Управление миграционными процессами в трудовой сфере. Монография

grant women into Spain and Italy and the patterns showing which forms of domestic work they are concentrated in, enabling a process of gradual ethnification of childcare services to be identified.

The Mediterranean welfare regime model. Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare state regimes (1990) which divides welfare systems into liberal, conservative and social democratic ones has acted as the basis for the majority of studies of European welfare systems. One of the main criticisms levelled at Esping-Andersen's typology (1990) is that it does not cover the countries of southern Europe, although it is possible to deduce that they are considered to form part of the corporatist or continental regime7. However, as Saraceno (1995) argues, simply highlighting the principle of state subsidiarity or stressing the key role played by the family and informal networks is not enough to explain the specific characteristics of these countries. The societies of southern Europe have strongly familistic welfare regimes, with welfare states which were late to develop and which remain underdeveloped. The family, through the intergenerational support it provides and through its gender structure, has always been and continues to be the direct provider of a significant number of social services. In short, it could be argued that these countries constitute a women-unfriendly model which has variously been described as the 'Latin Rim' model, the 'Catholic model' or the 'Mediterranean model'8. This model differs from the conservative model in one important aspect: the institutional emphasis concerning welfare regulation and provision concentrates much more on the family than on the market and relies more heavily on religious traditions.

Common to Italy and Spain is the rapid transformation of the role of women in society that has taken place during the past two decades. As a result, the gap between old and young women has broadened significantly, so that elements of tradition and modernity are found side by side (Gonzalez, Jurado and Naldini 2000). There is a clear generation gap and it is the generation of women under the age of 40 who have been at the forefront of a major revolution both in the world of work and in the home (Garrido 1992).

7The only southern European country studied by Esping-Andersen (1990) is Italy, which is classified as part of the corporatist continental tradition

8Authors such as Leibfried (1993), Ferrera (1996) and Trifiletti (1999) have identified the common characteristics of the Mediterranean welfare states

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Various changes which have largely been brought about by the new generation of younger women point to the gradual abandoning of the traditional family structure (based on the 'male breadwinner model' and the strict division of labour between men and women) in favour of a new model centred on greater gender equality. According to Gonzalez, Jurado and Naldini (2000: 11-21), the evidence for this change can be summarised in the following points: 1) the weakening of the figure of the male provider (owing to the reduction of industrial employment and the deregulation of labour markets) and feminisation of the labour market, in terms of both demand and supply; 2) the significant improvement in women's education (mainly young women in higher education) tends to increase women's labour market participation and occupational expectations9. What is new in this respect is not their participation in the labour market per se (female employment was previously not uncommon before marriage or childbirth), but rather the fact that women want to continue working, regardless of their family circumstances; 3) the gradual inclusion of gender equality principles and expansion of the welfare state in recent decades, although gender interests have not played a central role in the political agenda and southern European countries are far from being women-friendly in terms of social policy, welfare provision and measures aimed at enabling men and women to combine paid employment with caring for their family; 4) the relaxation of traditional family hierarchies as a result of the new economic role of women and the increasing educational level of the younger generations (in recent years there has been a gradual increase in levels of sexual intimacy and individual freedom among young people, of non-marital cohabitation and of extramarital births).

Despite all these changes, however, a number of factors which militate against gender equality and which are a clear leftover of the traditional family model continue to exist in these countries (Gonzalez, Jurado and Naldini 2000). Consequently, southern European society can be said to be in transition between two different gender orders: 1) First, increased female employment has not helped to renegotiate gender contracts and to change cultural codes, since the asymmetric division of unpaid labour persists

9 Even so, Italy and Spain show, in global terms, the lowest female activity rates in the European Union and by far the lowest female employment rate. The activity rate for women in 2001 was 39.4% in Spain and 36.2% in Italy, against an EU average of 47% (Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat), 'Labour Force Survey').

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(women still carry out the majority of childcare and care for other dependent family members); 2) Obstacles to gender equality in labour markets (high female unemployment, vertical and horizontal segregation of occupations by gender, the prevalence of women in 'atypical forms of employment', etc) create a high female dependency on men's income; 3) welfare states in southern Europe are based on occupational status and there is a significant gender gap in the implementation of social rights (i.e. there is a high level of protection for people with stable jobs, mainly the adult "male' breadwinner, and very weak protection for people who do not work, mainly women); 4) There is a continuing gender gap in political participation and political involvement owing to fundamental problems in achieving gender equality in the welfare state, the family and the labour market.

Notwithstanding all these continuing problems, however, the most important clement which has contributed to the attractiveness of foreign migrants, a significant proportion of whom are women, is the prevalence in southern European countries of 'women-unfriendly' welfare states. In these countries welfare states suffer from a number of deficiencies in the field of family policy compared with other western European countries, in areas such as support for children (up to the age of three) and care services for the elderly. Achieving a balance between caring for one's family and the demands of paid employment is viewed not as a matter for the state but as a private matter which women have to resolve for themselves.

According to the 'subsidiarity' principle in the regulation of social and care services, it is the family ('women') that has the primary duty and responsibility to provide for dependent family members. The state intervenes only as a last resort in cases where the family has failed to meet this responsibility. The lack of childcare services for children aged three and under is one of the main problems, since it means that mothers with small children are forced cither to rely on the market (by employing immigrant women, for instance, except for low-income women who cannot afford private childcare services), or on traditional support networks which are basically made up of other women, thereby reinforcing traditional family values10. The high percentage of grandmothers who perform childcare duties for their working daughters is significant.

10 Dominique Fougeyrollas-Schwebel argues that this leads to a 'form of division of labour between women throughout their lives' (1995: 94)

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In contrast to other European societies, the 'family and relations support' model is a distinctive characteristic which is fundamental to the Mediterranean welfare regime (Moreno 2001). However, while the daughters of the baby boom that took place between 1965 and 1976 can rely on the support of family networks to help them balance the demands of their family and working lives, this strategy is unlikely to prove sustainable in the medium term once the generation of 'grandmother-housekeepers' has dried up and in view of the fact that it is increasingly common for people to live further away from their immediate family. Similarly, relying on family networks to provide the care associated with an ageing population is also not a sustainable solution.

Care and services for the elderly is the other field in which states have most extensively applied the principle of 'subsidiarity'. As a result, in spite of the ageing of the population in southern European countries, there is limited public service provision for the elderly: few elderly people are cared for in residential homes and there is a lack of a well-developed system of social services and state provision to help elderly people to be looked after in their own homes (Saraceno 1995). Care services for elderly people in their own homes are available only to people who have no family members who can provide care for them.

In view of the above, and if Saraceno's analysis of the Italian situation (1995: 280) is extended to the other societies in southern Europe, it can be concluded that the social and cultural changes in the role of women in recent years and the significant increase in the number of 'dual-earner families' have meant that the familistic welfare regime is no longer mainly based on the figure of a strong male provider on whom inactive women are economically dependent. Rather, it is now based on a concept according to which the family unit is seen as the source of income and resources, and family support is taken for granted, as is the role of women - wives and mothers - as the main providers of care. Consequently, the main distinction between familistic and non-familistic societies concerns the interpretation of the term 'care'. In non-familistic societies such as the Scandinavian countries, the state takes on much of the responsibility for care provision for all its citizens, whereas in the southern European countries 'care' is synonymous with 'family care' and is basically viewed as the responsibility of the women in a family. Caring and domestic labour remain 'women's work' throughout southern Europe. So domestic labour, since it is timeand ener- gy-consuming, discourages women from venturing into the labour market

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and certainly determines the conditions under which they can undertake paid work (Vaiou 1996).

It is in relation to a 'Mediterranean welfare regime model' that the presence of migrant women in the domestic work sector in Spain and Italy should be interpreted, although it is also necessary to take into account the influence of immigration policy and the 'push factors' in the women's countries of origin (Vaiou 1996; Caritas di Roma 2002; Andall 2003; Parella 2003). The argument is that the use of migrant domestic workers in Spain and Italy is a result both of women's increased presence in the labour market and the absence of a welfare model to accommodate this fact through the universal provision of state support services. Because of this, migrant domestic workers in Europe are thought to be more prevalent in southern Europe than in other countries (Momsen 1999).

The resurgence of paid domestic work in Southern European countries: Italy and Spain. It was only in the later decades of the 20th century that the spread of the 'dual-earner family' as a result of a number of factors including the mass entry of middle-class women into the labour market and the pronounced ageing of the population led to the resurgence and rapid growth in Europe of the outsourcing of childcare. Consequently, the current demand for domestic workers among the middle classes does not constitute a continuation of the feudal or bourgeois tradition of domestic service which was a luxury only within the means of the social groups with the highest disposable income. This is not to say that, allowing for differences between countries, paid domestic work today is completely free of the ambiguities associated with dual financial and domestic dependency (i.e. the risk of neoservitude). Furthermore, in the majority of cases it continues to be regulated by an employment relationship which is hard to pin down objectively from a legal point of view.

While the increased demand for paid domestic workers is common to all Western societies, various comparative studies (Gregson and Lowe 1994; Anderson 2000) have identified differences within Europe with regard to the ways in which this type of paid work is used, the way in which it is regulated and the different forms that it takes. Differences in welfare and employment regimes, as well as in gender relations, play a key role in determining the strategies adopted by families in order to achieve an appropriate worklife balance and hence also influence the development of paid domestic work.

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In southern Europe, including Spain and Italy, the growth in paid domestic work has a number of specific characteristics associated with various traits of the 'Mediterranean welfare regime model' (Trifiletti 1999). The need partially to outsource childcare and to use female domestic workers is much greater in southern Europe than in other European societies. As explained in the previous section, whereas in other parts of Europe the state has responded to the increase in the number of women in employment by increasing welfare provision, in southern Europe, and particularly in urban areas, the problems associated with these changes have been kept in check by employing both legal and illegal migrants as domestic workers (Andall 2000). While in other parts of Europe such as Paris and Berlin paid domestic work is returning in the form of domestic workers who are employed by the hour or domestic work agencies, in the countries of southern Europe a major resurgence is occurring in the use by the middle classes of live-in female domestic workers who work full-time and live with the family that employs them (Anderson 2000).

The boom in the specific demand for live-in domestic workers in southern Europe can be put down to a wide variety of reasons, but the one factor that stands out above all others is the lack of well-developed care services.

The most typical case in point is the growth in the number of single-person households in the over-65 age group. The welfare states in southern Europe are not ready to deal with the gradual ageing of the population and the dependency and lack of independence suffered by people in this group. In what are deeply familistic societies, women's participation in the labour market is threatening traditional family values and destroying traditional family relationships. On the one hand, the burden of care is increasing, while on the other, women, who are the main informal carers within the family, have less and less time, and this trend is set to continue in the next few years. This lack of time together with the nuclearisation of urban families is causing it to become increasingly common to pay somebody to care for elderly people.

In the absence of public services offering care in the home, and influenced by a familistic social consciousness which still frowns upon the institutionalisation of elderly people, families which can afford to do so choose live-in domestic workers instead (Phizacklea 1999: Lazaridis 2000). In some instances, live-in domestic workers are considered as an alternative to institutionalisation not so much because the elderly person in question wishes to remain in their own home but rather because such people (who are

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usually pensioners with limited financial resources) are unable to afford a place in a private old people's home (there are very few state ones) and therefore turn to a live-in domestic worker, preferably from abroad, as the cheapest option. As Andall (2003) concludes, the fact that there has been no parallel rise in the number of elderly people living in institutions suggests that Italian and Spanish families may prefer to employ a (migrant) domestic worker to live in with elderly relatives.

There can be little doubt that the demand by families for domestic workers correlates directly with the extent of state childcare provision and provision of care services for the elderly, or (and this amounts to the same thing) the relative importance with regard to welfare provision that is placed by public policy, either actively or by omission, on the state, the market or the institution of the family11. In countries such as Spain and Italy, where no family policy exists that allows local working women to balance the demands of their 'job' with those of their 'family', families resort to woman immigrants from outside the EU, and the state is only too happy for them to do so (Stasiulis and Bakan 1994). The contribution made by immigrant women in the homes of the host society is beneficial to the welfare state, since they provide a source of labour which is cheaper and more flexible than local workers. Furthermore, their presence makes it possible for educated local women to work outside their homes without the state needing, at least for the time being, to develop an appropriate supply of social services (Heyzer and Wee 1994; Momsen 1999).

From the point of view of the host society, the pronounced concentration of immigrant women in the domestic work sector can be put down to a number of reasons which have led to changes in the structure of the entire sector. On the one hand, female immigrant workers are cheaper, since their 'job tolerance threshold'12 is lower than their local counterparts and consequently they are less demanding as far as pay and working conditions are concerned. Pay differentials vis-à-vis their country of origin constitute the most powerful incentive for immigrant women to accept employment as domestic workers (Parrenas 2001; Andall 2003). The cost of employing a

11In France, for example, state nursery provision is much more widespread than in other European countries, and consequently the main demand is for domestic workers to do the housework (Momsen 1999).

12The minimum working conditions below which a job offer would be considered to be socially unacceptable (Villa 1990).

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regular domestic worker and paying the corresponding social security contributions is equal to or even greater than the pay earned by many local working women or the pensions of elderly people who need constant care. As a result, paid domestic service is an extremely fertile sector for informal practices, the development of parallel markets and the use of female immigrant workers as a means of saving money.

Furthermore, there are not enough local workers to meet the spiralling demand. The demand for paid domestic service in southern Europe is creating 'new' kinds of jobs which are characterised by instability, a low social status, low pay, a lack of regulation and invisibility. These are jobs which are no longer being filled by local women who have become highly educated in recent years and who are now able to look for better jobs. Educated local women do not wish to do what they see as a menial job that has low social status and esteem and is for uneducated people. It is important to understand the recruitment of immigrant women from countries outside the EU in the context of this shortage of local workers.

However, this shortage of local workers does not affect all the different kinds of domestic work. Rather, it is a very specific characteristic of live-in domestic work, because of this job's low social status, appalling working conditions (invisibility, lack of protection, lack of privacy) and its strong associations with servitude. The older generation of local domestic workers who are mostly from rural backgrounds have gradually been leaving live-in domestic service as they have got married. These women either find work in other sectors (e.g. as factory workers or in the service sector) or they opt to work as full-time live-out domestic workers or on an hourly basis. This has led to the live-in domestic service segment becoming virtually the exclusive preserve of immigrant women. On the other hand, both local women (albeit fewer and fewer) and immigrant women can be found working in the liveout domestic service segment and for some domestic work agencies.

In short, the concentration of immigrant women in paid domestic service reinforces the social polarisation of women by transferring class and race inequalities from educated local women, who are entering the labour market in vast numbers, to immigrant women who need to earn income and have often been forced to leave their families in their country of origin in order to do so (Andall 2003; Parella 2003). With local women turning to other women to meet part of the burden of childcare, very little has changed in practical terms as far as the patriarchal relationships in their private lives are con-

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cerned, and there is still a very long way to go before equal sharing of childcare and paid work becomes the norm for men and women.

Consequently, it can be said that patriarchal relationships exist not only between men and women, irrespective of whether they are immigrants or locals, but also in the transactions between locals and immigrants on the market (Pessar 1999; Anthias 2000). In order to achieve a sound basis for the analysis of the problems of immigrant women, it is therefore desirable to develop analytical frameworks which consider subordination in terms of gender, social class and ethnic origin. As Andall (2003: 39) states, '(...) women's relationship to domestic work is not universal. Rather, reproductive labour must be understood as divided along gender, ethnic and class lines'.

What this means is that emancipated local women's efforts to care for their families involve the denial of family life to other women, i.e. to immigrant women (Andall 2000). Even if these women do manage to reunite their families and live with their own children in the host society, no country currently has a government policy which allows them actually to exercise their right to live with their children13. As Momsen (1999:303) argues, the recruitment of immigrant workers in the childcare sector causes an increase in the complexity and asymmetry of relationships between women and a rise in the number of households where the woman is the head of the family and in new kinds of family structures, all of which will have as yet unforeseeable consequences for the new generation of children in both the North and the South.

Domestic work and immigrant women in Italy and Spain. Since the mid-1980s, Italy and Spain have witnessed increased feminisation of immigration. As has been noted elsewhere, this trend is not specific to Spain and Italy, and is in fact one of the characteristics of present-day international migration. According to figures from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, in 1992 women accounted for 47% of all foreigners in Spain, and in 2001 the figure was more or less the same at 45% or 1 109 060 women. Similarly, figures from the Italian Ministry of the Interior show that women accounted for 42% of all foreigners in Italy in 1991 and 46.7% or 1 362 630 women in

13 The European Parliament's Report on the consequences of globalisation for immigrant women in Mediterranean countries (2000/2251 (INI)), signals the need for immigrant women to enjoy the same standard of working conditions as women from the EU so that they can care for their children and achieve a good work-life balance

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2001 (Caritas di Roma 2002). However, the data also show that the percentage of women varies depending on which continent they come from, and is influenced by a number of factors connected with both the society of origin and the host society. Nevertheless, the clear feminisation of migration flows from Latin American countries to Italy and Spain and the increase in the percentage of women in the flows from Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia can be said to be closely linked to the pull factors, in particular the demand for female immigrant workers to work in domestic service.

As far as the geographical distribution of non-EU women in Spain and Italy is concerned, they are heavily concentrated in the main urban areas which is precisely where the demand for female domestic workers is at its highest. The spatial distribution of different groups is therefore mainly determined by the structure of the labour market in the host society, although it is also important to take into account the influence of immigrant networks and the prior existence of communities of a particular nationality in a given place. In Spain, the feminisation of migration flows is particularly pronounced in the Madrid region and the province of Barcelona, where the 2001 figures for women with a valid residence permit were 50.9% and 41.3% respectively. These two regions accounted for almost 52% of all women officially registered as resident in Spain. In Italy, the majority of immigrant women are concentrated in the most developed regions, with 32.6% in the north-west region (23.0% in Lombardy alone) and 29.1% in the central region.

There can be little doubt that domestic work constitutes the first opportunity of entering the labour market for the majority of non-EU female workers in Italy and Spain. It is not easy to come up with figures for the number of immigrant women employed as domestic workers, since the sector is characterised by irregularity. Indeed, the Caritas annual reports in Italy estimate that one in four migrant domestic workers are working illegally (Caritas di Roma 2001). In Spain, it appears that the level of informal employment in the sector is even higher. According to the results of a survey carried out by Colectivo IOÉ (2001) among non-EU female workers in 1999 and 2000, the proportion of foreign female domestic workers without an employment contract can be estimated at 40%.

In 1996, migrant domestic workers accounted for 46.3% of all domestic workers in Italy, although there were regional variations, and immigrant women were in the majority in cities such as Rome and Milan where they made up 70.5% and 72.7% of the total respectively (Caritas di Roma 1999).

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