Ungerson2003 Commodified Care Work in Eu

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Commodified care work in European Labour Markets

Clare Ungerson
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Division of Sociology and Social Policy, School of Social Sciences, University of
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Published online: 04 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: Clare Ungerson (2003): Commodified care work in European Labour Markets, European Societies, 5:4,
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European Societies
5(4) 2003: 377–396
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COMMODIFIED CARE WORK IN

EUROPEAN LABOUR MARKETS
Clare Ungerson
Division of Sociology and Social Policy, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton
ABSTRACT: This paper considers the reasons why a form of commodified care
Downloaded by [Harvard College] at 08:09 21 May 2013
work identified as ‘routed wages’ has developed in many European countries

over the past decade. These systems, which are often argued for within an
empowerment discourse for the care users, are not often considered in terms
of their labour market impact. The paper uses empirical data generated in a
cross-national qualitative study of care users and their care givers in five
European countries (Austria, France, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK) to
outline the different ways in which different types of commodified care
schemes impact on the labour market. It is suggested that the schemes differ
in their labour market impact, depending on whether or not the scheme is
regulated, and on the geographic, social and economic contexts within which
the scheme is implemented.
Key words: care; care work; migrant workers; direct payments; cash for care
Recent developments in the funding of care in many European countries

and in some of the states of the United States have appeared to follow a
similar pattern: all of them have developed forms of care delivery which
allow for the care user to receive cash instead of care services, and use this
cash to employ directly their own caring labour. These forms of cash are
nearly always in the form of cash payments from the state, either the central
state, or, more commonly, the local state. Ungerson has developed the term
‘commodification’ to indicate that direct cash transfers are part of a process
of change in the support of care users and their caregivers. Typically, unpaid
‘informal’ care has cash attached to it, paid through social security, tax or
direct payments systems, inserted into the care relationship and these cash
payments are made available to care givers and care users or, sometimes, to
both. In a five fold typology of these forms of cash support, Ungerson
identified the type of commodified care that is discussed in this paper:
namely, the type named as ‘routed wages’ (Ungerson 1997). By this she
meant that the amounts of cash transferred to care users are often enough,
and intended to be enough, for the employment of care workers, and that
DOI: 10.1080/1461669032000127651 377

EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
their wages are ‘routed’, in much the same way as trains along a railway line,
from the state, through the care consumer, to the endpoint of the caregiver.
It is the purpose of this paper to outline, somewhat speculatively, the
trends that have driven this policy innovation, and then to speculate as to
how far these policies are likely to remain in place or atrophy. The paper
draws on preliminary analysis of a cross-national study of elder care users
who have been given cash for care, and points to the way in which different
funding regimes generate different types of care relationship and different
kinds of politics of care. The conclusion suggests that despite similar
impulses underlying these policies, they have rather different outcomes in
terms of their impact on the labour market for care work, and ultimately
for the care relationship.
1 Origins
The fact that ‘routed wages’ have developed so commonly, and, for most
of the European countries, within a rather similar time period (the late
1990s), indicates that similar trends may be driving them. We know quite
a lot about the way these policies work (Evers et al. 1994; Weekers and
Pijl 1998), but the history of their various origins remains to be written.
Nevertheless, one can speculate as to the general impulses that underlie
these developments. Interestingly, some of these impulses seem, at least
at first sight, contradictory. For example, one can argue that these policies
emerge out of a critique of the welfare state that developed in the 1980s
and 1990s – that the welfare state is an unwieldy and clumsy responder to
‘need’ and that ‘need’ is all too often defined by professionals intent on
self aggrandisement and hegemony. This critique, which argues for the
‘empowerment’ of care users, such that their needs are more directly heard
and responded to, is clearly part of a more general trend towards consum-
erism and individualism identified by many commentators on late moder-
nity (Beck 1992; Giddens 1992). Hence one can see, and most easily with
hindsight, how the provision of cash rather than services to care users is
heavily influenced by this consumerist and individualistic discourse.
At the same time, however, another impulse – the move to the expan-
sion of the concept of ‘citizenship’ such that it moves away from a male
breadwinner dominated model (Pateman 1988), and towards a model that
takes into account the contribution of citizens, particularly female citi-
zens, to ‘care’ (Fraser 1994; Lister 1997) – has also driven a much less
consumerist discourse, but rather a discourse that emphasizes and
broadens out some of the older ideas of collectivism and social responsi-
bility. It can be argued that this expansion of concepts of citizenship to
take on board ‘care’ has also had its own impact on policies to give cash
to care users. If care users are funded to employ their own care directly,
378
Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON
this demonstrates a form of trust by the state that its citizens know best
as to how to resolve their own needs (in much the same way as most
welfare states – but noticeably not the USA welfare system laced, as it is,
with food stamps – trust their citizens to spend their benefits in the way
they think best). At the same time, if care users are given carte blanche to
employ whoever they want – and, as we shall see, many welfare states do
precisely this – then, should care users choose to pay their relatives who
care for them, such payments to care constitute a recognition of the care
that informal carers deliver and provides them, very directly, with a sense
of the presence of the state in the care relationship. Thus the notion of a
partnership between welfare state and its caring citizens and its citizen
care users is, at least notionally, developed.
Two further impulses towards such policies can be identified. They can
also be understood within another trend of the 1980s and 1990s: namely
the trend towards the marketization, in the sense of introducing quasi-
markets, of the welfare state, and its wholesale privatization. Both these
trends took place on the grounds of increasing efficiency of allocation of
resources, and also to allow for the development of consumer choice. The
development of purchaser/provider splits within the quasi-market model
always begged the question as to why the ‘purchaser’ need necessarily be
an arm of the welfare state. Indeed, both the discourses of consumerism
and of citizenship referred to above, rather indicated that the purchaser
could indeed be the individual citizen, trusted to choose the form of care
that he or she authentically needed. Moreover, once the presence of care
delivery organizations was guaranteed through the process of welfare state
privatization then, in theory at any rate, a market supplying caring labour
was available for participation by the individual citizen purchaser. So it is
arguable that once the quasi market systems were in place, it was only a
matter of time before the logic of market ideologies drove towards the
direct purchase of services by their users.1 At the same time, other
responses to marketization and individualization paradoxically drive a
more communitarian and conservative impulse which in its own turn also
feeds into the development of ‘routed wages’. In response to the process
of individualization and fragmentation that takes the form of the break-
down of the traditional family based on marriage and a gendered division
of labour, some governments come to emphasize policies that attempt to
pull the traditional family back into shape. The payment of cash to care
users, where care users are able to use the monies to pay whoever they
want, including their relatives, is seen to be a means of reinforcing inter-
generational and intragenerational familial obligations.
One important aspect, common to most of the countries that have
1. This is probably a particularly British version of the logic and sequence of develop-
ments. In some countries, the quasi market stage is not an essential prerequisite for
‘routed wages’ since they are driven by more powerful other impulses.
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EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
developed these systems of ‘routed wages’ is concern about the growing

numbers and proportions of elderly disabled people within the population
who are in need of long-term care. The impulse behind many of these
policies, which appear within their various discourses to promote em-
powerment, choice, citizenship and intergenerational relationships, is also
cost containment. The distribution of monies to care users to spend on
their own care, particularly where they are allowed to spend those monies
on payments to relatives, means that care can be generated through
systems of residual and non-pecuniary obligations and feelings of affect,
as well as through the payment of a wage. Hence it is assumed that where
care work is generated through this combination of cash, affect and
obligation, particularly when it is located in the care user’s home, then the
costs of care are expected to be lower than the cost of organized, formal
care. However, it is not always the case that nations overtly pursue the
route of commodification of informal care: in France for example, as we
shall see, the development of routed wages has taken place within the
context of a proliferation of care organized by private agencies which
employ workers paid at least the minimum wage. In these cases, the
provision of cash paid to care users limits the care time that care users can
purchase, and the provision of care within the care user’s home means that
the overheads and hotel costs of care are covered, invisibly, by the past
and present expenditure of the care user’s household.
While these are general reasons as to why there appears to be conver-
gence among so many nations of Europe in the development of ‘routed
wages’ as part of the process of care commodification, there are also
particular reasons that pertain to particular nations. In the UK, for
example, the early development of the allocation of funds by the state to
people in need of long-term care in order for them to buy in their own
caring labour was restricted to disabled people of working age. The
extension of ‘routed wages’ or, as they are called within the UK legislation,
Direct Payments, to people over working age was the result largely of
campaigns by lobbies representing elderly people who argued that
refusing elders the option to purchase their own services was ageist and
implied that the state did not trust elderly citizens to use state monies
sensibly and in their own interests. In France, the decision to fund the
purchase, by elderly people, of their own care was much more closely
related to a general policy, adopted in the 1990s, of trying to bring the
invisible and largely grey labour market of the domestic domain into the
formal economy and to create employment. In Austria, where a social
insurance-based welfare state similar to that of Germany had led to a long-
term care system that was driven by an expensive medical model of elder
care funded by health insurance, the long-term care system had been
overhauled within a context where cash transfers are the tradition of the
Bismarkian welfare state. In Italy, the payment of monies to care users was
380
a policy adopted to provide services for elderly people in a context where

the provision of services was, relatively, very underdeveloped. Both left
and right support these policies, with the right seeing them as a way in
which the traditional family can be supported, while the left support them
as part of a larger network of support (including services) for care users
and their caregivers. In The Netherlands, the payment of monies to care
users is part of the tradition of social experiment and service innovation
framed within an empowerment discourse, and within a discourse of
citizenship for carers.
2 The five-country study

The discussion so far has concentrated on the politics of caregiving, and

the macro reasons as to why the funding of the individual care consumer
has become a major innovation in so many European welfare states.
However, it is also evident that, although there may be similar broad brush
reasons for the introduction of these policies, the actual construction of
the systems varies. Thus, for example, in the UK, the payment of close
relatives or anyone who lives in the same household as the care user is
outlawed. In Austria, Italy and The Netherlands, on the other hand,
payment of relatives through ‘routed wages’ is hardly discouraged, and,
indeed, it appears to be the case that in The Netherlands it is positively
encouraged. In France, payment of relatives who are not spouses is
permitted, but, as we shall see, the scale of the ‘routed wage’ system in
France is such that there is a burgeoning care work industry developing
which means that many elderly people are able, relatively easily, to access
and pay for outside assistance. Similarly, levels of regulation vary. Both in
the UK and in The Netherlands, very tight control is maintained by state
agencies to ensure that the monies given to care users are spent on the
provision of care work. In Austria and Italy, there are no attempts at all to
control the ultimate destination of these cash transfers and the monies can
be spent on whatever the care user feels they need; indeed, if they so
choose, the care user can save the cash, or even give it away. It is not within
the scope of this paper to unpack why these differences emerge – suffice
it to say that some of the explanation must lie in an analysis of the care
delivery and labour market contexts within which they have developed,
and the ability and willingness of these welfare states to regulate the
financial relationships of their citizenry.
One of the aspects of these policies that is often ignored is the impact
they have on the organization and status of care work and care workers.
Three shifts are taking place. First, the construction of what constitutes
‘work’ and ‘care’ is changing. The payment of kin to care has the potential
to commodify a set of tasks that until very recently have been regarded as
381
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
classic ‘unpaid work’ (Himmelweit 1995). The introduction of the cash

nexus into previously uncommodified territory could create new forms of
family and household relations whereby particular individuals move into
employment relations with each other. That said, however, it is important
to maintain a distinction between ‘family’ on the one hand, and ‘house-
hold’ on the other. It is possible to imagine the emergence of commodified
kin relations where the kin are not co-resident with care users. But co-
residence may mean that the additional monies paid to the care user enters
the household and are treated simply as one other resource to be allocated
and managed along well established guidelines, such that the care giver
remains, to all intents and purposes, a giver of care rather than a care
worker. Thus, while the boundaries of paid and unpaid work may well be
shifting as a result of these policies, it is also the case that there remain
older cultures of the handling of household resources which place a brake

on wholesale commodification of care within the household.
Second, the introduction of cash for care policies, particularly where
there is no regulation of their ultimate destination, can encourage the
further development of care work that is carried out by untrained,
unskilled, unprotected and even undocumented labour. While care work
has traditionally been regarded as the particular territory of working class
women socialized and willing to nurture, there are, embedded in these
policies, incentives to encourage this even further. By leaving the recruit-
ment, management and payment of these workers to individual care
consumers, the likelihood is that such consumers will seek out labour that
is cheap, and yet authentically ‘caring’. The cheapest labour will be ‘grey’:
invisible and hence untaxed, and yet visible enough to be relatively easily
accessed by elderly care users with good local networks built up over long
biographies. Thus, such caring labour will be unprotected by social rights
and employment regulation, and, in the long run, is at considerable risk
of poverty, especially in their own old age (Ungerson 2000).
Third, a development may take place (and indeed there are signs of it
doing so) whereby, particularly in the systems where cash for care is on a
very large scale or in regulated systems, a much more formal labour
market for care work develops. In these systems, private and NGO
agencies develop which provide care workers for those who wish to
employ them. The care users may pay a fee to the agency, or they may pay
their care workers directly. In such cases, the care work is visible, and
located within the formal economy. Inherent in such organized care
delivery is a hierarchy of line managers, and a need to be seen to conform
to any statutory framework of regulation. In terms of recruitment of care
workers, such organizations have to be able to convince, and, if necessary,
produce the evidence, that their carers are trustworthy and reliable.
Increasingly, as a result of domiciliary care policies, care users have
complex and health-related needs; thus these agencies will be expected to
382
provide additional evidence that their care workers are trained to execute
health related tasks. Hence embedded in this type of care work develop-
ment is a logic of growing credentialism, and the acquisition of occu-
pational hierarchies and status.
Thus the labour market impacts of these policies are complicated,
potentially contradictory, and dependent, at least to some extent, on the
funding regime adopted by the particular welfare state. We currently
know very little about how these impacts are working out in practice, and
it is for this reason that I have undertaken, with my colleague Sue Yeandle
(Sheffield Hallam University) and research teams working in four other
EU nations,2 a qualitative study of the employer/employee relationship
that emerges out of a selection of these various systems. The study is
funded under the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
‘Future of Work Programme’. The five countries under scrutiny are

Austria, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and the UK. Each of these
countries appeared, at the start of the study, to offer rather different types
of funding regime, with a speculated differential impact on the labour
market for care. Since 1993, Austria has placed the system of ‘Pflegegeld’
at the core of its social care system for elderly and disabled people.
Anybody needing continuous care for more than 6 months and a
minimum of 50 hours care a month can apply for a long-term care
allowance. In 2001, 343,782 care users were in receipt of this benefit, of
whom 82% were aged over 60 (Oesterle 2003). Care users can pay their
relatives. It is an entirely unregulated system. A rather similar system
prevails in Italy where a cash allowance – the ‘Indennita di accompagna-
mento’ – has been in place for disabled people since 1980, and extended
to elderly care users in 1988. In 2001, 5.8% of the population aged 65 and
over were in receipt of this allowance. In addition unknown numbers of
care users are in receipt of similar cash payments paid by the Italian
regions and municipalities (42% of Italian municipalities provide
payments for care to care users, with most of those municipalities being
located in the centre/north of Italy) (Gori 2003). There is very limited
regulation as to how the allowance is spent, and employers can pay their
relatives. Italian commentary, previous to this research project, had
suggested that the allowance is widely used to pay workers who operate
in the considerable informal labour market (Gori 1999), and that many of
these informally employed workers are non-EU nationals. Thus it was
always possible that Austria and Italy would emerge with rather similar
impacts on the labour market for care, but that the large ‘grey’ labour
2. The research teams were as follows: Austria: August Oesterle and Elizabeth Hammer,
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration; France: Claude Martin
and Blanche Le Bihan, ENSP, Rennes; Italy: Cristiano Gori, Barbara da Roit and
Michela Barbot, Istituto per la recerca sociale, Milan; Netherlands: Marja Pijl, Clarie
Ramakers and Fransje Baarveld, University of Nijmegen; United Kingdom: Sue Yeandle
and Bernadette Stiell, Sheffield Hallam University.
383
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
market in Italy would make a particular contribution to the care work

labour market. As we shall see later, our evidence suggests that, in most
respects, Austria and Italy emerge as very similar.
The Netherlands is another interesting example of a country where the
payment of relatives is permitted. However, this is within the context of a
heavily regulated system of routed wages. Since 1995 the ‘Persoonsge-
bonden budget’ or ‘personal care budget’ has been in place for people
needing more than 3 months home care. At the end of 2002, there were
34,544 personal budget holders (Pijl 2003). The personal budget operates
within the context of long-term care insurance. The Care Insurance Office
assesses need and allocates the payments, while the Social Insurance Bank
pays the care workers who are contracted by the care users, even when the
careworkers are relatives of the care user. The Netherlands system of
routed wages has been more and more subject to regulation until it has
moved into a directly opposing model of commodified care management
to that which prevails in Austria. In France, the allowance known as
‘Prestation Specifique Dependance’ has, since 1997, been available to
elderly care users. The allowance was means tested, but enough to employ
a care worker on a part-time basis. The allowance could be used to pay
relatives but not spouses, and was specifically directed towards pulling
informal economic activity into the formal labour market, and workers into
the social security system. At the end of 2001, approximately 150,000
elderly care users were in receipt of this benefit. The benefit has now been
extended and renamed as the ‘Allocation personnalisée à l’autonomie’
(APA) and the expectation is that 80% of the dependent elderly population
will be in receipt of this more generously allocated benefit, amounting to
about 600,000 recipients in total (Martin 2003). A somewhat similar system
has recently developed in the UK, where the right to choose cash rather
than services has been steadily extended to disabled people of working age,
culminating in the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996. This
option was made available to elderly care users in 2000. At present, very
few elderly care users are in receipt of direct payments, certainly in
comparison with the high number of recipients of cash for care in the other
countries described in this paper. In 2002 there were just over 1000 elderly
care users in receipt of direct payments – and this low take up is in contrast
to the continuing stream of policy documents emanating from the UK
government in support of direct payments (see, for example, Milburn
(2002) and the current extending provisions of the Health and Social Care
Bill) (Yeandle 2003). Careful regulation is used to oversee the system and
ensure that care users do not pay their relatives or anyone living in their
household (except a formally employed personal assistant). Payment of the
cash is contingent on the presentation of full documentation and evidence
that the workers are locked into the social insurance system.
The data collected in this project has been largely qualitative and
384
exploratory. We were concerned to investigate the employer/employee

relationship in depth, and to develop an understanding of how and whether
the presence of the cash nexus alters the care relationship, such that it
emerges as a hybrid of work and care (Ungerson 1999). In addition the
cross-national framework allowed us to the look at the expected differential
impact of the five funding regimes, and to explore the impact on differently
organized labour markets. In many respects the desire to conduct small-
scale qualitative research was rendered more complicated, but also more
interesting, by the attempt to make cross-national comparisons. Inevitably,
the data emerges with a great deal of ‘noise in the system’ where we were
unable to hold the variables constant. For example, in Austria, Italy and the
UK, the samples of elderly care users were located in large urban areas:
Vienna, Salzburg, Milan, Sheffield. But even here there were differences,
with Vienna and Milan being cities with incoming populations, particularly
internationally, while Sheffield has a very stable population with little
inmigration, particularly from abroad. Both the studies in The Nether-
lands and in France were conducted in largely rural hinterlands of urban
concentrations, and this means that it is likely that the labour markets in
these areas are much less diverse, and local networks rather more solidar-
istic than those of the urban areas. The outlining of the differences between
the areas of origin of our sample populations remains a task for the project
as a whole. However, we do know that if we had attempted to hold the
variables constant by, for example, using a triangulated method, the entire
project would have been prohibitively expensive. So what we have emerged
with is data from qualitative interviews conducted in five different coun-
tries of Europe (and five different languages) which has been selectively
translated into English. In each country interviews were conducted with
ten elderly care users in receipt of ‘routed wages’. They were then asked
to name and grant access to their care givers and these care givers were also
interviewed in depth. In each country, about 30 interviews were conducted
overall. The analysis so far has concentrated on the countries other than
the United Kingdom, so this paper omits the British data and concentrates
on Austria, Italy, The Netherlands and France.
3 Austria and Italy: two unregulated systems
Both the Austrian and Italian funding regimes are unregulated. Amongst
the Italian sample, the needs tested cash subvention that elderly care users
received was commonly in the region of 700 to 1,000 euros a month (about
£500). It became clear, in the course of the interviews, that a full-time non-
resident carer employed within the ‘grey’ market could command an
income of about 750 euros. Live-in paid carers in Milan appeared to be
paid somewhat less. Hence the amount that is available to elderly care
385
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
users through this cash payment is enough, should they so wish it, to
employ full-time help. Nevertheless, a number of our respondents
referred to the money as an essential subsidy to their low pension income.
They did not see it as a form of cash that should leave the immediate
household: rather they welcomed it as a means with which they could cope
with daily living expenses and, in particular, pay for essential drugs. Hence
the subsidy could be construed as an anti-poverty measure for pensioners
on low incomes, and a subsidy towards the costs of health care, rather than
a policy designed to promote the employment of care workers.
However, amongst those elderly care users who did ‘employ’ a care
worker in the Italian sample, it is absolutely striking that not a single one
of the elderly care users had approached a care agency to provide them
with a care worker. Among those who had decided to use a paid carer from
outside the immediate kin network, only ‘grey’ labour was employed. Three
of these workers were immediate neighbours who provided small amounts
of care – one hour in the afternoon, for example, while a carer husband did
the daily shopping – and were paid in cash and small presents for their care
tasks. All of the five paid carers who lived in the same dwelling as the care
user and provided 24-hour care, in some instances for 7 days a week, were
non-EU nationals. In this small sample, careworkers of the following
nationalities were either referred to in the interviews with elderly care users
and/or were subsequently interviewed themselves: Peru (three), Ecuador
(two), Romania (one), the Philippines (one), Mauritius (one), Sri Lanka
(one). It is clear from the interview material that only one of these non-
EU nationals had residence rights in Italy, and indeed for some of them
the acquisition of residential rights had become something of an obsession.
In Milan there is clearly a culture of, as one respondent put it, ‘taking
a foreigner’ to provide care. It was also clear that local networks worked
very well in the recruitment of these workers: workers were passed from
neighbour to neighbour, from sister to sister, and some were found by the
concierges of apartment blocks. A foreign appearance seems to be the
defining characteristic of availability to enter paid care work. A Mauritian
described graphically the casual process by which she was recruited:
One day when I was hanging out the washing on the balcony I was seen by a
neighbour who asked me who I was, how it was that I was there, and whether
I already had a job . . . she told me that a friend of hers was looking for a girl
to look after her mother . . . the next day she had already spoken to her friend
. . . and very soon the lady took me on and I went to live in her mother’s house.
None of the paid care relationships involving a live-in carer had

been initiated by the payment of the cash subsidy – all of these paid care
relationships pre-dated the receipt of the ‘routed wage’. A pre-existing
culture of employment of undocumented foreign labour for housework and
386
personal care tasks was available to Milanese who wished to employ paid
care. At the same time, the payment of the cash subsidy gave some care users
and their informal carers the financial headroom to fund very small amounts
of additional care – typically the payment of a neighbour to provide very
small amounts of regular companionship, or the employment of a cleaner,
for 2 hours a week, to help an elderly spouse carer. Nor did these cash
payments commodify kin relations. All elderly care users cared for by their
spouses thought the questions concerning whether or not they paid their
wives or husbands to care quite absurd. There were some more complex
relations between care users and their children, but again, the issue of
commodification of care did not arise. Payments to children were rare and
construed, not as regular payments, but rather as ‘tips’ and presents.
Thus, judging from this small sample, the labour market for care had
not been radically affected by the Italian cash for care subsidy. Far more
important was the decision, among most of the care users in this small
sample, not to use the money to pay carers at all, but rather to rely on pre-
existing informal care arrangements from spouses, daughter and sons, and
to use the cash to supplement their own incomes. Where they did use the
monies to pay for paid care work, they tapped into a pre-existing market
and maintained pre-existing paid care relationships. This ‘routed wage’
system had enhanced the effective demand of elderly urban Italians to
consume a range of products, from food and drugs to neighbourly compan-
ionship. Such payments are more likely to be defended by a politics of
income maintenance for elderly people rather than by a politics of care.
In certain respects, the Austrian sample was similarly engaged, either
with informal care arrangements which pre-dated the introduction of the
cash allowance to care users, or with the use of undocumented, foreign
labour. However, there were some crucial differences. First, it became
clear that the routes into the recruitment of foreign labour were entirely
different, in the sense that the Viennese labour market for care was being
specifically orchestrated by agencies that are recruiting caring labour in
the bordering transition economies of Hungary and Slovakia. Hence this
was unlike the Milanese labour market for undocumented labour in two
senses: first it was not a global market drawing in permanent migrants
from the South, but rather was a labour market located across a permeable
border, allowing for transition from one economy to another over tem-
porary and brief periods. Second, the Austrian recruitment of foreign
labour was specifically directed towards finding care workers for elderly
care users. A further major difference between Austria and Italy is that,
although we found, just as in Italy, the classic informal care relationship
between co-residents, where questions of commodification of the care-
giver were regarded as profoundly absurd, we also found instances of
direct commodification of co-resident relatives. Again, in these instances
of commodified care between kin, an agency was acting as intermediary.
387
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
To turn to the employment of foreign labour first: the range of cash

supplement payable to Austrian care users depended on the level of their
disability. A typical level of payment was either £400:00 or £543:00 a
month. The typical wage paid to a foreign worker was between £281 and
£300 for a period of a fortnight in every month. For this cash payment
workers from Hungary and Slovakia provided 24-hour care while they lived
in the same accommodation as their elderly employer. At the end of ‘their’
fortnight they returned to their home country, while another worker,
usually from the same country, replaced them for their fortnight ‘off’. Thus
the amount of cash that the elderly employers were receiving from the state
was almost enough to cover the entire cost of paying for full-time 24/7 care,
so long as that care was provided by illegal, undocumented care workers.
Typically, the care workers so employed were very young – all those who
lived with their employers for their fortnight ‘on’ were in their late teens
to mid-twenties. (Every one of the Austrian carers in this sample was
female.) Interestingly, the only older workers who commuted across
boundaries did so on a daily basis, and the only one of the workers who had
started off on the ‘two weeks on/two weeks off’ routine and who was in her
forties was now engaged to be married to her employer (he had, as a result,
stopped paying her – an interesting example of refamilialization!).
The careworkers thus engaged were highly satisfied with their work. It
constituted a means of working part-time and leading a transitional life
between two economies and two homes, in a way that generated a reason-
able income. As one of them put it:
Well, it’s good pay for me and he gains as well – it isn’t too much for him either.
He would have to pay more for an Austrian woman. It’s quite a good deal.
Most of the employers of such labour were also apparently satisfied with
the round-the-clock care that they managed to find at relatively cheap
rates. However, not all reported total satisfaction. As the employer of the
young woman quoted above said:
It’s like this: a person who needs someone round the clock can’t manage. I have
to take on a foreigner, because otherwise I can’t manage financially. I just
couldn’t manage. That’s sad. I have to employ someone from abroad because
those in our country are so expensive.
It was also clear that most of these workers were actually being recruited and
placed by a cross-border agency which was specifically advertising for care
workers to work in Austria in the Hungarian and Slovakian press. Only one
worker had been found through an independent route, and in that case the
employer had conducted comprehensive telephone and face-to-face inter-
views before employing the workers. Thus, it appears to be the case that the
388
employment of undocumented foreign care workers in Austria has indeed

been facilitated by the payment of cash subsidies to care users, to such an
extent that the labour market is becoming organized by intermediaries.
A further aspect of intermediary intervention had occured in Austria,
with the development of official employment, by a major voluntary organ-
ization known as Caritas, of caring relatives.3 On payment of a fee from
the care user, Caritas acts as the employer of their caregiver, who may well
be a relative. In such a case, the caregiver receives pay over and above the
amount of cash subsidy the care user receives, and is also fully covered for
social security rights, holiday pay, and has a contract of employment which
limits the hours worked. An example from our study is as follows: Mrs S,
aged 39, cares for her 80-year-old mother with whom she lives. Her
mother receives £266 a month in care allowance, and pays Caritas a fee of
£290 a month.4 In return for the care work undertaken, Mrs S receives a
monthly wage of £562, plus cover for social security contributions, holiday
rights, and holiday and sickness pay. Not only does Mrs S say that this rate
of pay for care work is better than the pay she received before she started
caring for her mother when she worked in a factory, but the wage from
Caritas means that the household income of this dyad of mother and
daughter has increased by £272 a month. All the paid kin working within
the Caritas scheme were satisfied with it. As Mrs S herself said:
It’s marvellous. To be at home, do the housework and get paid for it.
Care users too reported high satisfaction. Mrs M, an 86-year-old receiving

help from her daughter, said:
We’re very satisfied. Yes, very. We’ve never had a single complaint. We’ve
always sent in the money that had to be paid.
Not only did it increase the income of caregivers and their co-resident care
recipients, and provide them with social security rights, it also provided
them with a sense of self esteem. One carer, who had previously cared for
her father-in-law outside the Caritas scheme, described how she felt when
she discovered she could be paid for caring for her mother-in-law:
You can only say that I simply felt as if I had been promoted. Society also saw
it totally differently then. Suddenly it was: ‘Aha, you’re doing a job’. Although
I didn’t do anything differently from before, it was suddenly seen as self
3. This policy innovation by a voluntary organisation needs some further investigation,
in order to understand the aims and objectives of the scheme, and its funding.
4. All the care receivers in our sample paid Caritas a little more than their care allowance
– thus they supplemented their expenditure on care from their other income especially
from their pension. Two paid kin caregivers reported that they themselves contributed
to the Caritas fee from their own income from Caritas.
389
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
evident. But if you then say that you’re working for Caritas, people say to you:
‘Wow, you’re working now’ . . . As soon as you’re in employment and can say
to the doctor that you have your own health insurance, it appears you are a
better type of person. From the point of view of society, this type of employ-
ment is very good for women.
It is noticeable, and the quote above demonstrates this, that the caregivers
who had entered the Caritas scheme and become commodified, had, in
almost all the cases in our sample, been the primary caregivers before they
entered paid employment as care workers with Caritas. Hence there was
no direct impact of this scheme on the labour market: it was not, at least
according to this evidence, persuading individuals to give up paid work and
take on caring ab initio. However, there was some evidence that the fact of
payment acted as a form of retention of caring labour. All of these commod-

ified carers were committed to caring for their kin until death: none of them
were willing to contemplate the possibility of their parent, spouse, or
parent-in-law entering residential care. While they tended to express this
desire to care for their kin until death in terms of filial duty, it is also clear
that the additional income and rights accrued through their formal employ-
ment position rendered their position as carers more palatable.
Thus, the Austrian evidence indicates that, even in an entirely unregu-
lated system, niche intermediary organizations can develop. In this case,
two such organizations emerged from our data, both of which were proving
innovative in finding new types and locations of care labour market.
Whether such intermediaries will develop in the Italian/Milanese situation
is an open question. As to the future, the stability of these Austrian arrange-
ments depends on a number of factors, not least the migration regime, and
the economic position of transition economies in relation to the West; and
the willingness of voluntary organizations to continue to fund the adequate
pay of native kin carers, and their social rights.
4 The Netherlands: funding and regulation
Both the Italian and Austrian funding regimes pay cash to care users
according to an assessed level of disability. The Dutch system pays cash
according to the amount of care work time that is judged to be necessary, in
conjunction with an assessment as to how much ‘domestic’, ‘personal’ and
‘nursing’ care is required within the total amount of care hours allotted to
the care user. Thus the amounts of cash provided to the respondents in our
survey varied considerably. In the Dutch sample in this study, a paraplegic
man was assessed as needing 19 hours of nursing care per week, and 3 hours
domestic help. For this care his wife received, through the Social Insurance
Bank which administers the ‘personal budget scheme’, the considerable sum
390
of £21,828 a year. Rather more common were smaller sums, in the region
of £300 a month with which to pay for a combination of personal and
domestic care. However, there are striking differences in the amounts of
money received through the Dutch personal budget scheme reported by
our respondents; moreover, some of them were very confused themselves
as to the amount they had received and could expect in future, so the figures
they gave our interviewer have to be treated with caution.
The confusion of our respondents was not surprising. The Dutch system
is highly regulated, and administered by the Social Insurance bank. More-
over, apart from a very small sum of so-called ‘free’ money, these care users,
who are known as ‘budget holders’, never actually receive the full personal
budget themselves. Their ‘employees’ receive their cash payments directly
from the Social Insurance Bank. The regulation of the system had created
its own dynamic of confusion and frustration. Many respondents complained

about delays in payment of the ‘free’ payments to themselves, and in the
payments to their ‘workers’. There were further complaints about the
complexities of the forms and communications the budget holders received.
The fact that the system was delayed and confusing meant that care could
not be contingent on regular payment. Other factors determining the
presence of care had to be present. Moreover, the administration of the
Dutch scheme had divorced most of the cash transactions from the care
relationship, and the care users were able to name their kin, their friends
and their neighbours as their ‘carers’. Not surprisingly, therefore, all the
care relationships explored in the Dutch sample pre-dated the introduction
of the personal budget scheme and, of all the samples in this study, the
Dutch care relationships most resembled classic, unpaid informal care.
There were thus parallels with some of the Italian and Austrian respondents
where informal relationships had hardly been impacted by the subsidy
payable to the care user. But in the Dutch system, the fact that the payments
were so formalized (the regular arrival of a payslip and a payment into the
carer’s bank account) meant that individuals were well aware that their
relationships had been commodified. In the case of the wife who received
the princely sum of £21,828 a year for caring for her husband whom she
had cared for gratis for 30 years, the topic was something of a joke:
Interviewer: Has it affected the way in which you get on together?

Husband: Not at all.
Wife: He hasn’t fired me yet!
Thus the Dutch data demonstrate a number of paradoxes: first, a generous

system, which this can be, contains within it the seeds of heavy regulation
and intervention to ensure that policy is implemented according to its
original aims and objectives. The regulation in turn means that payments
can be bureaucratically delayed, such that the system is unsuitable for
391
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
those who need to develop a care relationship as urgent need arises.

Instead, the system is most suited to commodification of care relationships
which are already in existence where delays in payment make no difference
to the delivery of care – and thus the final paradox arises: these relation-
ships would, on the whole, exist and be of the same quality whether or not
cash supplement flows from the state.
Hence this policy, as far as we can tell from the small and rural sample
in this study, has very little impact on the labour market. But, as in the
Austrian system supported by Caritas, it does provide a route whereby
caregivers can be assured of their social rights, and reasonable working
conditions (although, when asked, many of them said they would not use
their paid holiday entitlement and, if necessary, they keep on working
when they feel unwell). The future of a system such as this depends on
the support it can command from those who directly benefit – the care
users and the care givers. So long as the scheme remains relatively
generous, and if it can become less confusing and bureaucratic to its users,
then that support will probably remain in place.
5 France: a professionalizing system
The French sample in this study had all been found through a care agency
which was used by elderly care users in receipt of the means tested Presta-
tion Specifique Dependance (PSD). Seven of the ten care users in this
sample were in receipt of the means-tested PSD, and a further three were
in receipt of tax allowances on the grounds that they needed care. A typical
amount of PSD received by these elderly care users was in the region of
£350 a month, which was certainly not enough to employ someone full
time, or even for many hours. It is possible that there is a ‘grey’ sector filled
with migrant labour, as in Italy and Austria, active in the French labour
market for care, who might have been willing to work for an income of this
level. However, given that the French sample was found through contact
with a formal care agency, and the fact that the study took place in a part
of France where there is very limited international migration, it is not
surprising that these features did not emerge in this part of the study.
However, there were two particularly striking features of care work
explored in the French interviews: first, the care workers employed through
the agency were engaged in multiple care relationships, a number of them
working for up to 13 clients whom they visited at least once a day. Second,
most of these workers had a basic care qualification known as the CAFAD,
which had provided them with training, and also, as we shall see, a reflexive
perspective on the work they undertake. In both these features, they are
very different from the workers in Italy, Austria and The Netherlands.
The fact that these care workers were employed by numerous
392
‘employers’ meant that they were engaged in a constant battle with time.
Many of them complained about the difficulty of dealing with so many
employers at once, and how difficult they found it to combine holistic care
(see below) with the exigencies of having to deliver care work at speed:
I asked the question, ‘Until what time are we to work in the evening?’ I was told
‘Usually you should be home by 7.30 at the latest’. Yes, but when I have both
clients . . . Like this evening: I have Mr Morin first. Friday is griddle cake night,
the night on which he eats best . . . so the griddle cakes have to be heated up,
the egg has to be placed on top and everything. . . . I don’t know where he puts
it all! He eats three of them! . . . But it makes him happy. On Friday he treats
himself. You cannot do it in five minutes! Afterwards there is the washing up,
and then he has to be undressed. As I have shopping to do this evening I will
take a quarter of an hour to go to the nearest grocers, it’s more expensive but
what can you do? On Fridays, instead of half an hour it takes a good three
quarters of an hour, plus a quarter of an hour for shopping, that makes one hour’.
These workers are engaged, as we can see from the above quote, in a wide
variety of tasks, including cooking and shopping. They are constantly
moving from client to client, delivering services to them in short bursts.
Their bureaucratically determined time frequently runs contrary to the
body times and the preferences of their elderly ‘employers’. At the same
time, this is a group of workers who have a carework qualification, and
who are highly reflexive on the contradictions of, and boundaries between,
the tasks they undertake:
The profession is not recognized. You are really a cleaner, a housekeeper. Of

course we do all that! But when you allow yourself to wash somebody, do the
shopping, fill in papers . . . you deviate a little from the profession of a cleaner.
Nobody understands.
This sense of not being properly understood was something of a

continuous refrain in these interviews. Many others in the French sample
identified a holistic approach as the distinguishing feature of the work
they do:
We cannot, when the person asks us, takes us by the arm and says ‘come and
see my granddaughter . . .’ you drop everything and go to see her. The rela-
tionship is important. Touch . . . it must not go to extremes but I think that a
slight caress or a pat on the back is important. If you do not have that instinct
to feel things, there is no point, you should find another job.
Such reflexive commentary on the nature of the work was typical of this
group of workers, and it was also clear that, as a group, they are engaged
393
EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
in a boundary dispute with the neighbouring (and better paid) occu-

pational category of ‘care assistant’:
We are not permitted to do dressings, or anything like that. We do not have a

care assistant diploma. If we give any assistance, it is at the request of the doctor
and we can refuse to do it.
Thus the French sample presents a rather different perspective on

carework emerging from ‘routed wages’ systems. In this case a widespread
benefit, available to many, but not at a generous enough level to allow
employers to take on a full time carer, is leading to the development of a
new form of paid carer. The intervention of agencies who recruit and
retain such labour is, as I argued at the start of this paper, likely to lead to
a credentialism which acts as a surrogate for the embedded trust that exists
in care relationships that pre-exist ‘routed wages’. These French care
workers are, I suggest, at the start of the development of a new creden-
tialized occupation. Their claim to unique holism will not be an easy one
to maintain, but it may also be one that manages, eventually, to overcome
the classic health/social care divide that so many of these care worker
respondents refer to. The politics and stability of this system of ‘routed
wages’ is founded on the willingness of the French welfare state to
continue policies of subsidising care users as part of a more general policy
to stimulate low paid employment for women. And the future of that form
of employment and its status lies in the politics of workers who are already
beginning, collectively, to reflect upon the nature of the tasks they do, and
the meanings of those tasks for their employers.
6 Conclusion
This paper began by arguing that certain common impulses and

discourses are driving the substitution of cash for services in modern
welfare states. But the empirical data presented here suggests that the
outcome of these policies, particularly in terms of the impact on the labour
market for care work, varies considerably. These differences are explicable
largely by reference to the internal organization of the schemes them-
selves, and the regulation, or lack of it, the particular cash for care policies
impose on the recruitment and management of caring labour. The differ-
ences in outcome also owe much to the migration regimes of the nations
studied, and the migration contexts of the particular locations in which
the qualitative interviews took place. Similarly the presence of NGOs
involved in the provision of care services, and of entrepreneurial private
care agencies, appears also to have had a major impact on the differential
outcomes identified.
394
As far as the care relationship is concerned, one thing is clear from our
data: successful, intimate care relationships occur within a variety of
managed and unmanaged settings. Both commodified informal carers (as
in The Netherlands) and agency care workers with multiple clients (as in
France) reported high levels of satisfaction and deep levels of frustration.
The provision of care, within the domestic domain provides opportunities
for intimacy and the development and reinforcement of affect; at the same
time, the invisibility of the domestic domain and its enclosed nature can
lead to boredom at best, and exploitation and abuse at worst. The intro-
duction of the cash nexus, sometimes with accompanying occupational
status and hierarchy, into this mesh of risk and opportunity creates a new
context for care, and it remains to be seen, in further analysis, how this
impacts on the care relationship itself.
Acknowledgements
The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Economic
and Social Research Council within the Future of Work Programme,
grant number: L212252080. The author is very grateful to her colleague
Sue Yeandle with whom she co-directed the project as a whole and to
Cristiano Gori and Marja Pijl, who commented on an earlier version of
this paper, and to the research teams listed under Footnote 3 who, through
their commitment to this project, generated the rich data, some of which
is analysed here.
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Clare Ungerson has been Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Sociology
and Social Policy at the University of Southampton, UK, since 1994. She has
conducted research in the area of paid and unpaid care, always within a feminist
perspective and sometimes within a comparative perspective, for the past two
decades. She has become interested in the way in which cash is entering the
informal care relationship, such that policy change is shifting and dissolving the
boundary between paid and unpaid work. This process she has named as the
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generated in an ESRC-funded project within the ESRC Future of Work Programme
for which she was the principal applicant.
Address for correspondence: Professor Clare Ungerson, Division of Sociology and

Social Policy, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton,
Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. E-mail: ceu@soton.ac.uk
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Commodified care work in European Labour Markets

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COMMODIFIED CARE WORK IN

work identified as ‘routed wages’ has developed in many European countries

Recent developments in the funding of care in many European countries

DOI: 10.1080/1461669032000127651 377

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

developed these systems of ‘routed wages’ is concern about the growing

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

a policy adopted to provide services for elderly people in a context where

2 The five-country study

The discussion so far has concentrated on the politics of caregiving, and

classic ‘unpaid work’ (Himmelweit 1995). The introduction of the cash

older cultures of the handling of household resources which place a brake

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

‘Future of Work Programme’. The ﬁve countries under scrutiny are

market in Italy would make a particular contribution to the care work

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

exploratory. We were concerned to investigate the employer/employee

3 Austria and Italy: two unregulated systems

None of the paid care relationships involving a live-in carer had

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

To turn to the employment of foreign labour ﬁrst: the range of cash

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

employment of undocumented foreign care workers in Austria has indeed

Care users too reported high satisfaction. Mrs M, an 86-year-old receiving

payment acted as a form of retention of caring labour. All of these commod-

4 The Netherlands: funding and regulation

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

its own dynamic of confusion and frustration. Many respondents complained

Interviewer: Has it affected the way in which you get on together?

Thus the Dutch data demonstrate a number of paradoxes: ﬁrst, a generous

those who need to develop a care relationship as urgent need arises.

5 France: a professionalizing system

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

The profession is not recognized. You are really a cleaner, a housekeeper. Of

This sense of not being properly understood was something of a

in a boundary dispute with the neighbouring (and better paid) occu-

We are not permitted to do dressings, or anything like that. We do not have a

Thus the French sample presents a rather different perspective on

This paper began by arguing that certain common impulses and

Commodified care work in European Labour Markets UNGERSON

Himmelweit, S. (1995) ‘The Discovery of “Unpaid Work”: the social conse-

Address for correspondence: Professor Clare Ungerson, Division of Sociology and

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