Mobility versus Caring Skills? The Recruitment of Care Workers for the Elderly
A new market for home care has emerged in Switzerland, fostered by the free movement of workers. Private care agencies recruit women from lower-wage countries and place them in private households for elderly care. The women usually work for a few weeks or months at a time and commute between their own homes in Eastern Europe and Switzerland. A study on these care agencies examines their role in the commercialization of elderly home care and asks about the valuation of caring skills.
Commercialized live-in care arrangements for the elderly have become increasingly popular in Switzerland. Performed by migrant women in private households, this form of care work is perceived as a “lesser skilled work” and generally undervalued. This can be explained by the fact that domestic work was transformed into a “labour of love” and constructed as the natural domain of women in the capitalist development of industrial societies. Consequently, caring skills are assumed to be developed within the household, which is considered less valuable than skills acquired in the public sphere. Because caring skills can be difficult to grasp due to its embodied and relational nature, valuation is complicated. In what way do new care agencies play a role in the valuation of caring skills?
Ever since freedom of movement was extended to the EU-8 countries (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia) in 2011, private for-profit care agencies have been mushrooming. Many agencies offer “all-inclusive” deals, which include matching, the organization of arrival and departure of the carers, and administrative work. The offers often include the possibility to change care workers if the relationship between carers and care-recipients do not develop as expected. What is most remarkable, however, is how fast live-in care can be organized; “within three days,” as an agent proudly reported.
Some agencies organize arrangements with two rotating carers in one household, while others replace a carer with a new one after only three months or less. Underlying reasons for the latter are tied to migration regulations. Carers working for less than three months in Switzerland can register their stay through an online form. Whereas, carers staying longer must apply for a residence permit and pay health insurance. With these models of constant new work placements, agencies can offer live-in care at lower costs.
Pools of Flexible and Mobile Care Workers
Evidently, these arrangements depend on the availability of care workers. Or in the words of one care agent, “flexibility is at the heart of this business.” To achieve flexibility, many agents create pools of care workers. One of the agencies where we conducted interviews managed a pool of 500 potential carers. At that time only around 120 carers were placed for 100 care recipients. Another recruiter explained, “if they tell me [that] they’re sitting on suitcases that are already packed, able to take a plane the next morning, then it’s better for them.” Hence, agencies create conditions where mobility and flexibility become an advantage for employment. The remaining question is, who among them will be recruited.
One might think that health care qualifications and experience might be important in the recruitment of carers. However, we find that the most important key points in the selection process emphasize other issues. Firstly, for most agencies, live-in care is clearly not meant for local care workers. To legitimize the recruitment of non-local care workers, some agents draw on and produce stereotypes based on recruitment countries. One of the agencies interviewed, for example, only recruits from Slovakia and Poland because of the supposedly warm-hearted nature of carers from the Slavic part of Eastern Europe. Another agency only recruits from Hungary, because of supposedly similar work ethic between Hungarian carers and Swiss workers.
Secondly, care agents construct carers as selfless people with a heart for the elderly. Although most agencies may prefer carers with experience in live-in care, many of the agents interviewed seemed to prioritize elusive skills, such as “a desire to help” over professional health care qualifications. The findings imply that caring skills acquired through training are secondary to the motivation of carers.
Thirdly, by predominantly selecting women, they reproduce an understanding of care work as a gendered domain. What is striking is that many recruit women of a certain age. Apart from explaining that women should be protected from, “[being] separated from their children for a long time”, as formulated in the words of a care agent, another reason to avoid women with children is that they are entitled to family allowances, which would make live-in care more expensive.
Professional Qualifications Less Relevant than Flexibility?
In summary, agencies portray migrant care workers as older, supposedly warm-hearted, highly motivated women from Eastern European countries or Eastern Germany. In this sense, access to the live-in care labor market in Switzerland is characterized less by care workers’ professional skills and qualifications, but more by the agencies’ business practices, marketing strategies, and care workers’ capacity to be mobile. In cases where care workers are requested to begin a placement relatively quickly, those who are flexible enough to accept these conditions have an advantage over those who need time to organize their journey. The less flexible candidates are usually those with families and other social responsibilities at home. Consequently, this flexibility affects not only care workers but also their families who must reorganize their lives to support their employment.
In conclusion, not only have workers been granted more rights to move freely for work since the introduction of the Free Movement of Workers Agreement—which does not legally distinguish between higher and lesser skilled migrants—but private actors such as care agencies have gained new powers in determining which workers migrate and under what conditions. In this sense, migration regulations have shifted from controlling external territorial borders to managing the live-in care labor market with less visible barriers and conditional requirements.
Care agencies frame live-in care work as “lesser skilled work” with their placement practices to offer flexible, affordable and so-called “warm-hearted care.” Thus, the delegation of care work to women migrant workers from lower-wage countries has not led to an appreciation of the value of care work. Instead, the interplay between profit-maximizing business practices, gendered labor regime, and migration policies rather reproduce the understanding of care work as lower skilled work in a transnational dimension.
The author Huey Shy Chau is an affiliated researcher in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich. The findings presented are part of ’Care markets. The role of care agencies in the commodification of elderly care’ funded by the SNSF.
