Gender, Migration and the Ambiguous Enterprise of Professionalizing Domestic Service: The Case of Vocational Training for the Unemployed in France

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views.

The making of gendered ‘migrant workers’ in youth activation: The case of young Russian-speakers in Finland

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“…Feminist migration scholars have analysed the gendered logic of workfare and how economic ‘integration’ programmes, which target migrant women, in particular, are implemented through workfare policies (Farris, 2017; Nordberg, 2015; Scrinzi, 2011). Sara Farris (2017) has argued that while constructing non-EU migrant women as needing to be liberated and assisted into the labour market, workfare programmes steer them towards social reproductive sectors, which have traditionally been conceived as ‘feminine’.…”

Migrants' Regular Army of Labour: Gender Dimensions of the Impact of the Global Economic Crisis on Migrant Labor in Western Europe

“…Migrant care-domestic workers in private households face different employment conditions, depending upon the country's management of the migration of unskilled labour and of care provision, as well as upon the specific culture of care. Thus, migrants can be hired on an hourly (and often informal) basis, as is prevalently the case in France and the Netherlands (Scrinzi, 2011; van Walsum, 2011) or as live-in workers, as in Italy and Spain (Finotelli and Arango, 2011; Ambrosini, 2012). The countries with the biggest share of domestic workers in the EU-15 are Spain, France and Italy.…”

Gendered and Racialised Constructions of Work in Bureaucratised Care Services in Italy

“…They have shown how the naturalisation of gendered and of racialised difference serves to make the emotional labour of migrant domestic workers invisible, on the basis of the idea of a 'cultural' predisposition for caring of women of certain nationalities. In other words, migrant women from certain national groups, for instance Latin Americans, Caribbeans or Filipinas, are portrayed as being especially endowed with 'feminine' qualities such as patience and devotion and are assigned the characteristics of the 'ideal' care worker (Scrinzi 2013, Marchetti andScrinzi 2011).…”