The provision of care has been widely referred to as facing a 'crisis'. International migrants are increasingly relied upon to provide care – as domestic workers, nannies, care assistants and nurses. This international volume examines the global construction of migrant care labour and how it manifests itself in different contexts.

For generations, migration moved in one direction at a time: migrants to host countries, and money to families left behind. The Labor of Care argues that globalization has changed all that. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez spent five years alongside a group of working migrant mothers. Drawing on interviews and up-close collaboration with these women, Francisco-Menchavez looks at the sacrifices, emotional and material consequences, and recasting of roles that emerge from family separation. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video open up transformative ways of bridging distances while still supporting traditional family dynamics. As she shows, migrants also build communities of care in their host countries. These chosen families provide an essential form of mutual support. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of today's transnational family—sundered, yet inexorably linked over the distances by timeless emotions and new forms of intimacy.

The report analyses the ways in which unpaid care work is recognised and organised, the extent and quality of care jobs and their impact on the well-being of individuals and society. A key focus of this report is the persistent gender inequalities in households and the labour market, which are inextricably linked with care work. These gender inequalities must be overcome to make care work decent and to ensure a future of decent work for both women and men. The report contains a wealth of original data drawn from over 90 countries and details transformative policy measures in five main areas: care, macroeconomics, labour, social protection and migration. It also presents projections on the potential for decent care job creation offered by remedying current care work deficits and meeting the related targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.

In this beautifully-argued book, Karen Cristensen and Ingrid Guldvik provide a comparatively-based insight to the historical context for public care work and show how migration policies, general welfare and long-term care policies (including the cash-for-care schemes) as well as cultural differences in values in the UK and Norway set the context for how migrant care workers can realise their individual life projects. Through viewing migrants as individuals who actively construct their lives within the options and conditions they are given at any time, they bring to the discussion an awareness of what might be called ’a new type of migrant’ one who is neither a victim of the divide between the global north and the global south, nor someone leaving family behind, but individuals using care work as a part of their own life project of potential self-improvement.

This book examines the commercialisation of domestic and care work through private agencies that organise transnational care arrangements by brokering migrant workers. The book focuses on the emergence of private for-profit home care agencies following the 2011 extension of the Free Movement of Workers to Eastern European Countries agreement in Switzerland. The agencies recruit migrant women from these countries and place them in private households for elderly care. This book explores how circular labour migration for these care workers is facilitated. In the form of a mobile ethnography, it traces their journey from Eastern European countries to Switzerland - from when care workers find employment and are recruited by agencies to when they arrive at their designated households. From the agencies' analytical standpoint, the book examines the recruitment and placement practices of the home care agencies and their role in facilitating migration. Brokering Labour Migration offers an understanding of new migration patterns and highlights fundamental changes in migration control with the extension of free movement of workers in Switzerland to lower-wage countries in Eastern Europe. It will be an invaluable resource for academics and scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender and migration.

Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families. With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant communities have changed. Children have now joined their parents. Male domestic workers are present in significantly greater numbers. And, perhaps most troubling, the population has aged, presenting new challenges for the increasingly elderly domestic workers. New chapters discuss these three increasingly important constituencies. The entire book has been revised and updated, and a new introduction offers a global, comparative overview of the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers. Servants of Globalization remains the defining work on the international division of reproductive labor.

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine.