| Based in Turin, Italy, this dissertation examines how the job of home eldercare assistant, an unexplored subset of domestic work, is shaped by the convergence of three major global trends: changes in labor market participation, aging, and immigration. Italy, with its negative growth rate and inadequate state policies to respond to a progressively older population, provides an important case study for understanding the complexities of eldercare. Increasingly, Italian families are no longer able or willing to offer assistance to the elderly. They prefer to hire eldercare assistants, and immigrant women, seldom men, of various nationalities increasingly fill these positions.;The project draws on sixty-five interviews with workers, employers, and members of non-profit organizations who facilitate the encounter between families in need of assistance and unemployed immigrant women, as well as a full year of participant observation, at one of the above-mentioned organizations. The dissertation exposes an organization of care that is only apparently based on the national, individual unit of the family, but that in practice, relies on global political, social and economic processes to function. The project offers two important contributions to sociology: on one hand it highlights how emotional labor, perhaps counter-intuitively, is not perceived as exploitative by the immigrant workers because it provides them with greater bargaining leverage. On the other hand, it highlights how the work of illegal immigrants allows the nation-state to hide the increased burden that the progressive privatization and marketization of care coupled with the restructuring of the welfare state is imposing on Italian citizens. |
