Global Care Chains and Feminism

Global Care Chains (GCCs) and feminist causes are at odds with each other. The GCC is a system and network of households around the world that transfers care demand of richer countries to care supply of poorer countries. GCCs are set up by cheap female labor from poorer countries helping out with care jobs in richer countries. This chain might impact 10 women in poorer countries before a western woman is able to enter a high paying job in the western labor market. First, I will explain what the GCC is. Next, I will give an account of what economic impacts this GCCs has. Here, I will point out that the GCCs was partly caused by western feminist endeavors, and now backfires in plain sight. The real question is why does this not bother anyone?

The second half of the 20th century saw a rapid increase of female labor market participation. These new labor participation was exhausted by household labor participation. Substantial jobs within household labor were care jobs. Here the three care jobs were defined as (1) Child Care, (2) Health Care, and (3) Elderly Care. Prior to the entry of the labor market, the majority of married women were tasked with the care of children, elderly, and sick or disabled family members of her and her husband’s family. These jobs were then substituted for professional employment leaving care jobs without personnel. Demand for individual care jobs increased. Outsourcing child care, health care, and elderly care to western workers was too expensive. Thus care jobs were given to migrant women. But who takes care of the families of migrant care working women? Figure 3 shows a graph of a short GCC. In the developing country, the origin country of the migrant female worker, another female caretaker is employed to take care of the family. But who takes care of the family of the women working for the women employed in western care jobs? This can go on for many more times (and it mostly does) until the poorest family has the eldest sibling caring for his/her brothers and sisters, in the absence of a mother. The GCC starts with the demand of care jobs in the west, due to the rise of female labor market participation. This leads to an outsourcing of care to poorer countries, down to the poorest in which there is no substitute for a caretaker or mother.

A classic GCC looks like this (hypothetical example): Samantha works as a strategy consultant in NYC. She cannot take care of her 4yo. She hires a young and educated polish women called Lenka to take care of her of her son. Samantha wants Lenka to read and write English as well as have a university education, in order to teach her son pre-school stuff. Lenka was a 30yo Kindergardner in Poland. She has a university degree, a 4yo son, as well as a sick parent, and parent in-law. Her husband is currently unemployed and therefore the family has financial problems. She hears about a well payed job in the US with Samantha. She takes it on and is able to pay an Egyptian women to take care of her child and the sick grandparents. The Egyptian Sara immigrated 3 years ago in order to get a job in Europe. She entered the EU illegally and is without a visa. She did so in order to support her family. She now works without license or job security for Lenka’s family. Back home a cheap Filipino caretaker takes on the jobs in Egypt, Sara now does in Poland. The Filipino lady in Egypt can only send minimal support to her Filipino family. It is not enough money to hire a full-time caretaker for the young or the old. Her eldest daughter has to live off of what her mother sends her, while taking care of the family. Her younger siblings grow up without a mother.

The consequences of the GCC are immense. What started off as a western ideal of gender equality, lead to millions of children growing up with a subsititute mother, and ends with children in the poorest countries growing up without any mother figure. On top of that we see women shifting a middle-income status in their country of origin to a low income status in the country where they give care (Lenka who has a middle-income job in Poland now has a low-income job in the US). It exacerbates the Gender Pay Gap (GPG) since only lower-class women stay in poorer countries while western countries experience a huge influx of poorer migrant care workers. The average status of women is thus lessoned everywhere. On top of that it seems to be the norm to not register migrant care workers in the childcare sector. Nannys rarely get a working contract in the west. They face illegal immigration, while doing illegal and underpaid jobs, just in order to feed their family in the country of origin.

It is absurdly unfair to blame women entering the western labor market for all of this. It seems to be a western family issue. It is both husband and wife who must find a solution to care when both want to work. Never the less I do believe that much of popular feminist literature has been calling for women representation at the highest job levels as well as the rapid entrance of female labor, knowing the cost of a long tale of female misery in the care industry. It is in plain sight for everyone to see. Do you know a successful woman with kids without a nanny? Is this nanny from a poorer country and do you really think she is legally employed in the country she works in? I see this every day; Women being celebrated for achieving great labor market success, while everyone looks the other way when it comes to her unregistered nanny, and the long tail GCC that comes with it.

I don’t have any solutions to this problem. I don't think paying care workers more is viable or helpful to this problem. Promoting less western gender equity also seems absurd. But the great achievement of progressive gender equality in the west does not come without negative consequences. The consequences link directly to the feminist cause. I would want to underscore that the celebration of western equality comes at the cost of extracting care work from poorer countries, where it might be most needed.

Further literature can be found here:

Hochschild, A. R. (2000) 'Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value', in Hutton, W. and Giddens, A. (eds) On The Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Jonathan Cape.

Parreñas, R. (2001) Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.