Labour Research

"Valued by German families, sought by the German authorities: female immigrants from Third World countries are cleaning loos and feeding babies. These young women, many of them living here illegally, send their earnings back home to support their own children. A report about the female dimension of globalisation." That was the title of a dossier about "Germany's new generation of housemaids" in the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit on 19 August 2004.

The phenomenon which is concealed behind the headlines has largely escaped public attention so far, but the facts speak for themselves: there is a silent army of domestic staff and cleaners, nannies and carers working in Germany's private households – many of them migrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. In English, these women (and a few men) are known as "domestic workers", and they carry out similar tasks to those once performed by housemaids. However, they differ from them in significant ways. And while there is a large body of literature about "migrant domestic workers" in English (cf. Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002), this issue was largely ignored by German researchers until very recently. Research on migrant domestic and care workers looks at the link between the international labour market, the private household as a place of work in Germany, and illegality and transnational migration (see also: Migration is Female …).

There are no precise figures on how many female migrants are working in German households. Estimates vary between 2.4 and 4 million, with turnover in this sector calculated at around 2.5 million euros.

Illegal in a dual sense

Although this "market" is largely unregulated in Germany, it is multi-faceted and well-established, operating via a multitude of networks. Contacts are made through friends, neighbours or relatives, and the Internet has also become an important source of supply. This applies both to countries where recruitment can take place legally, e.g. in the USA or Canada, where the desired candidate can be accessed with a click of a mouse and equipped with a visa and work permit before entering the country, and to Germany, where a legal framework is largely absent. With one notable exception – a programme run by the Employment Department, which allows the placement of Eastern European domestics in households with persons who require nursing care – Germany does not issue work permits for domestic workers in private households. So most employment relationships are informal, and no social insurance contributions are paid. What's more, many of the workers involved do not have any formal right of residence or have lost it over the course of the years. Temporary legal status can only be acquired by matriculating at a university or institute of higher education, and long-term residence rights can only be acquired by marrying a German citizen. So the female migrant workers are illegal in two ways – or rather, they are illegalised. The women often work in an isolated and highly individualised environment in an employment relationship which could break down at any time. This labour market evades any form of control and only operates because formal contracts are replaced by trust – a fragile basis which is extremely prone to disruption.

Outsourcing of domestic and care work

The growing demand for domestic services in Germany is generally explained in terms of the rise in women's employment outside the home and the growing need for nursing care for an ageing population. It also reflects a paradoxical situation: women's employment outside the home has increased, yet there has been little or no redistribution of domestic tasks between the marital partners. Women still bear the main burden of the domestic and child-raising responsibilities, and the lack of state childcare provision is still making it difficult to combine a family with a career. So "outsourcing" the domestic work (or at least some parts of it) to someone else – a migrant woman who is willing to work for far lower wages than legal agency staff – is the preferred solution. Domestic work consists of a package of services which can be neatly summed up as the "three c's": cooking, cleaning, caring. In other words, they are person-specific (caring for children and the elderly or others in need of personal care) and object-specific (tidying, cleaning, washing, ironing, etc.). Most domestic workers undertake a combination of the two. As well as being physically demanding, domestic work involves emotional or relationship inputs, as it takes place in people's private sphere, concerns their specific wishes and habits, and involves handling of their personal belongings.

Conclusions about this phenomenon vary widely: some authors refer dramatically to a "refeudalisation" of relationships, while others dispense with the drama, describing it as "perfectly ordinary paid work".

Financial asymmetry

It is important, however, to highlight the financial asymmetry that exists on a global scale, which mainly benefits the employers from the affluent developed countries. Skilled domestic and care workers are being recruited from the migrants' home countries and employed by the West for its own benefit. This outsourcing of what could be described as "genuine women's work" enables professional women in the West to develop their own careers and also defuses family conflicts. A global relationship emerges which in some ways reflects traditional gender relations. The First World takes on the role of the "old-fashioned male: pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks, with the Third World as the "traditional woman" within the global family, patient, nurturing, and self-denying" (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2002: 11, 12). Metaphorically speaking, all this takes place not in line with the rules of a regular marriage, but as a secret affair, concealed by all sides. In this way, domestic work continues to be a "female" affair. The imbalance in the remuneration and value attached by society to formal paid work, on the one hand, and family work, on the other, and thus the division of gender roles remain untouched; indeed, they are retraditionalised.

The issue is relevant to the debates not only about gender justice but also about immigration, the care system and state provision of childcare services.

Further reading Ehrenreich, Barbara; Hochschild, Arlie Russell (eds.): Global Women. Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York 2002. Lutz, Helma: Vom Weltmarkt in den Privathaushalt. Die neuen Dienstmädchen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Opladen 2007a, ISBN: 978-3-86649-011-9 Lutz, Helma (ed): Migration and Domestic Work. A European Perspective on a Global Theme. Aldershot 2007b (forthcoming publication), ISBN: 978-0-7546-4790-4