Global Care Chains Research Articles

Kilómetro 0: inicio de las trayectorias migratorias de trabajadoras domésticas en Chile

This study aims to describe how the migratory trajectories of migrant domestic workers begin in Chile and the role of migratory networks and emotional factors in their decisions. A qualitative analysis of six biographical narratives is employed to examine the complexities of their labor and migratory trajectories, influenced by intersecting factors such as gender, class, and ethnicity, within the context of global care chains. The results reveal five central moments when making the decision to migrate. The first moment is characterized by the fact that none of the cases had worked as domestic workersin their home countries. In the second moment, the need to change their circumstances in their home countries arises, often due to political crises, economic challenges, or gender-based violence. The third moment involves the existence of a migratory network of friends and family who assist in their journey.In the fourth moment, a significant emotional factor plays a central role in the decision to migrate, influencing the timing of the decision. Finally, in the fifth moment, the decision to migrate to Chile is made.

Women Workers’ Initiatives in the Field of the Social and Solidarity as a Space for Transforming the Domestic Care System: Potential and Challenges in the Ibero-American Sphere

A just socio-ecological transition calls for a transformation of the care system that ensures the sustainability of human life. This process involves recognising and revaluing unpaid care work it also means improving working conditions in this sector, characterised by the overwhelming contribution of women, including many migrant women, in global care chains. This paper analyses the opportunities and limitations of the social and solidarity economy in this transformation. Using the multi-level perspective on change as a framework and a methodology that combines an innovative collaborative workshop with 54 stakeholders in the Spanish context with interviews with leaders of care cooperatives in Honduras, Uruguay and Spain, transformative strategies for revaluing these essential services and addressing the structural challenges they face are identified.

The Unhappy Marriage of Care and the Global Market: ‘Soft Backsliding’ in the Narratives of Two Romanian Badanti

This paper encompasses an analysis of the novels written by two Romanian badanti who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Italy at the beginning of the 21st century, namely Liliana Nechita (Romania) and Lilia-Bicec Zanardelli (the Republic of Moldova). The reading grid of these narratives is a Marxist feminist one, as it continues the analytical framework of Lise Vogel and links it to the last decades’ “new gender arrangement” (Lutz) that emphasises the outsourcing of reproductive labour towards migrant and gendered labour-power. The work of these badanti partakes in the global care chain of our world-system, which privileges families in the West and affects poor households in the East. The novels written by the two workers show how agents directly involved in this global division of labour explain their own history, as it is shaped by their new working experience. However, their literary inquiry will circumscribe a contradictory rhetoric, also called “soft backsliding”, that combines emancipatory insights with reactionary ideologies related to the nation-state, family and Christianity. This study aims to explain them as both methods of subjective subsistence in capitalism and a virtual path to political radicalization.

Global care chains and empowerment through the social economy: women’s participation in care cooperatives

Global care chains and empowerment through the social economy: women’s participation in care cooperatives

The Global Care Chain: Analyzing the Increasing Feminization of Care Work Across Borders

With the rise in globalization, there has been an increase in migration, specifically labor migration. Women migrating to perform care labor has exploded after women formally entered the global labor market. Although many female migrants are independently traveling as the primary breadwinners of their households, they remain underappreciated, invisible, under-waged, and exploited. Upon relocating from countries in the global south to conduct care work in more affluent nations or communities, they leave their dependents behind, ultimately in the care of another female, typically a family member, or yet another more impoverished woman. At this point, the global care chain is not a single, linear chain but rather an intersecting one composed of numerous chains that multiple women become a part of. Therefore these intersections between the public and private, the paid and unpaid, and the productive and reproductive forms of care work are present. In addition, although globalization and neoliberal policy have benefited <i>some</i> women globally, it has dramatically made women who migrate for global care work and labor suffer. When women migrate, the global care chain often becomes an entire phenomenon through which many things intersect. On the one hand, we witness capitalism, feminization of migration, globalization, and neoliberalism interacting while also intersecting with care, emotional work, and gender relations. The goal of this paper is to examine and connect the intersectional effects on women by examining global care work in Asia and Latin America. In addition, we ask the following questions: How can we create change so that women's work is no longer invisible? How can we build a society where individuals are esteemed not just on monetized work but also on reproductive work? Will reproductive labor ever be considered labor? And finally, we will propose some preliminary solutions to begin framing steps forward.

Migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times

AbstractIn view of heightened food security issues in COVID‐19 times, we employ a transnational lens to give bifocal attention to migrant women’s experiences during the pandemic, as they sought to secure access to food for themselves and for left‐behind children and family members in Indonesia and the Philippines. In conjunction with the classic idea of global care chains and the notion of foodwork, we propose the idea of transnational foodcare chains. This distinctly agentic, migrant, and maternal food labour came to the fore under exceptional times of pandemic‐induced social distancing, economic precarity, and limited travel. First, we argue that these foodcare chains are multi‐relational, involving interdependence and reciprocity among a web of caregivers to secure food gaps. Second, we suggest that foodcare chains also extend to friendship networks forged among fellow migrant domestic workers in Singapore. Third, under pandemic conditions, we argue that foodcare chains enter the domain of well‐being and healthcare as food becomes evoked as medicine and cures. Drawing on findings from 40 qualitative interviews with Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in Singapore, we focus on developing, within studies of food (in)security, the idea of foodcare chains by foregrounding the maternal, relational, and often invisible labour of achieving food security for migrant women and their left‐behind families.

The Cumulative Effects of Marketized Care

Abstract Care is increasingly marketized. Previous marketing and consumer research has focused on specific tensions underlying marketized care provision and the ways in which consumers navigate them. In contrast, this conceptual article draws on interdisciplinary research on care to develop a cumulative understanding of marketized care, that is, based on those effects that build up over time when a critical mass of consumers routinely addresses care needs via markets. Defining marketized care as attending to the welfare needs of human and nonhuman others through the market, we identify four negative cumulative effects: individuating effects on consumer subjectivities, alienating effects on care relationships, responsibilizing effects on consumers as opposed to other institutional actors of care provision, and exploitative effects generated in global care and supply chains. We also outline four principles that can mitigate these effects: interdependent consumer autonomy, affective reconnections, proportionate responsibilization, and market reconfiguration. Our conceptualization moves the literature on marketized care forward by outlining its cumulative nature as well as offering potential solutions that are neither demonizing nor celebratory of markets. In doing so, we offer a series of generative insights for research on marketized care that contribute to addressing collective human and nonhuman flourishing.

A social reproduction analysis of digital care platform work

ABSTRACT Digital platforms are becoming an important factor in the process of reconfiguration and commodification of social reproduction during the neoliberal phase of capitalism. Developing a theoretical framework merging social reproduction theory and migrant labour regimes, this article argues that the introduction of digital platforms in the care sector is facilitating the expansion of precarised commodification of reproductive activities in a context of social care crisis. Through a mixed-method analysis, combining desk-based research with in-depth interviews of digital care platform work in Spain, the study examines the migrant labour regime of digital care platforms and how they take advantage of the international division of labour and global care chains to further exploit a highly precarious, informalised, feminised and racialised workforce. Our findings reveal that platforms use technology to rapidly access a reserve labour army, thus extracting more surplus value by restricting access to information, controlling the intermediation process and further fragmenting the workforce in reproductive activities.

Bordering of family and the social care of migrant farmworkers: men's gendered experiences of the global care chain

Bordering of family and the social care of migrant farmworkers: men's gendered experiences of the global care chain

Dependency theory meets feminist economics: a research agenda

Dependency theory had great influence in Latin America between 1940 and 1970, but since then it has lost political and academic relevance. However, in recent years, the dependency agenda has been increasingly revisited, incorporating new analytical axes and conceptual bridges with other theories. Despite this, this agenda remains largely blind to gender and racial-ethnic inequalities. This paper aims precisely to address this gap by combining the dependency school with feminist economics to address the links between gender inequalities and Latin American peripheral position. In particular, I propose to develop two analytical axes resulting from the combination of both currents. First, I argue that gender inequalities function as ‘adjustment variables’ in the ‘up’ and ‘down’ economic cycles of Latin American countries. Thus, women’s wages and more precarious working conditions constitute a central axis of peripheral countries in the international competition for attracting capital. Second, I argue that the large wage gap and high informality derived from the productive structure of the periphery catalyse the commodification of ‘low-cost’ paid domestic work. This ‘cheap’ care work satisfies the care needs not only of the upper-middle sectors of the peripheries, but also of the central markets through Global Care Chains.

Conditioning grandparent care-labour mobility at the care-migration systems nexus: Australia and the UK

ABSTRACT A ‘transnational turn’ in welfare regime theory has disrupted methodologically nationalist analyses of care regimes generating analytical frameworks that capture the interdependencies between care and migration regimes. Those frameworks share a focus on migration for paid care labour as the vehicle connecting care and migration regimes transnationally. In this paper, we highlight familial care-labour mobility as an additional mechanism connecting care and migration regimes across borders. Drawing on the care circulation framework, we argue that a focus on these informal global care chains helps to bridge macro structural level approaches of the frameworks that focus on paid care labour with the more micro-level transnational family care approach. We focus on grandparent care-labour mobility, arguing that while it is ‘familial’, ‘informal’, ‘private’ and ‘invisible’, its dynamics and the lived experiences of those entwined within it, are mediated at the care-migration systems nexus. Through case-studies on grandparent care-labour mobility between China and Australia and India and the UK, we examine how the care-migration systems nexus is shaped by the prevailing logic of neoliberalism and ensuing patterns of stratification within care and migration systems. We conclude by highlighting the need for a transnational ethics of family care to govern the care-migration systems nexus.

Parasitic Resilience: The Next Phase of Public Health Preparedness Must Address Power Imbalances Between Communities.

Community resilience, a system's ability to maintain its essential functions despite disturbance, is a cornerstone of public health preparedness. However, as currently practiced, community resilience generally focuses on defined neighborhood characteristics to describe factors such as vulnerability or social capital. This ignores the way that residents of some neighborhoods (as "essential workers") were required during the COVID-19 pandemic to sacrifice their wellbeing for the sake of others staying at home in more affluent neighborhoods. Using the global care chain theory, we analyze the way that the resilience of affluent neighborhoods depends on siphoning off the labor of other, less affluent neighborhoods, creating what we call the parasitic nature of resilience. We argue that understanding this neighborhood interdependence-and accounting for its parasitic nature-should be prioritized by public health authorities to prevent unintentional harm in future pandemics. Otherwise, any public health emergency response that relies on this labor (as did the COVID-19 pandemic response) depends on exploitative practices that produce the very disparities the response is trying to address. We explore the theoretical grounding and practical effects of this idea to provide the preparedness enterprise with an initial set of theoretical tools to move from a model of community resilience to one of community renewal. The community renewal model is based on an underlying ethics of care, in which systems are redesigned to become more prosocial during a public health response. We believe this model can more successfully address the tragic inequities in labor and health outcomes that we see during public health emergencies.

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

Research on the demand for paid domestic workers tends to be based on data from the United States and Western Europe, and to explain that demand in the countries of the Global South is a result of the migration of paid domestic workers to the Global North. This article argues that we need to decolonise our explanations of the demands for paid domestic workers, and to expand them by taking into consideration the unequal division of domestic labour between men and women, and investigating the possibility of other dynamics of demand than those driven by global care chains. Decolonising the demand for paid domestic work also requires a methodological shift. We need to acknowledge that care is not necessarily situated within a nuclear family or a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman. Empirically, I draw on interviews with employers of paid domestic workers in Slovakia. In Slovakia, while negotiations around outsourcing household cleaning are embedded in relationships within the nuclear family, decisions around outsourcing childcare are embedded in relationships beyond the nuclear family, namely, those between mothers and grandmothers. While nannies and babysitters do the work previously done by the mother, in reality they serve as replacements for the grandmothers.

From Migrant to Transnational Families’ Mental Health: An Ethnography of Five Mexican Families Participating in Agricultural Labour in Canada

This focused critical ethnography aimed to deepen our understanding of the impact of participating in a temporary, cyclical, low-wage migration program on the mental and emotional health (MEH) of Mexican women and their non-migrating family members. Except for global care chains research, the field of migrant mental health has paid limited attention to the importance of transnational family dynamics and the MEH of relatives beyond the workers’ children. The current study broadens this framework to examine how family-level changes brought about by migration affect the MEH not only the migrant and her children, but also extended family members. Participants included five women employed in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program and an average of five non-migrating members of their families in Mexico. The study combined four data generation methods: participant observation, ‘emojional’ calendars, semi-structured interviews, and sociodemographic questionnaires. Study participants’ MEH was significantly influenced by gendered selection processes and the cyclical pattern of migration. Similar impacts were observed within and across four groups of participants (workers, their children, the children’s caregivers, and extended family members) during their periods apart and together. There were significant effects of their relative’s migration on the MEH of extended family members, a population group commonly overlooked in the literature. Findings from this study suggest that public health research, programs, and policies using a transnational approach are best suited to effectively address the impacts of migration on the MEH of migrants and their non-migrating families.

Paradoxes in the cultural doula concept for migrant women: Implications for gender-inclusive care versus migrant-friendly maternity care

ObjectiveSwedish healthcare policies promote gender equality, shared parenting and cultural diversity. In response to the risk of adverse outcomes for migrant women, cultural doulas were introduced as support for migrant women during pregnancy and/or labour. The aim is to investigate potential tensions in the cultural doula concept in relation to policies of gender equality and diversity. DesignAn interview study was designed to analyse perceptions of the cultural doula concept among healthcare providers in Swedish sexual and reproductive healthcare. Through the framework of Bacchi's approach ‘What Is the Problem Represented to Be?’ and Hochschild's concept of ‘global care chains’, we analyzed whether the introduction of the cultural doula concept is in line with the policies of gender equality and culturally sensitive care by exploring paradoxes, unintended consequences and what was not reflected upon. Setting and participantsSemi-structured interviews (n = 18) with midwives and obstetricians at hospitals in two Swedish counties during 2022. Measurements and findingsThe interviews were analyzed through thematic analysis. Cultural doulas were perceived as multi-tasking resources for facilitating integration and providing healthcare information and psychosocial support. Respondents did not identify doula support as a cultural practice in migrants’ origin countries. Despite awareness of cultural differences in gender norms, many respondents stated that doula support included male partners. Key conclusionsThe cultural doula concept includes paradoxes in relation to gender equality and diversity. Rather than empowering migrant women, the cultural doula concept is related to gendered patterns of low-educated, underpaid care work. Labour support interventions including migrant women's social network and intensified partner involvement would be more in line with Swedish policies of gender equality, shared parenting and cultural sensitivity when needed. However, doulas may be an imperfect solution for women lacking partners or social networks, for example, newly arrived migrant women, if no support is to be found within the perinatal care system. Implications for practiceMidwives and obstetricians need reflexivity about what the problem is represented to be when it comes to gender equality and cultural sensitivity in their collaboration with cultural doulas, boundaries between roles, how they handle confidentiality, and why cultural doulas are needed in relation to migrant women's integration.

“Who Should Care for Our Parents?” How the Perceived Achievement Hierarchy Complicates Transnational Family Relations in China?

This article offers the concept of an “achievement hierarchy”—the symbolic meanings that families attach to siblings’ ability to convert education into professional accomplishments across borders—to examine how adult children caring for left-behind parents position themselves vis-à-vis their emigrant brothers and sisters. We argue that respondents’ characterization of siblings’ migration trajectories significantly shapes the dynamics within global care chains. Based on 95 qualitative interviews with family caregivers, our analysis delineates three scenarios where respondents manage a perceived achievement hierarchy in the context of long-distance eldercare: (1) hierarchical transfer, (2) contested sibling hierarchy, and (3) hierarchical collaboration. Many respondents believe that an achievement hierarchy among siblings paves the way for slotting them into a less desirable node in the global care chain. By contrast, some emphasize their status as the moral head of their family or China's global rise to challenge the family's symbolic distinctions. Others develop a collaborative relationship with emigrant siblings to care for parents at home, but this collaboration can either strengthen or soften the perceived achievement hierarchy between siblings. Our analysis shows that the pathways of emigration—as student, labor, and marriage migrants—mediate at-home caregivers’ feelings, emotions, and identities during family life transitions.

The Marriage of Care Labor and Self-Care: Marriage Migration and Neoliberal Refashioning of Care in South Korea

Care appears in current feminist scholarship in two distinctive forms: care for others in global care chains and care for the self as a neoliberal imperative. While migrant women perform the former to alleviate the care deficits in affluent households, professional middle-class women pursue the latter on the grounds of a felicitous work-family balance. Exploring the conjuncture of these two modes of care, this article examines neoliberal reconfigurations of care in the context of marriage migration in South Korea. On the basis of fieldwork I conducted in Ansan, “the migrant city” of South Korea, I examine marriage migrant women’s care labor, particularly as foreign mothers in Korean families. I analyze how it channels their self-development activities and, in some cases, expands into a new form of self-care for a better life in the way that neoliberalism delimits. The neoliberal futures that these migrant women cultivate, I argue, make their self-care political, if only provisionally, revealing the mobilization of gendered contradictions within neoliberal reconfigurations of care. This analysis suggests that we should recast our sometimes too ready critique of, and despair about, neoliberal subjectivities into a persistent experiment of feminist politics that engages with the aspirations, in addition to the structural constraints, that emerge within global care chains under neoliberalism.

The commodification of social reproduction: A view of global care chains from a migrant-sending country

What is driving the commodification of social reproduction in Ghana? Perhaps it is a natural consequence of the expansion of a powerful capitalist system into even more areas of the life world, as work on global capitalism suggests. Perhaps it is due to female international migration, creating care deficits in the country of origin, as the theory of global care chains suggests. This article shows that commodification is driven not only by transnational migration, but is also a response to local social conditions and historical traditions of care, such that the expansion of capitalism is not a natural force, but becomes naturalised and normalised through local adaptations. Although urban and international migration play a role, so too do changes in women’s ability to balance their individual advancement with care labour, changes in the meaning and practices of kinship, and long-standing histories of informal recruitment of labour into households that can easily become more commodified. This article examines the commodification of social reproduction and the effects of such commodification, phenomena which are not always seen as requiring explanation because of the linear narratives of ever-expanding capitalism and the changes wrought by modernization.

Migration, gender, and emotions. A reflection on global care chains and circuits of care in the context of migration from Bolivia to Argentina

The intersection between the history of emotions and migration studies highlights how motherhood and care practices are transformed during migration. In this article, through the example of Bolivian migration to Argentina, we shed light on diverse emotional experiences around care work that cannot be understood if we analyze them through the classic approaches of global care chains and the circulation of care. In this study, we set out to analyze care practices and the emotional dynamics that are connected to them from a situated perspective that focuses on different geographic locations to those studied in these two classic approaches. We call into question essentialist views of motherhood, care, and emotions by conducting a historical analysis of human mobility between two countries in the Global South: the waves of migration from Bolivia to Argentina that took place between the 1970s and 1990s.

A qualitative study on the experience of defection and staying in a third country of an unaccompanied female adolescent North Korean refugee in South Korea

ABSTRACT This study explores the defection background and experience of staying in a third country of an unaccompanied female adolescent North Korean refugee, ‘Mi-Hyang’, and the study investigates the human rights violations in the border area between North Korea and China. Qualitative research was conducted. The analysis focused on the significant events that influenced Mi-Hyang’s decision to defect and her eventual immigration to South Korea. Mi-Hyang’s story illustrates the phenomenon of the feminisation of survival, global care chains, and the human trafficking of minors. The results of the study help to understand the characteristics of unaccompanied female adolescent NKRs and provide primary data for preparing policies and services that support their resettlement in South Korea.