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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'2. 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).
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 expectations3. 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
2
Authors such as Leibfried (1993), Ferrera (1996) and Trifiletti (1999) have identified the common
characteristics of the Mediterranean welfare states
3
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').
31
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
(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.
32
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
values4. The high percentage of grandmothers who perform childcare duties
for their working daughters is significant.
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
4
Dominique Fougeyrollas-Schwebel argues that this leads to a 'form of division of labour between
women throughout their lives' (1995: 94)
33
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 time- and energyconsuming, discourages women from venturing into the labour market 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
34
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 neo-servitude).
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 work-life
balance and hence also influence the development of paid domestic work.
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
35
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
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 family5. 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,
5
In 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).
36
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'6 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
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
6
The minimum working conditions below which a job offer would be considered to be socially
unacceptable (Villa 1990).
37
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 concerned, 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 children7. As Momsen (1999:303) argues, the
recruitment of immigrant workers in the childcare sector causes an increase
7
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
38
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 presentday 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 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
39
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). In 1999, a total of 227 249 domestic workers were registered
with the Italian Department of Social Security (INPS), half of whom were
immigrants from countries outside the EU (Caritas di Roma 2002). Once
again, the figures point to a pronounced concentration of this sector in
certain regions, with the central region accounting for 41.6% of all domestic
workers and the north-west region accounting for 34.4% (Caritas di Roma
2002).
As far as Spain is concerned, immigrants made up almost 35% of the
total number of people registered with the Department of Social Security's
Special Regime for Domestic Workers (REEH) in 2001, with some 54 496
workers out of a total of 155 900 (MTAS 2002). The distribution of migrant
domestic workers is far from even, and is concentrated in the Madrid region
(48.7%) and the province of Barcelona (17.4%). Colectivo IOÉ (2001: 450)
estimates that in 1999 there were some 600 000 domestic workers in total,
including workers not registered with the Department of Social Security. Out
of this total of 600 000, Colectivo IOÉ (2001) calculates that almost 107 000
or nearly 18% are female migrant domestic workers (this figure includes
both workers registered with the Department of Social Security and those
who are not registered, as well as those who have acquired Spanish
citizenship).
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