Migrant Workers in Home Care: Routes, Responsibilities, and Respect

Abstract

We consider the increasingly common provision of home-based health care by migrant care workers. In particular, we explore the racial division of paid reproductive care and ideas about embodied work to show that although (im)migrants tend to fall to the bottom of the hierarchy of care work, the reasons are multifaceted and complex. We draw on interview data from a larger study of long-term home care in Ontario to explore the lived experience of care work by migrant workers, emphasizing their social agency. We organize our discussion around the themes of routes, responsibilities, and respect and emphasize the embodied and power-inflected care work relation. Through these themes we explore the different routes the migrants took into care work—how they found their jobs and what role those jobs play in their lives. Then we address the responsibilities of different home care jobs and the relational dynamic of how job responsibilities are actually practiced. Finally, the theme of respect examines how the workers try to treat their clients with dignity but sometimes the work relation is marked by racism and friction over what counts as “good” care. We show that care work is constructed and experienced through a complex interweaving of embodiment, labor market inequalities, and the province's regulatory mechanisms of care provision.