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Sahraoui, Nina (2016) "What I do, it's not little, it's really something": a political economy of migrant and minority ethnic care workers' experience in private older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.
In London, Paris and Madrid the reliance on migrant and minority ethnic workers for older-age care is related to patterns of inequality at the intersection of gender, employment, migration and care regimes. Building upon the possibilities opened up by the cross-national dimension of this research, the thesis presents a gendered political economy analysis of care assistants’ work and life experiences in the context of for-profit and not-for-profit private care provision. Inspired by institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005), the analysis draws upon 82 semi-structured interviews with migrant and minority ethnic care workers. The overarching theoretical framework of the thesis is embedded in a transnational political economy of care (Williams, 2011a) and brings into the analysis the perspective of feminist moral philosophy (Tronto, 2013; Molinier, 2013).
First, the social implications of labour market segmentation are scrutinized in a comparative perspective through the study of care workers’ routes into the care sector, the role of intermediaries, the profile of the workforce and respondents’ trajectories and aspirations within the sector. Second, a political economy analysis of workers’ employment terms and working conditions is conducted by revisiting the concepts of precarious employment and precarious work from a feminist perspective.
This leads to an analysis of emotional labour from the standpoint of migrant and minority ethnic workers. Finally, lived experiences of racism and discrimination come to the fore in respondents’ narratives and these are also examined from a political economy perspective.
The thesis contributes to the existing literature on migrant and minority ethnic workers’ collective role and individual experiences in the context of labour shortages and marginalisation of paid care in European capitals. The cross-national design of this research allows for a differentiated analysis of the role of migration, employment and care regimes in three sites where similar challenges are observed but where policies diverge. The thesis brings into dialogue two fields of literature - the feminist ethics of care and the political economy of gendered and racialised labour in care - that have remained separated for decades until more recent developments initiated a conversation (Mahon and Robinson, 2011) to which this thesis contributes.
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