Vulnerabilidades entrecruzadas. El cuidado de personas mayores en el ambito Domestico.
| Autor | Palomo, Maria Teresa Martin |
| Cargo | MONOGRAFICO |
Intersecting vulnerabilities. Elderly care provided in the domestic environment
Summary. 1. Introduction. 2. Research methodology. 3. Results and discussion. 3.1. Familism and domestic care work at the crossroads. 3.2. Decent work? Challenges in applying the legislation in force. 3.3. The difficult professionalisation of domestic elderly care work. 3.3.1. Migrants in domestic care work hired privately in households. 3.3.2. Ambivalent intermediation: The Home Help Service. 4. Conclusions.
Como citar: Martin Palomo, M. T.; Zambrano Alvarez, I.; Munoz Terron, J. M. (2020). Intersecting vulnerabilities. Elderly care provided in the domestic environment, Cuadernos de Relaciones Laborales, 38(2), 269-288.
Introduction (4)
The care of people has created employment for several decades. In particular, elderly care has continued to be a major source of remunerated work in most modernised societies despite the crisis. With the population ageing, the need for care has grown and become more intense and demanding (Duran, 2018). However, this does not mean that these are jobs of quality, especially when they are performed in the domestic sphere (Diaz, 2016; Diaz & Martinez-Bujan, 2018; Hobson, Hellgren & Serrano, 2019). The increase in the demand for care caused by demographic ageing can no longer be met by family networks, whose role is increasingly being supplanted by the immigrant female working population. (More, 2017).
In Mediterranean countries, the increasing needs for care has until now apportioned a major role for families, together with a limited and scarce public service network and the recourse to the market. This market offer comprises national women from lower classes and immigrants from poorer countries. Some authors (Bettio et al., 2006; Lyon & Gluskmann, 2008) have explored comparatively the interrelationships between Care Regimes and female migrations in southern Europe to explain the growing recourse to immigrant women in the domestic care sector. They concur that the proliferation of monetary transfers administered directly by families has encouraged the hire of female domestic workers. Based on the case of Italy, Bettio et al. (2006) argue that immigrant women are replacing national women in providing care work; Diaz and Martinez-Bujan also confirm that domestic work contracted privately by families is no longer a "shelter" for national women (2018). Under the heading Configurations of Care Work, Lyon and Gluskmann (2008) say that, with respect to Southern European countries with a strong familist tradition, the commodified work of immigrants in the domestic sphere has now taken prominence. This rising demand attracts a large number of migrants, a good proportion of them employed in the domestic sector. Many of these female workers come from Latin America (Leon, 2013).
The professionalisation and commodification of domestic elderly care are processes that do not necessarily go hand in hand (Torns, 2014). Professionalisation makes it possible to clearly distinguish the skills and knowledge incorporated into care work of the cultural qualities associated with femininity, and to identify them as specific qualifications (Gomez Bueno, 2001). This in turn lends the work dignity and recognition. Meanwhile, the commodification of care raises the problem of how the qualifications required are regarded and remunerated, as well as that of the working conditions in which this work is performed. In general, this type of work is highly feminised, with low remuneration and, overall, a minimal level of recognised qualifications. Domestic elderly care is affected, on the one hand, by the low regard that all care work has historically suffered, in that to perform it the knowledge and skills, as the cliche goes, acquired in the construction of feminine identity are put into action. On the other hand, specialised and technical knowledge is increasingly necessary in domestic elderly care (Martin Palomo & Gomez Bueno, 2018; Diaz & Martinez-Bujan, 2018), while many of the skills it requires carry strong relational and emotional connotations. In fact, caring practice entails the interconnecting of a variety of affective, moral and corporal dimensions in a complex, situated way. These make care a job in which the relational aspects are placed in the foreground, taking on central importance (Martin Palomo, 2008).
In Spain, the development of forms of care that are different or complementary to the type of care provided intensively by families has been propitiated by the convergence of various factors. These include two recent legal measures. The first, is the Law of the Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons, 2006. The second, Royal Decree 1620/2011 of November 14, regulates the special employment relationship of service within the family household. In this context, the demand for some care services that were already being provided in the domestic environment, such as the Home Help Service and the hiring of care services in the private market has expanded as a result of sociodemographic changes based on three core processes: the growing incorporation of women into the labour market, the demand for care generated by population ageing and the increasing number of migrant women prepared to respond to care needs.
The Law of the Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons gave rise to the development of the nationwide Autonomy and Dependency Care System, as its application is delegated to the governments of Spain's different Autonomous Communities. The Autonomy and Dependency Care System distinguishes between two major types of resource: (a) public services: telecare, home help, residential centres, day centres, personal assistants; and (b) benefits of three types: (i) one with which people in need of care can "reward" the services provided by a relative with whom they live (an Economic Benefit for Family Care, or PECEF, Spanish acronym for Prestacion Economica para Cuidados en el Entorno Familiar); (ii) one linked to buying a care service on the market; and (iii) one devoted to covering the expenses that arise from hiring a Personal Assistant. This financial assistance was exceptional; it provided for those situations in which other types of services were not available to respond to care needs. However, there have been cases where this assistance has been used to remunerate the care provided by irregular migrant female workers who suffer huge wage insecurity and no recognition of rights (Martin Palomo et al., 2018). The Economic Benefit for Family Care is not understood by the Law as a wage for the carer, but to help the person in need of care to pay in some way for the care received from a relative with whom they live. This enables many women, who were already taking care of their relatives, to receive a certain monetary payment for it. However, it has been criticised for reinforcing the role of women as carers, helping to reproduce the sexual division of work in families. In effect, the Economic Benefit for Family Care has generated a process of refamilisation of care that reinforces existing inequality structures of gender, ethnicity and social class (Martinez Bujan, 2014) among the most impoverished and vulnerable social groups. In Spain, where families had already assumed that role in the care of their elders (Colectivo IOE, 2005), the extending of this type of financial assistance (the Economic Benefit for Family Care) has favoured a growing trend towards the privatisation of care through domestic service (Martinez-Bujan, 2011). For several decades, this tendency has been underpinned by the hiring of migrant women, many of them in an irregular situation in Spain, often to work in a regime in which they live with the person or persons for whom they care (Anderson, 2000; Escriva, 2000; Parella, 2000). Thus, familism appears to have encountered new forms of expression with the commodification and development of public services under the Autonomy and Dependency Care System, and more specifically through the mass application of some of the types of financial assistance to the care-receiver established by the Law of the Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons (Martinez-Bujan, 2014).
This article focuses its analysis on the domestic sphere as this is the space that best reflects the singular intertwining of affection, morals and emotions involved in care work (Salazar Parrenas, 2001) that contributes to making it so difficult for it to be professionalised (Martin Palomo, 2008) and that makes this work so vulnerable (Martin Palomo, 2016). Accordingly, it has been necessary to investigate to what extent the different forms of recruitment and hire affect the professionalisation of domestic elderly care. For this, it must be remembered that there are two main types of care work in terms of type of hire: (i) families privately hiring carers, who in many cases are migrants and above all live with the care-receiver; and (ii) hire mediated by companies or directly by the administration for the Home Help Service, a public service provided in the domestic sphere.
The results of the study we conducted in Andalusia (5) are presented here as an example for analyzing how vulnerabilities cross between caregivers and carereceivers. In Andalusia, it undertakes a qualitative microsociological approach (analysing the discourses of different social agents), whose aim is to discover the characteristics of the paid elderly care work provided in the domestic environment. The intention is to answer the question as to what extent the form of recruitment in the domestic care sector enables such work to be made professional. To this end, it compares two types of hire that have been especially affected by the recent legal changes mentioned above: private hire by families and the Home Help Service.
Andalusia is one of Spain's poorest regions, in which the strong familist culture common to the whole country prevails. Even...
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