Karin Schwiter

In many countries of the global North, families increasingly rely on live-in care- givers to look after their children and elderly. Although much care work remains unpaid and informal, several states have set up a variety of migration and labour regimes to guarantee a steady supply of workers to provide paid live-in care in the home. This paper contributes to a broadening of the focus of labour geogra- phy beyond “productive” labour by factoring in the theoretical perspective of social reproduction into the debates on constrained agency. Our aim is to identify the mechanisms that make these regimes function for employers and employees, and their consequences for the social reproduction of the workers. To do so we compare live-in care schemes in the UK, Canada, Austria and Switzerland and examine the ways in which live-in care is differentially institutionalised. Our pol- icy analysis in these four countries shows that the constrained agency of the workers does not solely stem from their status as migrants, but is produced by the nexus of specific migration, care and gendered labour regimes. Furthermore, we argue that we need to extend our perspective beyond the immediate work context to see how live-in care regimes not only infringe, but also enable, the social reproduction of the workers – a fact that has often been neglected by existing research.

Our commentary brings Boyer et al.'s (2017) argument of a 'regendering of care' through men's growing engagement as caregivers into a dialogue with scholarship from German-speaking countries. This literature supports Boyer et al.'s claim of a connection between labour market opportunities and stay-at-home fatherhood. However, the research from our language context also suggests that fathers who are not gainfully employed do not necessarily become primary caregivers. Furthermore, the number of stay-at-home fathers is shrinking rather than growing. In light of these findings, we suggest shifting the discussion from stay-at-home fathers to fathers as part-time workers and part-time carers. This is where we identify the potential for a subtle revolution that bears the promise of far more wide-ranging changes in the gendering of care.

English title:
De-/naturalization of parenthood and gender “As a father, I want to work part time”. The linkages between the career and family plans of 30-year-old men in the German-speaking part of Switzerland
Abstract:
Many men today express the desire to be actively involved in their families. Our interviewees define good fatherhood primarily as the time a father can spend with his child. However, this desire conflicts with the demands of full-time employment and expected career paths. In order to fulfill their expectations of good fatherhood, we find that in one way or another they all have to deal with the question of whether and how to reduce their working hours when they have children. In this article we ask how this tension between men’s career and family plans plays out and analyze the solutions men find (or do not find) for themselves. Our analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 30-year-old men in the German-speaking part of Switzerland who work in gender-typical, -neutral and -atypical professions. Overall, our findings show that full-time employment is no longer a given for men hoping to become fathers. Furthermore, we argue that the discussion about part-time employment needs to differentiate between professions.

Wie stellen sich 30jährige Schweizerinnen und Schweizer ihre berufliche Zukunft vor und welche Bedeutung kommt dabei einer eigenen Familie zu? Ein Basler Forschungsteam zeigt im Rahmen eines Nationalfonds-Projektes, dass die Familienvorstellungen bei beiden Geschlechtern sehr bedeutsam für die berufliche Zukunft sind, wenn auch in unterschiedlicher Weise. Obwohl den meisten Frauen ihr Beruf viel bedeutet, ist ihnen häufig unklar, wie ihre Berufslaufbahn weitergehen wird, wenn sie Mutter sind. Junge Männer wünschen sich, als Väter mehr Zeit mit ihren Kindern verbringen zu können. Dazu würden sie gerne ihr Pensum reduzieren (80%), sind aber unsicher, wie stark sie das von Arbeitgebenden fordern können. Je nach Berufsbranche gestalten sich die Bedingungen, Berufs-und Familienpläne zu vereinbaren, unterschiedlich.

Taking the recent debate on austerity as a starting point, this paper discusses contradictions in current processes of neoliberalisation using the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland as an example. Just as in other countries, an austerity rationality in public spending and the neoliberal restructuring of public health services paved the way for the emergence of private suppliers of 24 hours home care. These new agencies hire migrant women from Eastern European countries and sell packaged care services to the elderly. In so doing, they play a key role in reconfiguring care according to a market logic. They shape the working conditions of live-in migrant care workers and the definition of care itself as a marketable good. In our paper, we analyse the strategies of these new corporate intermediaries based on a market analysis and on interviews with their representatives. We argue that the marketisation of elderly care in Switzerland is illustrative of today’s neoliberalism in that it combines progressive and regressive aspects and owes its emergence to its ambiguous entanglement with many other discourses. The paper illustrates how the transformation of the home into a new space of commercialised care relies on the production and economic valorisation of social and mobility differentials.

Processes of neoliberalization cannot be reduced to deregulation and cut-back of public services and their restructuring based on market principles. They include a new logic of how markets themselves operate. The former distinction between competition and morals 􏰀 between economic values and cultural values increa- singly dissolves. While public services are transformed according to market based incentives, companies are increasingly expected to offer not only good services for low prices but also to contribute to a better society. We discuss these changes in the constitution of markets in the example of the emerging market for com- mercial 24-h home care services for the elderly in Switzerland. Our analysis shows how profit-oriented care agencies draw on discursive im/mobilizing, ethicizing, gendering in order to position themselves as part of a market that cares and to claim that they offer care which is not only cheaper but also more caring than services offered by the state.