Detail
Passau Research Colloquium on Southeast Asia
Since the 1960s, transnational care chains have been established as a labour regime in a post-colonial context to overcome crisis situations in social reproduction and a severe shortage of health care personnel in the OECD world. Care workers, majority being women, migrate from poor to more wealthy households and countries, from the Global South to the Global North. Governments in the South use the export of cheap care workers as a development strategy which earns them foreign currency through remittances and is supposed to reduce problems of UN(der)employment and poverty in their countries. Countries and metropolitan cities of the Global North use this migrant care proletariat to restructure their regime of social reproduction at low costs. Thus, a pool of cheap migrant care workers, kind of a care precariat is constructed which is based on inequalities and asymmetrical power relations on a national, regional and transnational scale and on a cross-border extraction and commodification of care work and care workers.
The precarious situation of care workers in general and migrant care workers in particular deteriorated due to the Covid-19 pandemic, care extraction intensified, the depletion and exhaustion of care workers multiplied. At the same time, health care work was celebrated as heroic struggle against the virus and got – with applause, singing, lighting candles, banging on cooking pots – more visibility and acknowledgement as never before. However, this symbolic upgrading did not result in better remuneration and a lasting higher respect.
The lecture unpacks with an intersectional perspective this labour regime of transnational structures and subjectivities, and the cross-cutting development strategy of care extractivism with a focus on Asia-Europe relations.
Additional Information
Open to | all |
Prior registration | not required |
Organised by | Chair of Development Politics |
Contact organizer of event | ursula.junk@uni-passau.de |