July 22, 2019

Professor Shereen Hussein convened a symposium for the Transforming Care Conference last month. The symposium draws on her research as part of the Sustainable Care project. The symposium started with an overarching comparative paper by Professor Hussein on the demand and use of migrant workers in the long-term care sector (LTC) in eight OCED countries (Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea and UK) highlighting commonalities and differences. We then present case studies from Norway, Germany and Italy, offering rich and insightful discussions of various countries facing similar challenges of meeting escalating care needs, but who adopt different immigration, welfare and employment policies. From Norway, Karen Christensen examined how macro and meso factors in the UK and Norway influence migrants’ destination and care work choices. Hildegard Theobald investigated how the restructured market-oriented German LTC organisation might be linked to increased stratifications and inequalities among migrant care workers. The last paper was from Mirko Di Rosa who provided detailed analysis of the interplay between the Italian cash-for-care approach, the employment of formal and informal migrant workers and the redistribution of care burden and their competing effects. The discussant at the symposium was professor Ito Peng, University of Toronto, Canada. The full papers of the symposium can be downloaded from the Conference web-page and Professor Hussein’s presentation can be found here.