Client Satisfaction with Live-In and Live-Out Home Care Workers in Israel

Abstract

In an era of globalization where the migration of long-term care workers is common, foreign live-in home care workers can compensate for the unavailability of family members and, perhaps, even substitute for institutional care in the provision of long-term care services to disabled older persons.

This study examines differences in home care satisfaction between disabled older persons in Israel with “live-in” home care workers and those with “live-out” workers, and explores some differences in socio-demographic and personal characteristics between these two groups. Face-to-face interviews were held with a random sample of 93 older persons in Beer-Sheva.

Older persons with live-in home care workers were more satisfied with their home care service than those with live-out workers. Those with live-in workers were more severely disabled, tended not to have any children living in close proximity, although an adult child was available as an informal caregiver. Communication difficulties between the elderly persons and their home care workers were found not to affect negatively the satisfaction with the service.     

Care workers, care drain, and care chains: reflections on care, migration, and citizenship

In this article, we discuss a case study that deals with the care chain phenomenon and focuses on the question of how Poland and the Ukraine as sending countries and Poland as a receiving country are affected and deal with female migrant domestic workers. We look at the ways in which these women organize care replacement for their families left behind and at those families’ care strategies. As public discourse in both countries is reacting to the feminization of migration in a form that specifically questions the social citizenship obligations of these women, we also look at the media portrayal of the situation of nonmigrating children. Finally, we explore how different aspects of citizenship matter in transnational care work migration movements.     

Client satisfaction with live-in and live-out home care workers in Israel

In an era of globalization where the migration of longterm care workers is common, foreign live-in home care workers can compensate for the unavailability of family members and, perhaps, even substitute for institutional care in the provision of long-term care services to disabled older persons. This study examines differences in home care satisfaction between disabled older persons in Israel with "live-in" home care workers and those with "live-out" workers, and explores some differences in sociodemographic and personal characteristics between these two groups. Face-to-face interviews were held with a random sample of 93 older persons in Beer-Sheva. Older persons with live-in home care workers were more satisfied with their home care service than those with live-out workers. Those with live-in workers were more severely disabled, tended not to have any children living in close proximity, although an adult child was available as an informal caregiver. Communication difficulties between the elderly persons and their home care workers were found not to affect negatively the satisfaction with the service.     

Dementia Patients’ Transition to Residential Aged Care: Carers’ and Social Workers’ Experiences

Many people with dementia eventually require residential aged care, frequently preceded by a hospital admission. Family carers often find the process challenging and disempowering, as they are expected to move their family member to residential aged care quickly. This article reports on findings from a small Australian qualitative study focusing on the provision of information, support and resources, and discusses the findings in relation to person-centred care and critical social work. Social workers completed an online survey and participated in focus groups, and carers were interviewed. The research found that carers valued the information, support, and resources provided by social workers and other hospital staff. They needed time to adjust to the dementia diagnosis and wanted a supportive person to talk to about the written information. The social workers wanted an improved approach to the preparation and communication of information, and a more consistent approach to family meetings.     

Migrants’ Descendants and New Mobilities between China and Spain

The economic rise of China and the financial crises in Spain have transformed transnational practices between the two countries and have boosted new strategies of mobility among Spanish of Chinese descent. This article examines the relationship that migrants’ descendants establish with their parents’ country of origin from their childhood, and analyses emerging new mobilities towards China undertaken by migrants’ descendants who have attained high degrees of formal education and are looking for a better professional future. The article argues that migrants’ descendants are reshaping the transnational space between the two countries and re-evaluating their transnational training in order to apply their Spanish and Chinese socio-cultural skills in their professional careers. The research reveals how migrants’ descendants undertake a migration journey to secure upward social mobility, just as their parents did when migrating to Europe. Hence, social and geographical mobility intersect in opposite directions over time and across generations.     

Care of older people in migration contexts: local and transnational arrangements between Peru and Spain

Care arrangements for the elderly are becoming a main social process in contemporary societies due to socio-political and lifestyle changes over the last few decades. The family and the State play a basic role in the construction of care systems and in the establishment of strategies to access care resources. In the present context of migration, these resources interact at a transnational level, challenging family and State migratory regimes. These new realities need the recognition of basic international social rights, as the experiences of Peruvians living in a migration context in Spain show.     

Live-in Care Workers in Sheltered Housing for Older Adults in Israel: The New Sheltered Housing Law

Supportive housing schemes were historically aimed to provide group accommodation for older adults. With the aging of residents, facilities were required to enable them to receive care services in order to allow them to age in place. Thus, different countries and different facilities developed different models of housing with care, reflecting cultural and policy diversities. Despite all of the different models, there are many commonalities among the supportive housing schemes across countries. These include provision of dwelling units and care services provided by either the facility or by external agencies. The aims of this article are threefold: to describe the historical development of the ever-evolving supportive care housing phenomena; to point at variations in models of housing and care within the international context; and to present a new Israeli model that enables residents to privately hire live-in care workers to meet their care needs. This is a unique model in the international context that has not been reported before. The article describes the main ideas of the new model and discusses the challenges that it raises and pinpoints the unresolved issues associated with the presence of live-in care workers employed by residents of sheltered housing that should be addressed.     

At the intersection of marketisation,diversity and migration: reshaping the provision of paid family eldercare in Sweden?

This article explores how paid family eldercare in Sweden is reshaped at the intersection of marketisation, accommodation to ethnic diversity and globalisation of international migration. Using a mixed-methods case study approach, the paper examines how implementation of customer choice in publicly funded homecare services to older adults in the city of Stockholm interacts with paid family care. The results show that some private homecare companies employ family caregivers as a business strategy; moreover, that the majority of employed family caregivers are foreign-born women coming primarily from non-European countries. The findings point towards gains but also risks for all parties involved. Though the family caregiver is ensured an income, the employment is generally associated with low wages and weak social security. In addition, employed family carers often lack formal training, which affects documentation procedures and monitoring of the daily care work. It is therefore difficult to evaluate the quality of care services performed by employed family carers. The results indicate a need for policy-makers to reconsider how customer choice in eldercare interacts with paid family care. Otherwise, unintended consequences may result in negative effects for integration as well as social work practice with foreign-born older adults.     

Ageing,migration infrastructure and multi-generational care dynamics in transnational families

The analysis of transnational family relations from an intergenerational to a multi-generational perspective highlights the significant role migration infrastructure plays in transnational family care arrangements at different family life stages. Changing migration policies and local-bound welfare systems in the host and home countries tend to fixate the role of care-receiver and provider against fluid transnational family care dynamics as the life course of the family unfolds. This paper focuses on Chinese transnational one-child families in which the initial separation between parents and their only-child was motivated by the child's overseas education, and followed by the adult child's employment and family formation in the UK. My findings illustrate how reified definitions of the family and familial roles structure mobile individuals’ access to family rights in a transnational context. They warn of the danger of entrenched injustice embedded in the definitional classification of family migrants.     

Foreign Domestic Workers and Home-Based Care for Elders in Singapore

As with other developed nations where rapid population aging has led to increasing health care and social care burdens, Singapore has searched for ways of paying for and providing long-term care for its increasing numbers of elders. The Singapore state, faced with the prospect of one-fifth of the population aged 65 or older by 2030, has reinforced its basic principle of rendering the family the “primary caregiving unit” and home-based care as the highly preferred option for eldercare. Our paper demonstrates why, despite the range of alternative care arrangements available or emerging on Singapore's eldercare landscape, the employment of live-in foreign domestic workers as care workers for the elderly has become one of the more common de facto modes of providing care for the elderly. In this context, we discuss the politics of eldercare in the privatized sphere of homespace and conclude with policy implications relating to the employment of foreign domestic workers as caregivers for the elderly.     

‘More like a daughter than an employee’: the kinning process between migrant care workers,elderly care receivers and their extended families

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like – or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed – through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers – into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals.     

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian,China

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT‐enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white‐collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the mobility of cheap digital labour from Japan to Dalian in northeast China. They work at call centres and other Japanese‐speaking workplaces in the lower echelons of the city's IT sector, typically earning salaries in Chinese yuan at, or even below, the average Japanese minimum wage. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between the two locations. I analyse how the neoliberal logic of exception underpins the creation of IT parks in China and the casualization of labour in Japan to enable new forms of transnational labour control and capital accumulation.     

Responsibility,Mobility, and Power: Translocal Carework Negotiations of Nicaraguan Families

Recently, carework has emerged as a key area for exploring the gendered connections between migrants and their families “home,” providing insight into family‐level consequences of migration. However, the way carework shapes migration itself has not received due attention. Based on field research among Nicaraguan migrant families, this article explores the links between translocal carework and family migration decision‐making by connecting the concepts of transnational caregiving and power‐geometry of mobility to interpret fathers’ and female relatives’ carework involvement. In conclusion, the article highlights how translocal carework shapes family members’ access to mobility through ongoing negotiations of a wide range of responsibilities, indicating a possible direction for future explorations of migration.     

Migration status and transnational mothering: the case of Filipino migrants in France

Recent studies on transnational mothering have explored the various strategies migrant women use to negotiate their absence from home; however, there is limited knowledge on how migration status diversifies transnational mothering practices. To fill this gap, I conducted in‐depth interviews and observations of Filipino migrant mothers working in the domestic service sector in and around Paris. The consequences of migration include the prolongation of a planned stay in France, emotional difficulties due to family separation, and distant mother–child relationships. Transnational family life appears more complicated and difficult to manage for undocumented migrant mothers since they cannot easily visit their family back home, which they try to compensate by resorting to more intense transnational communication and gift‐giving practices. Hence, migration status plays an important role in shaping transnational motherhood.     

Conflicting temporalities and the unsustainability of the Italian model of migrant personal care assistant

In Southern Europe, the migrant-in-the-family model has become a structural component of the elderly care regime. However, home care work is, by its nature, poorly reconcilable with private and family life. In fact, several studies have denounced the limitations on the right to private and family life that these workers suffer. In this article, I use the migrant home care assistants’ experience of conflicting temporalities around the work–life balance as lens through which to show the social unsustainability of the Italian model of home care assistant. This paper is based on broader research conducted between 2018 and 2020 in Padua (Italy) on Moldovan female migrant workers. As part of this research, 30 semi-structured interviews were collected with Moldovan workers employed – at the time of the interview or in the past – in home care for elderly people, in a live-in or live-out regime.     

Transnational aging careers: on transformation of kinship and citizenship in the context of migration among Bulgarian Muslims in Spain

This article focuses on “transnational aging careers,” a group of elderly migrants who are in constant movement between social contexts, families, and states. Drawing on a case of Bulgarian Muslim migrants in Spain, I look into the ruptures in the structure of care arrangements, kin expectations, and family relations, which migration triggers. I suggest that these transformations, albeit subtle, lead to reformulation of the fabric of the family. In this way, transnational care-motivated mobility affects future security based on kin reciprocity. At the same time, migration disrupts aging careers’ social citizenship both in Bulgaria and in Spain by limiting or even excluding them from state welfare support. I argue that these two lines of transformation, kinship and citizenship, result in new forms of gender and intergenerational inequalities. Furthermore, their intersection leads to a move from welfare to kinfare, which not only affects present arrangements between migrants, but also entails future insecurities.     

Transnational social workers’ transition into receiving countries: what lessons can be learned from nursing and teaching?

Appropriate interventions for assisting transnational social workers (TSWs), nurses and teachers in their transition into the receiving country are significant for enabling competent and safe professional practice. These professionals form a significant part of the professional workforce of many countries as globalisation and liberal migration policies encourage many to cross borders for professional practice. Engaging in employment overseas, however, is a challenging process for them as it entails relocating to a new country and working in unfamiliar sociocultural and practice contexts. While some form of profession-wide assistance is found in nursing and teaching, social workers rarely receive any such interventions. This article discusses existing support offered to transnational nurses and teachers in English-speaking countries such as the UK, US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada and suggests how a similar approach to social workers can assist their transitioning into the receiving country. It draws on the findings of a thematic review of the literature addressing support for transnational nurses, teachers and social workers. The imperative of interventions to assist transition of TSWs into host countries is explored and the article concludes with recommendations for some intervention strategies and mechanisms.     

Reconceptualizing Motherhood,Reconceptualizing Resistance

Female labour migrants face contradictory expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to be their families' and communities' economic saviours. On the other hand, they are expected to meet their maternal responsibilities even while they are abroad; otherwise, they face charges of maternal neglect. My goal in this article is to highlight how female migrant workers handle these conflicting demands. I discuss how migrant women simultaneously adapt to and challenge imposed family separation through the case study of Filipina live-in caregivers in Canada. They do this in two ways. First, they exhibit transnational hyper-maternalism which allows them to overcome accusations of neglect. They ‘mother across borders’ by providing for their families and by using technology to supervise, monitor and communicate with their children. In doing so, they reify and contest established gender roles. Second, they are active in civil society. In doing so, they highlight the negative consequences migrant women and their families face. Reconceptualized notions of motherhood characterize migrant women's transnational parenting, while the desire to ameliorate the negative consequences of family separation and reunification explain their activism.     

The Impact of Female Emigration on Families and the Welfare State in Countries of Origin: The Case of Romania

The heavy reliance on foreign labour in the care sector by Western countries (particularly those in southern Europe) is fuelling a growing feminization of migration in many emigration countries. This migration has a new impact on the countries of origin: it adds the problem of “care drain” to the better known “skill drain” problem ‐‐ which has already been extensively examined in the literature. In this article, we investigate how this phenomenon is taking place in Romania. In particular, the article explores the compensatory strategies put in place by Romanian families and local welfare states to limit the impact of care drain. Furthermore, it considers the persistence of a “care shortage” problem, which constrains both individuals and local institutions in Romania and requires the establishment of new social and cooperation policies. The research is based on the results of qualitative interviews conducted between the winter and spring of 2006 with 30 Romanian female care‐workers living in Turin and Rome, and with 40 family members of female care‐workers (often belonging to the same family units as the women interviewed in Italy) in Romania. With a view to gaining a more comprehensive overview of the phenomenon, more than 35 privileged observers were also interviewed in both countries in which the field work was carried out.