Home Care for Sale

The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe

By: Brigitte Aulenbacher (Editor), Helma Lutz (Editor), Ewa Palenga-Mallenbeck (Editor), Karin Schwiter (Editor)

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Hardcover | 7 February 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.39 x 15.6 x 2.06

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The world of care provision and care work in Europe has undergone huge changes in recent years. This collection draws together the latest research on the factors influencing these changes, from transnational care brokerage to agency business models. It makes the case that the care market has become increasingly commodified and marketised, and explores the different areas of the sector, from care homes to private residences, in which these changes have occurred. The chapters uncover the recent proliferation of agencies brokering international home care services. These services broker home care services and workers to middle or upper-class households, promising affordable and appropriate care for seniors according to individual needs.

The brokerage of live-in care work has created transnational care chains and markets that span across Europe. These capitalise on poverty-driven migration and social inequalities between countries. This collection uncovers how these agencies' business models are based on gender and migration regimes, labour and social policies, and regulations within and between countries. Increasingly, agencies have been trying to shape these regulations in their own interest:they have, therefore, become powerful players in many national economies and welfare systems.

This volume also explores how agency-brokered senior home care provision has become highly contested, analysing the care struggles and labour disputes around both the quality of care and working conditions. We are shown how care workers' organizations and trade unions have entered the field, raising awareness of the poor working conditions that exist in contrast to the agencies' promise of delivering good care.

The four parts in this volume each present a specific focus area in the context of senior home care brokering, including the following: processes of commodification and marketization, the transnationalization of care work, the private household as a workplace and the contestation of the live-in care arrangement. Together, they depict far-reaching changes in care provision and care work and the problems that have emerged in this growing sector.

Industry Reviews

This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the political economy of care in the XXI century. It offers a compelling combination of classic and cutting-edge approaches that sheds light on the emergence of brokerage and agency intermediation in Europe and provides an excellent variety of examples from different countries and care settings. -- Sabrina Marchetti When within a capitalist institutional framework accelerating ageing leads to the crisis of social care and to further transnational marketization of household services 'Home Care for Sale' is an essential reading. The rich empirical and conceptual work points toward an almost encyclopedic outcome, where commodification, marketization, transnationalization, exploitation in care industry is explained in a complex manner within the context of global and local inequalities. This work is performed by a group of amazing critical analysts, who dare to confront some of the key contradictions of our current painful social transformation in European terrains. -- Attila Melegh 'Home Care for Sale' provides an encyclopedic account of the commodification and marketization of transnationally-brokered senior home care provision across Europe, including the UK. It pays close attention to the economic and social inequalities, as well as state policies, that underlie this new migration industry, as well as collective efforts to contest and improve conditions of work and care. 'Home Care for Sale' documents the geography of care chains within a divided Europe. This is a geography that both complements and disrupts conventional understandings of international care chains between global north and south. Theoretically and empirically rich, this is a must-read collection for those interested in senior home care, social reproduction, migration, border studies, and the workings and repercussions of neo-liberal state policies. -- Geraldine Pratt

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