Decolonising demand for paid domestic work and childcare: Beyond dyadic relationships and Western models

Introduction

Researchers have identified an unequal gendered division of labour as crucial in the emergence of a demand for paid housework and childcare in Western Europe and in the United States (Hochschild, 2003; Lutz, 2011). The general argument is that when women entered the labour market, this shift was not accompanied by a change in the division of domestic labour: men did not start to do their share of domestic work, and housework and childcare were still considered feminine tasks. Demand for (usually migrant) domestic workers thus emerges when women want or feel the need to do less domestic labour and men do not want/do not feel the need to do more. These explanations are based on data from the United States and Western Europe (Williams, 2011), and take a nuclear family, specifically the dyadic relationship between a man and a woman, as the unit within which negotiations resulting in the hiring of a domestic worker happen.

My aim in this article is to expand on and deepen these explanations, asking what happens when we look beyond both the Global North ¹ and the nuclear family, and take into account all relationships – not only those between a man and a woman – involved in the decisions related to hiring a paid domestic worker? This thinking about an expansion of concepts is inspired by feminist writing on ethics of care (Raghuram, 2016; Tronto, 1993), by writings decentring the nuclear family and heterosexual couples within sociology of the family (Eldén, 2016; Morgan, 2011; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004), and by work aimed at decolonising both feminism and the ethics of care (Ang, 2003; Mohanty, 1984, 2003; Raghuram, 2016; Tlostanova, 2010).

Empirically, I am working with material from Slovakia, which, being situated in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), ² provides a good case study for illustrating the need to move beyond ‘master narratives’ based on Western European or US material. Even as a European and industrialised country, Slovakia differs from the typical model based on data from Western Europe and the United States (Hochschild, 2000; Lutz, 2011; Macdonald, 2011), as well as from the typical model based on global, regional, or local care chains (Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2001; Williams, 2012). While the material I present disrupts the North–South dichotomy, my aim is not to argue for the recognition of CEE as the ‘second world’. Inspired by Ang (2003), I do not use Slovakia just to provide a case study that differs from previous research. Instead, I use the Slovak material to argue that we need a more inclusive explanatory model, one that would enable us to work with a greater variety of care relationships and wider notions of family.

Thinking beyond the nuclear family and dyadic relationships

In her work on ethics of care, Joan Tronto (1993) has argued that we must not presume that caring is dyadic or individualistic. It is not necessarily a relationship between two individuals (in most writings, the relationship is between mother and child). Tronto warns that a dyadic understanding of care can ‘dismiss from the outset the ways in which care can function socially and politically in a culture’ (Tronto, 1993: 103). Tronto’s theoretical work is supported by numerous empirical studies challenging the notion that the unit of care is a heterosexual nuclear family and showing the importance of other caring practices and relationships (Donovan et al., 2001; Eldén and Anving, 2019; Morgan, 2011).

Roseneil and Budgeon (2004) have argued that, to understand intimacy and care, we need to decentre both the family and the heterosexual couple in our imagination. Researchers have insisted that members of an extended family (Glaser et al., 2013) as well as various paid and unpaid non-kin actors (Eldén and Anving, 2019) are important for the provision of care, especially if we look at care from the perspective of those who are cared for (Eldén, 2016).

However, studies explaining the demand for paid domestic workers take for granted that negotiations leading to hiring a paid domestic worker happen within a nuclear family (for Global North countries) or are a result of what is happening on a global scale (for Global South countries). ³ Focusing on the Global North, Helma Lutz (2008) identified household and care work organisation as ‘the expression of a specifically gendered cultural script’ (p. 2). According to this script, men in the Global North attach their identity to career and not to care, leaving the main share of childrearing to women (Hochschild, 2000; Lutz, 2011). However, despite seeing childcare and housework as their responsibility, professional middle- and upper-class women are ‘caught in a male-career pattern’ (Hochschild, 2000: 140): they work in jobs structured for men who are free from family responsibilities. These women either do not want to or cannot rely on their partners or the State for support, and instead outsource childcare and housework to another – usually migrant – woman (Lutz, 2011).

In her influential work on the globalisation of paid domestic work, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas describes an international division of reproductive labour, within which privileged women from the Global North employ migrant women from the Global South to provide them with housework and childcare. Such transfers of care create chains, because migrant domestic workers leave their own households and employ poor local women to care for their children and homes in their countries of origin. At the end of such a chain, a grandmother, older daughter, or other female relative provides unpaid care (Parreñas, 2001). Inspired by Parreñas’ research, Arlie Russell Hochschild labels such personal relations among people coming from different parts of the world and connected through paid and unpaid care ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2000). Hochschild powerfully argues that the migration of female domestic workers results in care deficits in their home countries, where their love and care are missed (Hochschild, 2000, 2003: 20).

Focusing on the links between global trends and the individual lives of paid domestic workers, Hochschild (2000, 2003) pays much less attention to the dynamics leading to the demand in the Global North, mentioning employers only very briefly. Similarly, Lutz (2008, 2011) focuses mainly on relationships between employers and employees and the living conditions of migrant domestic workers. This is not unusual. Since our feminist hearts are with the oppressed, we focus on domestic workers and their exploitation. We pay much less attention to employers and deal with them much less empathetically; within this equation, the employers exploit the domestic workers.

However, the lack of focus on demand may result in explanations that either tend to generalise from US data and use dyadic models or to see demand in the Global South as driven only by a ‘care drain’, which, in the end, means being driven by dynamics happening elsewhere, in particular in the Global North. This might lead to reductive and homogeneous notions of countries in the Global South. Indeed, Mohanty warned against ‘ethnocentric universalism’ (Mohanty, 1984: 336) in feminist analyses that ignore the complexities and conflicts in the lives of women in the Global South. While there are numerous studies examining the social and cultural organisation of paid care in Southern countries, ⁴ these studies do not necessarily lead to changes in hegemonic universalistic theories of care, and tend to stand only as examples of difference (Raghuram, 2016).

This has a profound influence on what is studied, and how. For example, despite the importance of childcare provided by grandparents in both the Global North and the Global South (Arber and Timonen, 2012; Timonen, 2020; Wheelock and Jones, 2002), only very few studies of paid domestic work consider the role of grandparents in relation to the employment of paid domestic workers (Lan, 2003; Souralová, 2015; Sun, 2012). However, grandparents are often involved in childcare even if the family employs a nanny or a babysitter (Sarti, 2010), and the care provided (or expected but not provided) by grandparents impacts also on the character of paid domestic work and the relationships involved. Paid care should not, therefore, be studied only as a dyadic relationship between mother and domestic worker. Indeed, examining transfer chains of filial kin work, within which the filial duty to care for elders is transferred from the son to the daughter-in law and from daughter-in-law to domestic worker, Lan (2003) argues that paid domestic work is organised as a triangular relationship among mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, and paid domestic workers. Sun (2012) describes grandparents functioning as moral guardians of the nexus of ‘market-based yet family-centred childcare’ in Singapore. Even in the absence of actual grandparents, grandparental care can provide a model for relationships with paid domestic workers (Souralová, 2015: 26).

My suggestion is that we need to decolonise (Ang, 2003; Mohanty, 1984, 2003; Tlostanova, 2010) our approach to care and reveal how care is organised in particular cultures (Tronto, 1993: 103). As Tlostanova (2010) writes, ‘[b]y decolonizing I mean freeing [thinking and knowledge] from the established paradigm and intellectual grounds . . .’ (p. xviii). We need to recognise that our theoretical ‘master narratives’ on paid care originate in Western feminist thinking on a gendered division of domestic labour. While applicable to many contexts, we should be methodologically and conceptually open to wider possibilities and arrangements of the relationships that are important for the outsourcing of care and housework: ‘[E]ven the initial set of gender roles may be different from the Western dichotomy and generate more complex models’ (Tlostanova, 2010: 194).

I am neither first nor alone in this plea. Parvati Raghuram (2016) points out that most theorisations of the ethics of care ‘have implicitly conceptualised care as a universal practice or drawn on care as practised in the global North’ (p. 511). Fiona Williams (2011) criticises the global care chain concept because it generalises from the US experience and argues that the analysis of paid care organisation has to include the role of state policies and the nature of citizenship. When Williams (2011) asks how ‘might we analyse the role of the state?’ (p. 42), I come back to the role of interpersonal relationships in the organisation of care. In particular, I argue that care is not necessarily situated within a nuclear family or a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman, and we have to decentre the nuclear family in both our imagination and our methods. The plurality of approaches to the organisation and ethics of care has to be recognised in the structure of theory (Lugones, 2003 [1991]: 7 in Raghuram, 2016: 523), and I suggest that it has to be recognised in a methodological openness to other ways of organising care than those typical of countries in the Global North.

Methods and context

When we want to include all people who are important for the organisation of childcare, we have to carefully adjust our methodological and conceptual work. Sarah Eldén (2016) powerfully shows how the answers that children in Sweden gave about who the members of family are differed from the drawings they made in discussions about who provided care for them, revealing that care includes much wider circles of people than those who exclusively belong to the nuclear family. Unlike Eldén (2012), whose research was centred on the perspective of children, I decided to focus on women’s perspectives, since it is women who are doing the majority of housework and who are seen as the primary providers of childcare (Marošiová and Šumšalová, 2006) in Slovakia. Also, according to the research, women’s decisions to do less housework and/or childcare are the first step in outsourcing such work to a paid domestic worker (Hochschild, 2000; Lutz, 2011).

Between 2013 and 2015, I interviewed 25 employers (23 females and two males). In 2018 and 2019, I interviewed three female employers and eight female providers of childcare. The employers were university-educated members of dual-career families. Of the interviewees, 23 were married, two were divorced single mothers, and all had children. Research participants hired full-time and part-time nannies, babysitters, and cleaners in varying combinations. In total, I conducted 35 semi-structured interviews in Bratislava and 13 in Banská Bystrica. The interview settings were chosen with regard to the geographical distribution of demand for domestic workers. According to the online portal Domelia, ⁵ which is the main formal platform used to recruit paid carers in Slovakia, the highest demand for paid carers is in Bratislava (the capital), followed by large cities in other regions (represented in my research by Banská Bystrica).

The interviews were biographical. Usually, at the opening of the interview, I asked when and under what circumstances the employment of a paid domestic worker had started. I tried to elicit longer stories situating the hiring of paid domestic workers within the biographies of the research participants. Only after getting such stories did I ask complementary questions. Biographical interviews were a suitable tool for getting a grasp on how hiring paid domestic workers was connected to the lives of interviewees. Importantly, biographical interviews enabled me to look at the employers’ decisions without preconceived assumptions about which relationships were important for hiring a nanny or a cleaner.

Outside of care chains: Employment of paid domestic workers in Slovakia

Like other Central and Eastern European countries, Slovakia has been analysed as a typical post-socialist country sending paid domestic workers to more affluent European countries (e.g. Bahna, 2015; Búriková and Miller, 2010). During the last decade, Slovakia has witnessed increased demand for paid domestic services within its borders. Despite the continuing migration of Slovak domestic workers, this demand cannot be explained using the concept of global care chains. The employment of Slovak migrants abroad creates neither a care deficit nor an employment chain for paid carers (Bahna, 2015). Popular au pair stays are only available for young people who are not married and do not have dependent children (Búriková and Miller, 2010). While there are no similar restrictions on carers in Austria, Slovak migrant care-workers providing care for elderly Austrian people do not have young children, have few responsibilities for their adult children, and do not have pressing care responsibilities for their parents (Bahna, 2015). In Slovakia, paid domestic workers are mostly local women, not migrants. Furthermore, the employment of these paid domestic workers does not lead to a care deficit: usually, the paid carers are either university students who do not yet have children of their own or women around retirement age who have adult children. Conceptually, the data reveal that, even in the countries that export migrant domestic workers – such as Slovakia – demand (or at least part of the demand) can be driven by dynamics other than a care deficit in the country.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that we need to decolonise our explanations of the demand for paid housework and childcare and situate them within localised social situations and relationships. I have shown that research on the demand for paid domestic workers tends to generalise from the US or Western European contexts and to explain the demand in countries of the Global South as resulting from the migration of paid domestic workers to the Global North. I have suggested that we need to apply methodologies that allow us to identify and acknowledge the relationships that are important in care delegation and which may differ from those recognised in Western countries (Hochschild, 2003; Lutz, 2011) or in the literature on global care chains (Hochschild, 2000, 2003; Parreñas, 2001).

The reasons for this decolonisation are both analytical and political. Analytically, it makes it possible to give more nuanced and more precise explanations of care-related processes, and allows us to see how care functions socially and politically in a particular culture (Tronto, 1993; Williams, 2011, 2012) Our analytical choices also have political implications. As in the feminist writings on ‘third world women’ criticised by Mohanty (1984, 2003), the expectation either that care is situated within a nuclear family and decisions are made within a dyadic relationship between a man and woman or that the demand for paid domestic workers in countries in the Global South must be driven by a care deficit caused by the migration of domestic workers to the Global North ‘discursively colonizes the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women’ elsewhere than in the United States and Western Europe (Mohanty, 1984: 355). An attempt to decolonise how demand for paid domestic work is understood outside of Western European and North American contexts also demands a methodological shift. Our methods have to decentre the nuclear family in our imaginations (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004) and involve all of the relationships that are important for either unpaid or paid care (Eldén, 2016).

The demand for paid domestic workers in Slovakia cannot be explained by inequalities on a global scale leading to a care deficit and the creation of care chains. Even though Slovak women work as migrant domestic workers abroad, their migration does not result in care chains because they do not typically leave behind children who have to be taken care of by poorer local Slovak women (Bahna, 2015; Bahna and Sekulová, 2019). While the interviews on outsourcing childcare have the same starting point as interviews on outsourcing cleaning – women wanting or needing to do less in the home – and have the same outcome – hiring a female domestic worker – they are embedded in different sets of relationships.

In Slovakia, the decisions and negotiations involved in outsourcing cleaning are embedded in relationships within the nuclear family, mainly in a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman (though the participation of children in domestic cleaning might be marginally present in both the decision making and the organisation of the cleaner’s work). When female employers want or need to do less housework, they think of their husbands as a preferable solution to their problem. The paid domestic worker is hired when the husbands either refuse a more equal division of domestic labour or are unavailable to do more. While the cleaners do the work previously done by the wives, they are an alternative to the preferred but lacking ‘help’ provided by the husbands.

In contrast, the decisions and negotiations involved in outsourcing childcare are embedded in relationships between the mother (or parents) and grandmother (or grandmothers). The most important factor was the availability and willingness of a grandmother to provide childcare for her grandchild/grandchildren. While nannies and babysitters do the work previously done by the mother, they are actually substitutes for the grandmothers. To focus only on the relationship between a man and a woman would mean ignoring the local culture of childcare and gendered contracts between generations in the Slovakian context. It would also mean negating the character of paid childcare, which is structured according to a model of grandmotherly care. Methodological and conceptual openness to including relationships other than the nuclear family in the analysis also enabled me to see care as a culturally and socially embedded practice.