No abstract

In "ageing Europe", there have been widespread developments aimed at the privatisation of elderly care. In tandem, the demand for private domestic services is expanding all over Europe, and elderly citizens are a major part of this demand. Simultaneously, migrant women are increasingly considered the solution to the labour force deficit in the wake of the "care crisis". This article explores the dual privatisation process in the context of New Public Management reforms and glocalisation in Stockholm/Sweden: namely, what are the consequences to providers and consumers in the elderly care sector and domestic services? In particular, the article highlights the purchase of informal services among the elderly as a part of the "elderly care puzzle".

Exploring the relations between different migrants who meet in Spain, this article discusses issues of mobility, the globalization of care and service work, and precarization of labor and livelihoods, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work and retirement conditions in Europe. A mélange of migratory processes are scrutinized along a Swedish-Spanish North-South axis. It analyzes longstanding conditions on the Spanish labor market combined with neoliberal de- and reregulation of work and welfare with a bearing on spatial and social inequalities across the European Union. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of the workers and entrepreneurs who provide care and services for them. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to organization of migration as well as work and services. Some of these workers, especially third country migrants, occupy precarious, and sometimes informalized, low skilled jobs in an ethnically segmented and gendered labor market.

This article analyses the Swedish international retirement migrants (IRMs) in Spain and their consumption of domestic and eldercare services. In a transnational position and in the absence of stable structures and institutions (i.e., family, state and market provision), the IRMs are a part of liquid communities of care. It is argued that between themselves, and in relation to entrepreneurs and workers, the Swedish retirement migrants are part of a moral economy of care, reflecting the collective and individual consequences of the migration -as well as the labour market and welfare context in Spain. To IRMs, the moral economies mitigate the changing conditions of family and welfare in a transnational context. Solidarity and care among IRMs, as well as personalized relations with workers and intermediaries become even more important when relatives are physically absent and the Swedish welfare services (which are traditionally more extensive than the Spanish equivalent) are inaccessible. Therefore, the IRMs partake in a moral economy making gaps and inequalities more manageable, while creating coping strategies in the face of unaffordable market solutions.