The latitude of domestic service brokerage in the global migration industry: the Sri Lankan and Austrian case of brokered live-in work and care
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
The International Political Economy of Labor Migration The Next Great Transformation?
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The paper is based on two research projects: the Austrian country study Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements; and the Sri Lankan country study Ideal Migrant Subjects: Domestic Service in Globalization;. Drawing on the projects, we explore and compare migration brokerage in terms of both labour and care brokerage. We present our theoretical framework combining Polanyian, neo-institutionalist and intersectional perspectives to analyse the complex interplay of marketisation, expectations and evaluations founded in the normative and institutional order of the society and social inequalities along different and intersecting axes, such as gender, class, race, and nationality. Starting with the Sri Lankan case of domestic work brokerage and moving on to the Austrian case of senior care brokerage, our paper interrogates the role and latitude of brokerage agencies in constituting and shaping the contemporary migration industry including the expectations of clients, the conditions of the live-in arrangement as well as bureaucratic representations. The paper shows how brokers act as marketeers in transnational labour and care markets, interpreters of bureaucratic rules and lobbyists aiming at receiving (more) support by the state and politics and establishing their business in favour of their domestic service provision for solvent clients. We analyse how the respective labour and care arrangements take shape in the relations between market and state, economy and politics in an interplay of institutional logics and social inequalities, and how the exploitative marketisation of the fictitious commodities labour and care and poor working conditions are persistently contested yet legitimised elements of this migration industry. Fourth and finally, our conclusion reflects on differences and commonalities between the two cases of brokerage, which constitutes an indispensable element of the migration industry in the Global North as well as the South.
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