Irregular migration and the welfare state: strange allies?

In Italy, as in other countries, a significant number of regular and irregular migrants are employed as domestic workers, baby-sitters or carers of elderly people in native families (Andall, 2000; Parreñas, 2001). The system of care services is still based largely on families and women, in contrast to the increasing participation of women in the labour market outside the home and the growing number of elderly in need of care. This has led to the growth of an informal welfare system, in which waged immigrant women enter Italian families, as they do in the rest of southern Europe and elsewhere, to help them to carry out the many tasks socially assigned to them (Jordan, 2006). In Italy, over 871 thousand domestic workers were enrolled with INPS (National Social Security Institute) in 2010. 81.5 per cent of them were foreigners (710 thousand units), and 71.8 per cent were from non-EU countries. Between 2001 and 2010 growth in enrolments was recorded almost exclusively among migrant workers: in ten years their number almost quintupled (+408.3 per cent), while for Italians it was just +23.7 per cent (Leone Moressa Foundation, 2012). The results presented in the paper come from a series of studies, both quantitative and qualitative, conducted in northern Italy, in the regions of Lombardy, Liguria and Trentino-Alto Adige between 2002 and 2012. I shall focus my attention on the assistance to the elderly at home and on the formation of what we can call an “invisible welfare”: a system of assistance parallel to the official welfare system, managed by families and based on the work of care workers coming from abroad. I shall explore three questions: 1) The evolution of the role of the traditional care-givers; 2) The expression of demand that exceed the contractual relationship; 3) The formation of a web of mutual obligations and concerns. First, one of the most important aspects of the advent of this parallel welfare system is the corresponding evolution in the role of traditional care-givers: adult people, mainly women, bound by family ties to the elderly in need of assistance. In response to the prolongation of dependence and the more burdensome nature of the tasks required of them, they tend to shift from providing direct care to the management of a care system that focuses on the figure of the care worker (Anderson, 2000). They delegate the heaviest tasks to the latter, as well as responsibility for the patient’s constant supervision. But they have to deal with management of the care worker’s legal situation and the many problems related to his/her stay abroad, far from home and family. I call this new role the ‘care manager’ (see also Degiuli, 2010). Besides managing the possible intervention of other professionals (doctors, nurses, rehabilitation therapists) and dealing with public institutions, care managers very often take over from care workers when they are absent on free days or for other purposes, cope with emergencies, and regulate economic relations. The transfer of familial duties is never complete and irreversible If sponsored and accompanied by their Italian employers, the care workers manage to access various public institutions more easily, to obtain information or documents, and to acquire the services that they need. Where interpretative and discretionary margins can be found, employers mediate, insist and protest, deploying their knowledge and their ability to influence practitioners and decision-makers. In several cases care managers assume roles not formally pertaining to them in order to support care workers in very serious difficulties (Tognetti Bordogna, 2009). A link evidently exists, and it helps explain this involvement: the well-being of the worker translates into the quality and continuity of services provided, and therefore into the well-being of the elderly persons cared for. Second, the particular characteristics of live-in care work, especially when the job involves care of the elderly, give rise to a change in interpersonal relationships with their employers. Employers and workers eat together, go for walks together, watch television together. Very often, the employers interviewed talked about the immigrant care worker as ‘one of the family’, even ‘like a daughter’ (Ambrosini and Cominelli, 2005). In particular, the elderly expect their care workers to relieve them of loneliness and depression, to substitute for children and other relatives who cannot be as close to them as they would like. So, we can say that families purchase labour, but what they actually want is affection. Interestingly, sometimes the care managers complain that the worker, although irreproachable in terms of her professional services, does not give what the elderly need: empathic communication, companionship, and moral support. Third, on the other side, the families of elderly persons, and especially the care managers often struggle to see themselves as employers. They know they have to manage an employment relationship, but they actually live it as a much denser and more multifaceted interpersonal relationship, with all the ambiguities that may arise (Triandafillydou and Kosic, 2006). These distinctive relationships have various implications. They generate an invasion of privacy, demands that exceed the normal work obligations, and sometimes sexual harassment. But they also provides resources for migrants: primarily, the willingness of most families to regularise them when the opportunity arises. Employers quite often provide aid that goes well beyond their contractual obligations: for example, lending money, helping relatives of the care worker to find jobs or accommodation, , even allowing them to stay in their homes, or letting them stay in the elderly person’s home for a period after his/her death and the end of the employment relationship. They are forms of aid that certainly confirm the power asymmetry and the underlying expectations of dedication and gratitude, but nonetheless help solve the urgent problems of migrant care workers and thus contribute to their capacity to cope with the demands of their family networks. Other research studies, such as Korac’s work on Balkan refugees in Rome (2001, 2009a; 2009b) have documented this point: the employers may exploit their domestic workers, but they may also protect and help them beyond their contractual duties, and the two aspects often go together Generally crucial from the point of view of workers is the relationship established with the care manager. Care managers thus also become supports, resources and confidants for issues that extend beyond the employment relationship, home management, or the relationship with the elderly client. In other respects, involvement of care-workers in some kind of family relationship with the Italian families employing them would also respond, to a certain extent, to the emotional needs of the migrants themselves, separated as they were from their loved ones. Ironically, part of the dissatisfaction expressed by some care workers, for instance in the last research conducted in Trentino, concerned attempts by employers to compress the emotional component of the relationship. Sometimes, the negative judgement on live-in care work arises from the cold and formal intransigence manifested by the elderly person or, perhaps more often, by the family, and in an environment – the household – which demands a human warmth, flexibility, and personal relationship very difficult to define by contract. The literal application of the provisions of a contract is unlikely to give rise to a relationship satisfactory to both parties. Hence, as Lutz (2011, p.110) points out, the relationships between the parties involved are very complex, framed by mutual uncertainty regarding modes of address and designations, lacking in rule systems and established behavioural conventions. On the one hand, they cannot be seen as simple exploiter-exploitee relationships; on the other, they are clearly characterized by multiple interlocking asymmetries. Family designations, involvement in the personal and familial problems of care workers, various forms of help, can be seen as attempts to mask the differences of status and power. But care workers can turn them into resources useful for their needs and projects.