Conference Agenda

Since the 1990s, a gendered, transnational labour market of senior care has been growing rapidly and steadily in Europe (Melegh and Katona 2020). The European care border regime is built on formalised labour mobility that subtly combines inclusion, by providing EU citizens access to other domestic labour markets, and exclusion, by excluding them from certain labour rights and protections and from certain welfare provisions. These care workers from less wealthy EU countries are a new form of ‘guest worker’. The system works only because mobile care workers move back and forth across the borders without their families. As EU citizens they are not entirely migrants, but as workers they are not treated entirely on par with citizens either (Uhde and Ezzeddine 2020). In the last decade the transnational senior care sector has gone through a great transformation from mostly undocumented and informally organized labour to strong marketization and professionalization (Aulenbacher et al. 2021).

Our paper draws on data from a collaborative international project, which foregrounds the mezzo-level of the transnational organization of senior care in Europe, including intermediary agencies, informal and formal platforms and social media, transnationally shared infrastructures and political mobilization of care workers. In doing so, the project focuses on the perspective of Central and Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, which are predominantly sending countries, though increasingly also receiving immigrant care workers from especially Ukraine.

In our paper we analyse and compare political discourse on senior care in CEE, with a focus on the perceptions of emigration and immigration in the sector. We study the attention for, but also silences around emigration and immigration in senior care policies and explore how this is related to discussions around familialization, de-institutionalization, churchification, marketization/financialization and working conditions. We find that, despite the large impact of emigration for the senior care sector, silences on this topic predominate across all countries. Moreover, rather than a public responsibility, responsibility for care is varyingly placed on families, the church or the market. Meanwhile, the silences around migration are accompanied by a complete lack of attention for working conditions in senior care.

The health and care systems of high-income countries have become increasingly reliant on international migration and recruitment to sustain their workforce. This includes the long-standing international recruitment of doctors and nurses, and more recently, of care workers, through their integration in labour migra;on systems. While the role of migrant care labour has been well documented in the literature, there has been more limited attention to the ‘brokers’ of these workers, including private recruitment agencies. At the same time, the governance of international recruitment in health and care systems has been underexplored(Yeates & Pillinger 2019). At the international level, this includes the WHO Global Code of Practice for the Recruitment of Health Personnel, which sets out the principles to which states should adhere to promote ‘ethical recruitment’, alongside codes at the national level that position recruiters as responsible for upholding ethical recruitment standards. This paper develops understanding of ethical recruitment in care labour markets in practice. It draws on the findings of research on the integration of care workers in labour migration systems, and specifically the international recruitment of care workers to the UK since 2022, involving qualitative interviews with recruitment agencies and other actors directly involved in transnational care worker recruitment between the UK and the principal countries of origin of care workers in South and Southeast Asia West Africa and Southern Africa. With respect to the framework of ethical recruitment to which recruiters should adhere, it considers how(un)ethical recruitment is understood, navigated, enforced or resisted in practice by these actors, and the implications for the regulation of international recruitment in care labour markets.

The paper is based on two research projects: the Austrian country study Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements; and the Sri Lankan country study Ideal Migrant Subjects: Domestic Service in Globalization;. Drawing on the projects, we explore and compare migration brokerage in terms of both labour and care brokerage. First, we present our theoretical framework combining Polanyian, neo-institutionalist and intersectional perspectives to analyse the complex interplay of marketisation, expectations and evaluations founded in the normative and institutional order of the society and social inequalities along different and intersecting axes, such as gender, class, race, and nationality. Second, starting with the Sri Lankan case of domestic work brokerage and moving on, third, to the Austrian case of senior care brokerage, our paper interrogates the role and latitude of brokerage agencies in constituting and shaping the contemporary migration industry including the expectations of clients, the conditions of the live-in arrangement as well as bureaucratic representations. The paper shows how brokers act as marketeers in transnational labour and care markets, interpreters of bureaucratic rules and lobbyists aiming at receiving (more) support by the state and politics and establishing their business in favour of their domestic service provision for solvent clients. We analyse how the respective labour and care arrangements take shape in the relations between market and state, economy and politics in an interplay of institutional logics and social inequalities, and how the exploitative marketisation of the ‘fictitious commodities’ labour and care and poor working conditions are persistently contested yet legitimised elements of this migration industry. Fourth and finally, our conclusion reflects on differences and commonalities between the two cases of brokerage, which constitutes an indispensable element of the migration industry in the Global North as well as the South.