ABSTRACT
With the comeback of domestic work in both the EU and worldwide, global inequalities are being reinforced by migration and international division of labour. In this chapter I discuss the ways policy and individual actors approach such global order, and specifically the ways employers discuss their preferences, positions and everyday practices. Basically all EU countries are experiencing a “crisis of care” (Daly and Lewis 2000: 291, Holzmann and Munz 2004, Lutz 2002: 93) that is increasingly being solved by migrant domestic workers in both formal and informal markets (Sassen 2006). Increasing demand for migrant domestic workers partly reflects a widespread lack in public provision of affordable and flexible child care arrangements, as well as an ageing population and demographic stagnation with increasing demands for care services (Daly and Lewis 2000, Holzmann and Munz 2004). The informal sector, with generally insecure employment conditions, proliferates and intertwines with the formal sector all over Europe, partly due to wider global, social and economic restructuring (Sassen 2006, Slavnic 2007). In addition, the shortage in domestic care work is connected to the low wage rates and demanding working conditions in household services (Cancedda 2001: 14, 84). These widening care gaps are related to the decreasing availability of women’s unpaid care work as a result of increases in women’s labour force participation (Mahon 2002: 3, Cancedda 2001). Thus, shifts in domestic care work are conditioned by welfare policies, migration policies and the changing nature of public care provision in Europe. In different social and historical contexts, the nature and solution to the “servant problem” (Cox 2006) has been defined from two opposite perspectives: either raising issues around the lack of available and affordable workers willing to carry out domestic services (privileged irresponsibility perspective), or the existence of a new class of servants consisting of exploitable migrant domestic workers whose availability builds on global injustices (structural responsibility perspective). Importantly, however, the allocation of who buys and sells domestic work reflects shifting racial and gender divisions of labour in the reorganised global political economy of care (Anderson 2000). Ethnic and racial preferences for the “type of person” required among employers of domestic workers are crucial
to their demands and the everyday realities of employees. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in London, Stockholm and Madrid, this chapter investigates these issues. Using theoretical sampling, I carried out interviews and participant observation in London between July and September 2004 and these included sixteen employees, ten employers and eight organisations. In Stockholm, I conducted interviews between September and December 2004 with seventeen employees, ten employers and eight representatives of organisations and agencies dealing with domestic work. In Madrid, I conducted interviews, most of which were made in collaboration with Virginia Paez, between January and April 2005, with fourteen employees and ten employers, as well as nine organisations. Based on my interviews with employers of domestic workers in Sweden, the UK and Spain, this chapter discusses employers’ racial and ethnic preferences. Moreover, I connect such conceptualisations of employers to rationalisations around hierarchies in everyday work relations, and their implications for human rights in a global political economy. From the perspectives of employers, “servant problems” revolve around contrasting themes in the three national settings: Swedish nationalist preoccupation with mythical Nordic egalitarianism, UK preoccupation with ethics of motherhood and Spanish preoccupation with otherness. Employers use these notions to make sense of contradictions between privileged irresponsibility and structural responsibility.
