditions, a third worker interjected, “They [Korean-Chinese migrant workers] earn a lot, anyway. You know, they will do anything for money”.
Since 2008, an increasing number of older South Korean women have obtained yoyangbohosa certificates under the government’s Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) program. The LCTI, established in 2008, is touted as a “win-win” solution providing urgently-needed support for the rapidly ageing population in need of care services and creating desirable jobs for older groups of women workers (National Health Insurance Service, 2016). However, in contrast to policy rhetoric, yoyangbohosas quickly realized that their new “profession” was more akin to working as a state-certified pachulbu – the vernacular term used to describe and stigmatize domestic workers. To demand social recognition for the value of their work, yoyangbohosas began organizing collectively, demanding improved rights protections and working conditions. Their efforts have elicited broad civil society support, including by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) and feminist groups that have long supported workers’ rights. However, excluded from this political mobilization is the large and growing population of Joseonjok workers who work in a range of low-paid, informal jobs. Unlike South Korean women who work as yoyangbohosa, most Joseonjok workers in the care sector are not certified under the LCTI and work informally as patients’ aides (ganbyeongin) and domestic workers. Some Joseonjok workers may earn equivalent or more total monthly wages than their native-born counterparts, but they do so as virtual indentured labour, working extremely long hours without any legal protection as 24-hour live-in workers (Um, 2012).
The predominance of migrant workers on the bottom of South Korea’s care labour market is commonly viewed as a natural outcome of an emerging regional care chain and an ethnocentric immigration regime that selectively brings migrant workers into the nation’s care markets (Michel and Peng, 2012; Um, 2013; Um and Lightman, 2011). However, the interaction between policy discourses and the subjectivities of migrant and native-born care workers reveals a more complex story. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted in and near Seoul, I find that both groups of workers conflate ethnic divides with moral criteria regarding who is a “good” versus “bad” care worker. As the opening vignette illustrates, South Korean women workers view the increased number of Joseonjok workers into care jobs as synonymous with poor quality care provided by “ill-trained” migrant workers from China. In contrast, they construct their own identities as professionals who deserve better treatment than migrant workers from China who they view as “dirty”, “law-breaking”, and “motivated solely by money”, despite their shared ethnic background. On the other hand, Joseonjok workers reject the idea that they are “unprofessional others”. Instead, they emphasize their value as informal workers who provide wholehearted care as “fictive kin” (e.g. aunts, older sisters, grandmothers), a type of intimate care that professionally-motivated South Korean women are no longer willing to provide.
In this article, I examine the boundary marking strategies of native-born and migrant care workers in South Korea to better understand how each group makes sense of and navigates the dynamics of ethnically-segmented care labour markets. By boundary marking strategies, I refer to micro-level practices of patterned othering that reinforce divisions between an “us” and a “them”. Although theories of pan-ethnicity emphasize use of solidaristic ethnic boundary practices by oppressed groups to reaffirm their self-worth and value (see Espiritu, 2001), I argue that it is crucial to analyse the role of policy regimes in reproducing existing divisions and hierarchies between similar yet unequally-positioned groups of marginalized workers. In particular, I argue that in South Korea’s care labour market, prejudicial ideas that link ethno-national traits to cultural stereotypes are also strongly mediated by a care regime that creates stark distinctions between state-certified and informal care workers, which in turn, shapes the construction of different ethnic boundary marking strategies.
To elaborate my arguments, this paper is organized as follows. First, I examine the specific institutional contexts shaping each group’s position as state-certified professionals versus informal workers, examining the role of care and immigration policies in creating ethnically-segmented, two-tiered care labour markets. Next, I draw upon extensive fieldwork conducted with both native-born South Korean women and Joseonjok women to illuminate the distinct boundary marking strategies that each group pursues to demand recognition for the value and contribution of their care labour. I conclude by discussing the implications of these divergent boundary marking strategies and their role in (re)producing ethnically-segmented, two-tiered labour markets institutionalized by eldercare policies.
Research Methodology
The data for this study was collected between 2015 to 2016 in Seoul and its neighbouring cities and includes two components: 1) in-depth interviews with both South Korean and Joseonjok workers as well as agency owners and experts and 2) participant observation in organizations that advocate for each group of workers. 2 I conducted 24 in-depth interviews with 16 South Korean workers and 24 Joseonjok workers. Most South Korean workers were recruited through the Seoul Supporting Center for Elder Care Workers where I conducted extensive participant observation. These 16 workers were all South Korean national citizens and predominantly worked at homes or LTCI facilities at the time of interviews as yoyangbohosa. Joseonjok workers were recruited through the Joseonjok Association, one of the oldest and largest Joseonjok advocacy groups in the country. I conducted 24 interviews with Joseonjok workers, six of whom were working in senior hospitals as ganbyeongin (informal care worker), and two who had yoyangbohosa certificates, but fell outside the pattern of live-out workers – one was working as a live-in caregiver and the other was working extra hours outside the LTCI. Respondents were asked about their immigration history, work history, memorable events at work, experiences of being fired or of quitting, and the meaning of good elderly care and being a good eldercare worker. All the interviews were conducted in the Korean language, digitally recorded, and transcribed and coded using NVivo software.
Understanding Care Policy through Workers’ Eyes
Studies of the LTCI find that the Korean government’s efforts to create and professionalize eldercare failed in creating decent jobs for women. Rather, it created another large “pink ghetto” that has relegated middle-aged women to care work. While the government’s own policy assessment celebrates the success of the LTCI in creating a large volume of formal employment for women as “care professionals”, feminist scholars have questioned this assertion. Some scholars have asked whether the LTCI actually contributes to the dismantling of the gendered organization of care provision when women’s unpaid care work within the family is outsourced to other women whose labour is subsidized by the state (Yoon, 2014). Others have examined the quality of newly created jobs for women, asking whether the working conditions of informal eldercare workers (ganbyeongin) are significantly different from their institutionalized yoyangbohosa counterparts (Oh and Roh, 2010). They also question whether the LTCI has truly socialized care when the policy fails to recognize the ongoing role of unpaid care (Kim, 2016). Notwithstanding these important findings and timely critiques, this line of inquiry neglects the role and contribution of migrant workers in the sector, a striking omission given the sector’s heavy reliance on migrant workers.
Studies that recognize the significance of migrants to care work examine how care regimes and their intersections with welfare, employment and immigration regimes shape and reshape policies around care provision within a single national context (Michel and Peng, 2012; Um, 2012; Williams, 2012). For example, Michel and Peng (2012) emphasize the preference of co-ethnic migrants as care workers in Japan and Korea, two countries which resisted immigration due to the embrace of the notion of an ethnically homogenous nationhood, to show how each country developed polices that relied on co-ethnic migrants as a way to reconcile familialistic ideals of care with the deepening care deficit. Similarly, Um and Lightman (2011) argue that recent policy changes in welfare and immigration policies in Korea have resulted in the creation of hierarchical categories locating co-ethnic migrant care workers at the bottom.
While focusing on the interplay of multiple regimes advances our understanding of national variations of care provision, we know much less about how actors, especially migrant workers, understand and navigate care labour markets that have been reorganized by state eldercare policies meant to address the rapidly ageing population. As Adams and Padamsee (2001) aptly point out, a policy is not simply what gets enacted: rather, policies have effects when they are culturally mediated by actors’ meaning making processes. In other words, policies matter, not only because they restore workers’ agency, but also because they better capture the effect of policy in shaping micro-level processes.
Drawing on a social constructivist perspective that sees policy regimes as signifying processes that have their own “emergent logics” (Adams and Padamsee, 2001), this study focuses on the significance of micro-level practices and the ways in which workers make sense of and navigate the opportunities and constraints created by policy regimes. In particular, I focus on the boundary marking practices that marginalized groups utilize to reconstruct a sense of value and self-worth in the context of racial and ethnic subordination (Espiritu, 1992, 2001). These boundary marking practices are important, because they show how discursive practices can have material effects. For example, Espiritu (1992) argues that the construction of a pan-ethnic identity allowed people from seemingly unrelated “minority” groups to unite under a broader ethnic affiliation to gain political recognition, which in turn advanced group members’ access to institutional resources. Through flexible boundary marking practices, ethnicity can be (re)invented and strategically utilized to create better opportunity structures for subordinated groups. But, how do we understand the opposite process when people who supposedly share the same ethnicity mark differential boundaries to advance their goals and interests? And what are the material consequences of exclusionary ethnic boundary marking processes? To better understand the relationship between policy contexts and ethnic boundary marking, I turn to the case of Korean eldercare workers and the strategic use of ethnicity by differently-positioned groups.
Institutionalizing Two-tiered Care Labour Markets
Long-Term Care Insurance and the Institutionalization of Eldercare
The paid care market in Korea has expanded and diversified since the 1980s in the context of rising economic prosperity and the growth of the urban service economy. The recent expansion of the paid care market is indicative of the gendered ways in which the state has managed the changing political economy. After the Asian Debt Crisis in 1997, which many collectively remember as a “national humiliation” (Song, 2009), the Korean government quickly embraced neoliberal welfare policies to address a broad array of social issues, including the nation’s ageing population, the care shortage and women’s empowerment. While official policy discourses emphasized the importance of the sustainable growth of the national economy, such aspirations were not gender neutral; the policies targeted women, viewing women as an idle labour force that can and should be immediately reactivated. Housed under the scheme “social services”, the state implemented an array of policies to foster the creation of low-skilled, low-paid and insecure jobs in the care sector.
The eldercare sector became one of the first arenas of job creation for older women. Eldercare work has long existed as informal work, but the steep population ageing in Korea 3 led the state to intervene in this “grey” market. The government first turned its attention to eldercare in 2001 when it launched an official task force team to develop a system to socialize eldercare. Once it was on the policy agenda, questions about how to design and institutionalize long-term care also came to enter the public sphere. The system that emerged from the debates reflected a compromise between two schools of thought. On the one hand, some voices pushed for a national health service for senior citizens that guaranteed universal access to care with care workers employed by the state. Other voices, however, argued that the private sector would more effectively guarantee an adequate supply of labour. As a result, under the LTCI scheme, the state provides universal coverage for Korean citizens and certification for eldercare workers (yoyangbohosa), who then work for for-profit private agencies and facilities.
This new national license system obligated eldercare facilities and private in-home care agencies to employ state-licensed eldercare workers and grew out of the commitment to “providing high-quality care by fostering care specialists” (National Health Insurance Service, 2016), and the hope to draw middle-aged women into the labour market (see Public Long-Term Care Task Force Team, 2004). The licensing succeeded in advancing formalization of elderly care work. Yoyangbohosas are covered by major social insurance schemes as legally recognized workers who have clearly defined job descriptions and work tasks for hours allocated to specific recipients. The LTCI system co-pays the cost for hiring state certified elderly care workers for qualified elderly recipients who receive a limited number of hours for home-based care or care in assigned LTCI institutions, such as nursing homes and day-care centres.
The scheme also succeeded – rather more than expected – in drawing women to “return” to the labour market. In 2007, the Ministry of Health and Welfare set itself a goal of securing 34,000 yoyangbohosas and envisioned this target as a major challenge. Within a year, however, 172,889 people obtained yoyangbohosa certificates and that number escalated to 1,100,000 in five years, making yoyangbohosa the fastest-growing occupation in Korea (National Health Insurance Service, 2016). Rather than dealing with an undersupply of yoyangbohosa, Korea now has a new profession plagued with issues stemming from an oversupply of workers. The failure to control the oversupply of yoyangbohosas, combined with the failure to regulate mushrooming agencies and small private-sector LTCI facilities, has resulted in poor working conditions. While the government advertises yoyangbohosa as a promising professional job for older women, the reality has been the opposite. The public perceives yoyangbohosas not as the government-touted care professionals but as “state-certified domestics” (pachulbu). Wage levels fell below expectations, resting at slightly above the minimum wage. In 2008, the government announced that in-home yoyangbohosas would earn 1,400,000 won (1,314 USD) per month, but in 2012, average monthly earnings were approximately 600,000 won (563 USD) (Park, 2014). Job tasks also involved “extra” cleaning and cooking tasks that far exceeded defined activities. Care recipients and family members commonly treated certified workers as their personal maids, not professional “care specialists”. Private agencies that matched recipients and yoyangbohosas also exacerbated exploitation; it was not uncommon for private agencies to avoid providing severance and other benefits or to arbitrarily reduce work hours by hiring workers on short-term contracts. Private agencies also were known to “steal” government cash benefits from workers by inflating the total number of hours worked through fraudulent claims (Nam and Sin, 2013; Park, 2014).
Unions and NGOs have become vocal opponents against the poor working conditions and lack of regulations and protections for the yoyangbohosa workforce. Their active role began as early as 2001, before the introduction of the LTCI, when unions started mobilizing vast numbers of ganbyeongin working outside the scope of existing labour law protections in private homes and hospitals. For example, at one of the city’s biggest and most renowned hospitals, Seoul National University Hospital, women workers in their 40s and 50s occupied the hospital director’s office and staged rallies and sit-in protests onsite. The Korean Confederation of Trade Union (KCTU), as well as other civil society groups, built enough pressure and support to unionize ganbyeongin, resulting in one of the most successful cases of organizing irregular and informal workers in the history of the labour movement. This process of mobilization resulted in the creation of the Seoul Supporting Center for Elder Care Workers and the National Yoyangbohosa Association, among others. These groups and their supporters have consistently been at the frontline of advocacy for yoyangbohosas, launching campaigns raising public awareness, educating workers, conducting studies about the poor working conditions of eldercare workers, making policy suggestions, and participating in legislative negotiations with the government to regulate the provision of privately-delivered eldercare.
Care Market: An Ethnic Niche for Co-Ethnic Migrant Women Workers
While the LTCI created a large workforce in the eldercare labour market, it was not sufficient to meet demands. The elderly who needed more hours than the state allowed or further medical treatment needed to pay for costs of care out of their own pockets, creating an economic incentive to hire informal workers. As South Korean workers were largely absorbed into the state-supported elderly care system, opportunities in the informal care market arose for migrant workers. Such workers were almost inevitably Korean-Chinese women. Strong ethnic nationalism or the firm belief that Korea is built on racial and ethnic purity had resulted in policies that privileged co-ethnic migrants over other migrant workers (Michel and Peng, 2012). Immigration policies stipulated that only co-ethnic migrants could work in the care market. As a result, Korean-Chinese women came to virtually monopolize Korea’s informal care market. These women came to form the second pillar of the eldercare system in Korea (Michel and Peng, 2012; Um and Lightman, 2011).
Commonly referred to as Joseonjok, Korean-Chinese people voluntarily or involuntarily emigrated from Korea to China mostly during the Japanese colonial era (1919–1945) and were unable to return to their homeland due to the Cold War. When Korea normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1992, and the Korean government relaxed immigration regulations for Joseonjok, an exodus of Josoenjok began, with many Korean-Chinese seeking to pursue the “Korean Dream” (Freeman, 2011; Yang, 2010). What began as short-term visits to meet family soon developed into large-scale immigration, with enclaves developing near the border areas between North Korea and China. Many of the Joseonjok came as trainees under the Industrial Trainee System (ITS, or ITTP: Industrial Technical Training Program), benefitting in particular because the Korean government established a higher quota that privileged Joseonjok over other groups of foreign workers (Seol, 2002). Others came to Korea with a tourist or visitor visa and then remained, some were smuggled across the border, or married Korean citizens to relocate and obtain paid work in Korea (Bélanger et al., 2010; Seol and Skrentny, 2009). This last group in particular shaped the gendered composition of the Joseonjok migration flows. Many Joseonjok women entered Korea as “international marriage migrants” in the name of “bridging the broken lineage” across the Korean diaspora (Freeman, 2011). Motivated by economic interests and utilizing their linguistic fluency and existing networks, these Joseonjok women quickly emerged as a major labour force in the service and care sectors.
In taking jobs in the informal care market, the Josoenjok were not responding to policy directives, but rather to market demands. In fact, the policies reflected what was already happening in the market, as Lee (2004) aptly points out. When the Industrial Trainee System (ITS) was introduced, it excluded the service and care industries. Yet, contrary to the government’s expectations, many Joseonjok entered the country under the ITS and remained as undocumented workers moving from manufacturing into services. As a result, in 2000, three-quarters (74.7%) of Joseonjok in Korea were undocumented, with women working primarily in restaurants or in private households as domestic workers, while men laboured in construction (Seol, 2002). In 2002, even though the law prohibited private households from hiring foreign-born workers, there were 9,109 undocumented migrant women working in private homes, and around 70% (6,244) of them were Joseonjok women (Lee, 2004). In 2013, this figure increased to an estimated 60,000 migrant workers and Joseonjok workers represented the vast majority (Korea Immigration Foundation, 2013).
In sum, Joseonjok women workers have dramatically increased their market share in Korea’s informal care sectors since the late 1980s. The reliance on co-ethnic migrant workers quickly doubled (Economic and Social Development Commission, 2011), and then increased to 70% (Kukmin-Ilbo, 2012) and even 90% (Song, 2014) of the informal workforce in the eldercare market by 2014, with the majority of Joseonjok women working as ganbyeongin (uncertified), not yoyangbohosa (state-certified).
Redefining Professional Care Worker Subjectivities and the Redefinition of Good Care
South Korean Workers’ Professional Project
South Korean yoyangbohosas view their work as “professional” work. While the term professional often connotes an occupation with higher economic rewards and social status, the assertion of work as “professional” can also be understood as a kind of labour closure strategy (Parkin, 2001) which “aims for an occupational monopoly over the provision of certain skills and competence in a market for services” (Witz, 1990). I use the term “professional project” to denote how South Korean certified eldercare workers purposively and strategically define their work as “professional”. The professional project starts from workers’ conscious efforts to re-construct the meaning of their work from work that simply entailed essential gendered characteristics to skilled labour requiring expertise. Such work justifies the provision of higher symbolic and material rewards.
The first step of South Korean yoyangbohosas’ professional project is to define their work as “real” work, not just a survival activity of poor women. The yoyangbohosas I observed were well aware of long-standing gendered perceptions that viewed eldercare as “dirty work” for poor women with no other options, especially the “husband-less” (nampyeon-up-neun-yeoja), and as low-skilled work than any woman could do. All the South Korean participants in my study consciously challenged the gendered assumptions that differentiated their domestic and care work from other types of work. When workers frame “eldercare as work”, they are making an assertion that providing care requires the performance of complex tasks that are both physical and emotional, and can also result in physical and mental harm. This “eldercare is work” narrative is the building block upon which the workers construct other narratives to enhance the value of their work and justify their demands for workers’ rights. The following vignette illuminates this process.
In August 2015, I took part in a discussion with nine yoyangbohosas during a summer retreat hosted by the Korean Women Workers Association. When I entered the room, Nari, a yoyangbohosa with seven years of work experience, was describing an incident she experienced with her client and his family. Nari said, “One day she [the recipient’s daughter] asked me, ‘why do you do this work? Is your husband incapable of supporting your family?’”. All the yoyangbohosas in the room booed and one worker said, “What a b----!”. Nari continued, “One day she asked me to wash a pair of running shoes, so I did”. Then another worker interrupted, yelling, “Don’t do it!”. Nari continued, “But apparently, she didn’t like the result. So, later she said, ‘Haven’t you washed running shoes before?’”. People booed again and proceeded to discuss how difficult it is to say “No” when asked to do work outside their duties. They concluded at the end of the discussion that they needed skills to help them refuse excessive demands made by clients and their families.
South Korean yoyangbohosas also emphasized the importance of defining their work as paid contractual work with elderly care recipients and clients. While Joseonjok workers preferred being referred to by employers through kinship terms, such as imo (aunty), unni (sister) or halmoni (grandmother), the majority of yoyangbohosas I interviewed rejected such kinship terms as well as the appearance of a fictive kin relationship. Some workers said that they allowed their recipients to call them “friend” or “deaconess”, but none of them accepted the legitimacy of kinship terms. Most workers asked their elderly clients and family members to use their official occupational title, yoyangbohosa, which underscored their state-certified qualification. Workers also said they never used kinship terms such as grandmother when talking to recipients. Instead, they consciously used the honorific term, ureusin (respected senior).
By using their official occupational title, these workers strategically re-frame their identity as women engaged in unpaid household and family labour to wage workers in a contractual relationship with recipients. Like the worker who emphatically told Nari, “Don’t do it!”, clarifying the relationship with recipients as part of a contractual one enables workers to say “No” to excessive requests. It also justifies workers’ emphasis on pre-defined job descriptions that bind both parties to the contract and legal regulations. According to workers, this discursive strategy helps protect them from any potential exploitation that derives from the embrace of fictive kinship-like relations with recipient employers. By using their official titles, the workers moreover declare who they are and what they do as eldercare specialists. Sin-Bi, a 58-year-old yoyangbohosa working in a daycare centre, explained: People think that we are helpers. They don’t realize that I do things that their own children cannot do. They don’t understand that I become an extension of elderly people’s limbs. We [yoyangbohosa] have received formal education.
Sin-Bi and other yoyangbohosas made clear that they were not simply substitutes for the recipient’s family, but that they provided care services that only trained specialists could provide. Based on their self-identification as specialists, Sin-Bi and other yoyangbohosas reject the appellation “ajumma”, a generic term that refers to middle-aged Korean women. Rather, they favour more dignified terms such as seonsaengnim (teacher) that recognize their professional capability. Sin-Bi elaborated: People who work in the office call each other with titles, like, “director” or whatever. We need to call ourselves “teacher” (seonsaengnim). A colleague of mine once said, “what, seonsaengnim for this menial work (nogada)?” I yelled at her and said, “No, this is not menial work!”
Dealing with Emotional Labour
Emotional labour, and the skills to perform emotional labour is a critical element in workers’ construction of their subjectivity as “professionals”. For the yoyangbohosas I interviewed, their professional skills equipped them to provide the emotional labour that was beyond the skill level of recipients’ family members. When I said, “I don’t think I can take care of a person like you do, even if it’s for my mom” in casual conversations with workers, yoyangbohosas responded, “Of course you can’t do this for your own parents”. According to workers, it is extremely difficult for family members to restrain their own emotions and provide proper care for parents whose mental capacities have deteriorated and their training provided them with the tools to do the emotional labour (gamjeong nodong) in providing eldercare, in contrast to family members who live with their frail parents and cannot deal with providing non-stop, intense emotional labour.
One worker who reiterated the “you can’t do this for your own parents” narrative, was Norah, a 53-year-old yoyangbohosa who provides in-home care for an elderly woman with dementia. She said: When I do not visit, they [the recipient’s daughter-in-law] just lets her eat, sleep, watch TV, and play with bubble wrap, since she has dementia. You know, what else can they do? It is like, “I can’t teach my own kids but need a teacher for them”. It’s the same thing. Once I visit, she tells me, “My mother doesn’t want to brush her teeth. She doesn’t want to sit up”. I don’t do things that way. That’s the skill. That’s the role of yoyangbohosa. I say, “Ureusin (respected senior), I am here”. Then she [the recipient] says, “Who?” and I say, “It’s me, friend. Are you going to lie there when your friend comes?”. Then, she rises, saying, “Of course not”. Then, I get her to wash her face. She does what I say. That’s why her daughter-in-law is surprised. She is amazed that her mother-in-law, whom she assumes is completely disabled, can do this and that. I do things in an instructive way, because she [the recipient] has dementia.
Norah’s account illustrates the level of skill and professionalism involved in caring for an elderly recipient with dementia. Norah referred to herself as a “friend” when talking to her client, not to create more intimacy, but as an instructive tool to help assist her 92-year-old recipient to wash and start her day. What is notable in Norah’s story is how she contrasts the care of family members to the care provided by yoyangbohosas. While the care provided by the recipient’s family merely ensured the recipient’s everyday survival, Norah described herself as a professional who can diagnose the recipient’s state and come up with proper methods of care.
Although Hochschild (2012) asserted that emotional labour operates as a mechanism of labour exploitation by commodifying human emotions as a source of profit, yoyangbohosas interpret the emotional labour they perform as a sign of their professionalism. Yoyangbohosas understood that presenting a cheerful attitude and looking neat at work distinguished them from “unprofessional others”. Many yoyangbohosas I interviewed criticized “un-trained workers” who went to clients’ homes without dressing properly and having courteous manners, claiming that such workers contributed to the public perception of care work as “dirty jobs” and “jobs for poor and uneducated women”. These workers also highlighted their ability to maintain a “cold yet professional and objective” distance from elderly recipients, and to smile and speak positively to their clients, regardless of their genuine feelings, as essential to delivering quality, professional care. Thus, for yoyangbohosa, paying attention to one’s attire and manner is not simply about the presence of external control over the female body; rather, it is a source of value creation and an indication of professionalism.
“We Have a State-issued Certificate” not like “Unprofessional Others”
South Korean yoyangbohosas distinguished themselves from ganbyeongin (uncertified workers) and yoyangbohosa by pointing to their training and credentials, often reiterating the following sentence: “We have a state-issued certificate”. The yoyangbohosa certificate was not just a document to these women. Rather, it was a source of pride that justified entitlement, because it proved their expertise as care specialists, as recognized by a state authority. The emphasis on skills and knowledge, instead of love and emotional attachment, enabled workers to demonstrate the “respectability” of their profession (Macdonald, 1999). Workers emphasized the importance of interpersonal skills, linguistic fluency, and knowledge about healthy food, hygiene, psychological characteristics of elders, dementia and pedagogical techniques. To support their claims, many yoyangbohosas exemplified how their services “improved” the recipient’s condition. As the quote below shows, “studying and doing research” was necessary to become a yoyangbohosa, not only because they needed the knowledge for practical reasons, but also because it enabled them to draw boundaries between the kind of help that one’s next door neighbour might provide and that of a trained expert. Norah explains: You should be able to read the various needs of different recipients. To do so, you have to have some knowledge about dementia, the psychology of elderly people, and nutrition and health from the perspective of a professional. Once you visit, you should use professional terms so that you distinguish between just chatting with a woman as a neighbour (ajumma) and talking with a yoyangbohosa. If they talk to a woman next door and decide something, that’s not good. So, yoyangbohosas need to keep studying and doing research.
Yoyangbohosas commonly expressed pride in their state-certification to justify their rejection of migrants as fellow workers. Referencing the large number of South Korean women who have obtained yoyangbohosa certificates but did not work in the field, many respondents said that the government needed to encourage South Korean nationals with certificates first, instead of bringing in more “Chinese” to fill care jobs. Although these workers all know that senior hospitals and nursing homes heavily relied on Joseonjok workers, none of them considered migrant workers as potential colleagues who had equivalent skills or who deserved legal protections. Some workers expressed strong antagonism toward Joseonjok workers, denigrating them as “dirty, ignorant and only seek[ing] out money”. However, most respondents provided rational justification about the lack of skills and knowledge of Joseonjok to explain their exclusionary sentiments. Some found my comparison between yoyangbohosa and ganbyeongin uncomfortable, since it suggested to them that I did not appreciate the time and money that they had invested to complete the required coursework, training, and exam to become an official yoyangbohosa.
South Korean yoyangbohosas uniformly depicted what “Joseonjok ganbyeongins” do in nursing homes or hospitals as simple manual work. For instance, Sin-Bi responded blankly to her mother’s praise for a Joseonjok ganbyeongin. She neither recognized the Joseonjok worker’s skills in managing her emotions when dealing with difficult situations such as not grimacing when dealing with her mother’s bowel movements nor appreciated her role in improving her mother’s health. Sin-Bi also refused to consider the Joseonjok worker as a potential colleague. When I asked if there is a foreign national in the day-care centre where she works, Sin-Bi said: Why would they accept Joseonjok when we have lots of Korean candidates? They know they are not going to make it, so they don’t even try. And as I said, they just go to the nursing home or hospitals.
For Sin-Bi and many other South Korean yoyangbohosas, migrant workers simply belonged in workplaces with extremely poor working conditions.
Another worker, Da-Yeon, a part-time domestic worker, expressed deep concerns about Joseonjok ganbyeongin. Exclaiming that an ill-trained ganbyeongin could kill a recipient by making silly mistakes, she said, Yoyangbohosas shouldn’t work like pachulbu. We need systematic and scientific education. Those ganbyeongins at hospitals are horrible. There are many Chinese, too many of them. And Chinese never … They just fill out the time. They are completely, they only think about money, the way they think about the recipients, are different from ours. [Author: How different they are?] They just smile, always bright face. Seriously. But they would not work for even a minute for the recipient because it is about money. They just came to make money.
By emphasizing that Joseonjok were “Chinese”, not co-ethnic migrants or even Korean-Chinese, Da-Yeon further reinforced the distinction between South Korean women and migrants. South Korean yoyangbohosas also rejected the idea of “being passively channelled” into the job. Instead, they contrasted their professional motivations with migrants who worked in restaurants, private homes, or nursing hospitals as survival jobs in a restrictive labour market. Their narratives of purposively choosing to work as yoyangbohosa reinforced the boundary with “Chinese” who just worked for money as disposable menial workers.
Joseonjok Migrant Workers’ Wholehearted Care
“We are like a family”, said In-Sook, a Joseonjok ganbyeongin who was taking care of six virtually immobile elders in a nursing hospital, when describing relationships with her clients. While uncertified migrant eldercare workers predominate in Korean nursing hospitals, it was difficult to interview them, because they virtually live in the hospital and work on-call for 24 hours. I met In-Sook in the hospital where she worked near bedtime hours. To make time for a short one-hour interview, she rushed through multiple tasks, including changing diapers for two elderly clients, assisting two other elderly clients to use the washroom, emptying urine containers, and comforting an elder with dementia while coaxing her to take her sleeping pills. In-Sook said it had been more than a year since she had had a day off, yet despite such long work hours, she spoke with care and appreciation about her clients. For instance, she explained that her oldest recipient affectionately calls her “child” and another recipient with dementia calls her “sister” which makes her feel loved and appreciated. Like In-Sook, none of the co-ethnic migrant workers I interviewed minded the use of such kinship terms, unlike yoyangbohosa, and many even preferred to be called imo (aunt), unni (sister) or halmoni (grandmother).
Asked why they liked such familial terms, migrant workers did not furnish clear answers. They responded that they “just liked” it because it feels better. To probe, I asked them to describe situations when conflicts arose to the extent that they decided to quit. Interestingly, many migrant workers, especially in live-in settings, expressed disappointment and even humiliation in response to employers who did not eat with them or provided poor quality meals. While most South Korean workers said that they avoided eating in their employers’ home, for migrant workers, eating together with employers reflected treatment as a quasi-family member. In the same vein, workers preferred kinship terms, since it mitigated the feeling that they were in a master–servant relationship. These sentiments indicated that, for Korean-Chinese migrant workers, treatment as a quasi-family member was the best way to gain some respectability in informal conditions that mirrored indentured labour.
South Korean workers’ emphasis on professionalism and the contractual relationship with recipients sharply contrast with migrant workers’ narratives about the informality and intimacy of their work. Migrant workers used the term “whole hearted (jin-sim)” to describe the sincerity and value of their work, in contrast to South Korean women who may do the same care work but lacked genuine sincerity. In fact, migrant workers often ridiculed South Korean yoyangbohosa workers for insisting that elderly recipients call them by the honorific term “seonsaengnim (teacher)”, as they rejected the notion that elderly care work was akin to professional work. Moreover, while yoyangbohosas viewed the time and money that they invested in their credentials as well spent, Joseonjok workers saw training as unnecessary to carry out their tasks.
Informality as a Labour Market Strategy
Yeon-Ja, a 60-year-old Joseonjok worker, entered Korea in 2013. As soon as she arrived, she wandered around many job agencies, while staying in a church shelter. Although she had no previous experience as a care worker, she immediately secured a care job in a private home simply by lying to the agency. In her first job, Yeon-Ja provided in-home care for an elderly woman, and did all the household chores for her and her family. But soon after, she decided to quit. She felt that they treated her like an “animal” (jimseung), never sharing any meals with her and giving her the wasted parts of leftover kimchi every day. Instead of telling her employer why she decided to quit, she lied and instead said she needed urgent medical treatment in Japan where her son resided. When I asked why she had lied, Yeon-Ja said, “I told the old lady’s daughter that we don’t eat such things in China. But she begged me to take care of her mom, saying that her mom trusts me and only I can take care of her”. The fact that her employer refused to address Yeon-Ja’s complaints about the poor food quality and heavy workload convinced her that her situation would not change.
Yeon-Ja also sensed that she could easily find another job. Joseonjok workers commonly moved between employers and from one sector to the next, especially when conflicts arise with a client. The lack of public support or intervention also resulted in frequent turnover. Workers forego giving advanced notice of their intention to quit, since they are well aware of the negative consequences such as withholding of wages.
Informal employment conditions also led many Joseonjok workers to develop individualistic tactics to navigate problems with employers. Many emphasize their shared ethnicity as Korean to improve their situations with individual employers. Chung-Hui, a 69-year-old Joseonjok live-in care worker taking care of twins as well as doing household chores, earned 1,400,000 won (1,227 USD) monthly salary. When I asked her, “What do you think the government can do to improve the issues people face working in private homes”, she answered, Well, is it about the government? The problem is how people treat us in their homes. Discrimination is the problem. It would be strange if the government says something [about working conditions in] private homes. I think that people in the Republic of Korea must not discriminate against Joseonjok because we share the lineage. We are different from foreigners, like Russians and Filipinos. [Discrimination against us] would be, like, parents discriminating against their kids.
By framing the issue of poor working conditions as “private” issues and distinguishing Joseonjok workers as people who deserve better treatment than other “foreigners”, Chung-Hui underscored the privileges she believed should come from a shared sense of cultural affinity and ethnic belonging. This sentiment contrasts with South Korean women workers who demand better rights and protections as “professional care workers”. Joseonjok workers’ embrace of a shared “Korean” ethnicity also starkly contrasts with views expressed by South Korean yoyangbohosa workers who see their co-ethnic workers as simply unqualified “Chinese”.
Dealing with Emotional Labour
While South Korean workers asserted the importance of “keeping distance” from clients as a source of workplace protection and professionalism, Joseonjok workers claimed that their emotional attachment to recipients made their service a “superior” form of care. Characterizing the emotional labour carried out by South Korean workers as hypocritical “lip service”, Joseonjok workers often said that “Koreans pretend to take care of elders when the employers [recipient’s family] are around”, but that they “do not really care” about their recipients and only do a limited number of tasks in the hours allotted. All the Joseonjok workers I interviewed also denied the existence of different skill levels between certified and non-certified workers, emphasizing that “women can naturally (sunlilopga) [do care work]” or care work is suited for hard working and strong Joseonjok women.
The Joseonjok willingness to provide unlimited care, however, is not actually unconditional. “They treated me well” was a common expression when these workers described positive work experiences that facilitated long-term emotional attachments to recipients. For example, when I asked, “what do you mean by ‘treat you well’”, workers listed various examples such as consistently eating together at the same table, receiving a bonus on their birthdays and holidays, or receiving the type of help from employers that helped them better adjust to life in Korea. Workers who described these experiences as “good experiences” tended to work for the employers for many years, justifying the exchange of “wholehearted” service in return for “good treatment”.
Conclusion
This paper has shown how native-born and migrant care workers actively construct different notions of “Korean” ethnicity to emphasize their value and self-worth in Korea’s burgeoning eldercare market. While previous studies view the preference for co-ethnic migrants in labour and immigration policies as a sign of the nation’s ethnic homogeneity, this study reveals the flexibility and instability of ethnic boundaries in the context of ethnically-segmented, two-tiered labour markets. For Joseonjok workers sharing the same co-ethnic lineage and cultural affinity enables them to claim preferential status over non-Korean migrant workers. It also allows them to emphasize the value of their informal care labour over native-born women who are no longer willing to provide intimate, familialistic care. In contrast, South Korean women do not recognize a shared sense of co-ethnic solidarity with Joseonjok workers. Instead, they tend to paint Joseonjok workers as greedy “Chinese” who lack the professional skills, training and qualities to be “good” care workers.
Native-born, South Korean women’s emphasis on the links between professionalism and good care is not simply a product of ethnic stereotypes or conflict. Under the LCTI program, the Korean government has created a policy divide that distinguishes professional “care managers” or “care specialists” from unskilled informal workers. Such policy distinctions institutionalize differences in occupational categories and employment status, but they also mediate the way workers make sense of and navigate existing hierarchies and exclusions. My research findings show that South Korean women who become certified as yoyangbohosa workers actively embrace yet reinterpret the discourse of professionalism in their efforts to professionalize care labour. By asserting that workers who receive specific training and obtain specialized skills for providing quality care deserve higher value, their professionalizing project seeks to create labour market closure. On the other hand, co-ethnic migrant workers develop different interpretations of quality care to signify their specific values and contributions as informal care workers. By highlighting their ability to provide emotionally attentive care as co-ethnics and fictive kin, Joseonjok workers try to assert their monopolistic status in the care market as a preferred category, both to non-Korean migrant workers and native-born, South Korean woman employed as state-certified yoyangbohosas.
Each group’s “othering” strategies reproduce existing inequalities between care workers in an ethnically-segmented, two-tiered care market. Professionalizing projects and fictive kinship strategies may appear unrelated, but they reinforce two sides of the same boundary, which ultimately reproduces the underlying divisions and inequalities that construct it. South Korean care workers’ efforts to improve their work by emphasizing its professional character do little to challenge the harsh and exploitative working conditions of co-ethnic migrant workers and their position as an informal niche market. Similarly, Joseonjok workers’ emphasis on the informality of their care as co-ethnic insiders leaves them vulnerable to unregulated and arbitrary treatment and working conditions. In the long run, efforts to preserve relatively better jobs “for South Koreans only” are short-sighted. South Korean workers may feel safe from the competition of lower-paid migrant workers; however, their ultimate goal – of revaluing care work and gaining social recognition – will be out of reach, as long as migrant workers continue to be hired in highly exploitive informal care jobs.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jennifer Chun for her support throughout fieldwork and writing. I also thank Sharmila Rudrappa for her detailed comments and Heidi Gottfried for her astute comments, particularly her suggestion on how to conceptualize ethnic boundary marking. Cynthia Cranford, Hae Yeon Choo, Sohoon Lee and Yi-Chun Chien provided helpful comments.
Funding
This study was supported by the Doctoral Associated Program funded by the Centre for Global Social Policy under the project titled “The Micro Politics of Care: A Comparative Study of Co-ethnic and Local Women Workers in the Domestic and Long-term Care Market of South Korea.”