Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20

Migrancy, Gender and Social Class in Domestic

Labour and Social Care in Italy: An Intersectional
Analysis of Demand

Lena Näre

To cite this article: Lena Näre (2013) Migrancy, Gender and Social Class in Domestic Labour and
Social Care in Italy: An Intersectional Analysis of Demand, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies,
39:4, 601-623, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2013.745238

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.745238

Published online: 11 Dec 2012.

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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013
Vol. 39, No. 4, 601
623, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.745238

Migrancy, Gender and Social Class in

Domestic Labour and Social Care in
Italy: An Intersectional Analysis of
Demand
Lena Näre

Since the 1980s, welfare provision in Italy has been dramatically transformed, due to
demographic changes, changes in gender orders and, most importantly, the increased
employment of migrants for domestic and care work. Drawing first on statistical data, I
explore how the intersections of ‘migrancy’ and gender configure in the domestic-work
and social-care sector in Italy. I conclude that, even though gender remains the most
important stratifying factor in this field, migrancy is almost as important. I then explore
the demand for domestic work and the different forms of care work through in-depth
interviews with Neapolitan employers in Naples. I posit that the demand for
housekeepers is a class-specific phenomenon related to a particular life-style, including
the traditional gendered division of labour and a symbolic hierarchy of household tasks
according to which certain jobs are deemed too ‘dirty’ for the ‘madams’, or female
employers. The demand for childcarers, on the other hand, is more connected to Italian
women’s increasing labour participation and men’s absence from caring responsibilities.
However, here, too, social class is not irrelevant. It affects the demand for elderly care in a
slightly different way: the availability of an inexpensive migrant labour force, combined
with state subventions, has made it possible for families from lower social strata to
employ home carers.

Keywords: Domestic Work; Care Work; Social Care; Migrancy; Gender; Italy

Introduction
With increasing gaps in care provision, paid household and care work has become
one of the main migrant occupations in high-income countries in Europe and

Lena Näre is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. Correspondence to: Dr L.
Näre, Department of Social Research/Sociology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 16, Snellmanink 12, 00014
Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: lena.nare@helsinki.fi.

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

602 L. Näre

globally (Lutz 2008a; Moya 2007; Yeates 2009). In many European countries, welfare
services have become dependent on migrant labour*a fact often overlooked in the
debates on migrants being a burden on the welfare state. Giuseppe Sciortino (2004:
112
13) has argued that ‘the configuration of many Western European welfare
regimes is actually a main structural factor behind the enduring demand for unskilled
foreign labor’. This reliance on migrant labour as an integral part of welfare service
provision, especially in the care of the elderly, is especially pronounced in Southern
European countries with familistic welfare arrangements (Bettio et al. 2006;
Cancedda 2001). Mediterranean elderly-care labour markets share a number of
common characteristics, including the informality and irregularity of migrant
workers and privatisation*carers are employed by families and individuals, whilst
public institutional care is scarce (Da Roit 2002; Lyon and Glucksmann 2008; Näre
2011). Concomitantly, traditional forms of domestic service have persisted, and have
even been revived through the increasing availability of a migrant labour force. This
article examines the Italian care and domestic labour markets and how they have
expanded and transformed in general. It also explores the demand for paid household
and care work by drawing on the specific case of Neapolitan employers.
A particularity of the Italian model of welfare is that it largely remains hidden
within the confines of households, making it difficult to evaluate quantitatively (Da
Roit 2002; Gori 2002). In fact, in attempts to depict the dramatic changes in this
labour sector in Italy, it is important to rely on statistical as well as qualitative data. In
this article, I draw on ethnographic data on migrant domestic and care work in
Naples which I collected in 2003
05, as well as on available statistical data. In the vast
literature on paid domestic and care work, relatively little has been written on the
employers of domestic and care workers (Alemani 2004 and Anderson 2007 being
important exceptions). Another fact overlooked in the existing literature is the
continuing co-existence of nationals and migrants in this labour sector*even though
the numbers of nationals have significantly decreased.1 This article seeks to address
these gaps in the literature. I draw on interview data with Neapolitan employers and
examine the positions which migrant workers and nationals hold in these labour
markets. I explore how employers justify their choice to hire nationals and/or migrant
domestic workers and carers. I also analyse how the transition of this labour sector
from a lower-class occupation to a ‘migrant niche’ has occurred in Italy, both
statistically and at the micro level. I employ an intersectional, interpretative,
theoretical framework, which emphasises the importance of taking into account
the interaction of diverse forms of stratifying factors*in this case, differences based
on economic and social class, gender, nationality and migrancy (see, for example,
Brah and Phoenix 2004; McCall 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006 on the intersectional
approach in gender studies).
The interview data consist of 15 thematic in-depth interviews with Neapolitan
employers, all of whom employ or have employed paid domestic and/or care workers
of Neapolitan and/or of migrant origin. Twelve of the employers were from what they
themselves assessed as an upper-middle-class and three from a lower-middle-class
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 603

background*12 women and three men. Their ages ranged from 29 to 80 years. In the
case of elderly care, it is important to distinguish between the employer and the care
receiver, who are not necessarily the same person. Three of my research participants,
one man and two women, were over 65 years old. The man employed a live-in carer
for himself and also handled the paperwork regarding the carer’s employment. One
elderly woman lived with her daughter, who was responsible for the employment of
their current cleaner. However, in the past, the elderly lady had herself employed
cleaners*of both Neapolitan and migrant backgrounds*and the interview
concentrated on the time when she was in charge of household worker employment.
I have included an interview with an 84-year-old woman whose daughter employs a
carer for the woman’s husband, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Although the
old lady was not responsible for the paperwork related to the carer’s employment, she
was considered the main employer of a part-time Neapolitan domestic worker. All the
interviews were transcribed and analysed using a method called ‘reflexive close
reading’ (Watson and Wilcox 2000). The transcripts were read critically and
analytically, with a focus on putting each passage in dialogue with theoretical
concepts.
In the first part of the article, I discuss Italian welfare state transformations at the
macro level. I draw on different sources of statistical data to illustrate how this labour
sector has expanded and evolved in the past decade. In the second part, I explore the
demand for domestic and care workers at the local level, drawing on findings from
my fieldwork in Naples.

Social Care, Domestic Work and Migrancy

Currently, there is a vast body of research on paid domestic work in high-income
countries around the world (see e.g. Andall 2000; Anderson 2000; Constable 1997;
Cox 2004; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Gamburd 2002; Lutz 2008a; Moya 2007;
Parreñas 2001; Yeates 2009). Helma Lutz (2008b: 1) has summarised well what these
various analyses have found to be characteristic of domestic work:

[T]he intimate character of the social sphere where the work is performed; the
social construction of this work as a female gendered area; the special relationship
between employer and employee which is highly emotional, personalized and
characterized by mutual dependency; and the logic of care work which is clearly
different from that of other employment areas.

More-recent research has demonstrated that, although domestic work remains

socially constructed as feminine, it is performed not only by women but also by
migrant men (Näre 2010; Sarti and Scrinzi 2010; Scrinzi 2010). There has been an
important effort by researchers to re-conceptualise domestic and care work as social
care in order to give this kind of labour its proper value (see Kofman, this issue). Re-
conceptualising domestic service as social care is also important in order to
emphasise its connections to the welfare regime.
604 L. Näre

The concept of social care is apt for the analysis of care work provided by migrants
in households, as its roots are in the feminist critique of the invisible everyday care
done by women in households (Sipilä et al. 2003). The concept is also useful as it can
potentially include dichotomised private/public, professional/non-professional and
paid/unpaid aspects of care, and thus account for the heterogeneous and boundless
reality of care and the different sites where care work takes place. According to one
useful definition, social care includes the ‘assistance and surveillance that is provided in
order to help children or adults with the activities of their daily lives’ (Kröger 2003: 3).
However, most policy studies on social care and welfare services continue to overlook
the phenomenon of migrant social care, even though the need to analyse social care
in global contexts has been increasingly recognised (Yeates 2009). For instance, a
comparative study on social care (Sipilä et al. 2003) collapses informal with unpaid
care and formal with paid care, and overlooks paid care within the informal setting of
the household.
However, re-conceptualising all forms of domestic work as social care is
problematic in that, as a general term, it effaces the differences between caring and
much more mundane cleaning tasks.2 Care work differs from cleaning not only in
terms of the actual labour tasks, but especially in terms of the social and moral value
that this labour carries (Näre 2009a). It is crucial to separate social care and domestic
work, although in everyday work practices they might overlap (see Deguili 2007 for a
similar argument). I suggest that it is important to distinguish between the different
forms of care work (care for the elderly, the infirm and children) and domestic work,
as these jobs all have a very different social status and demand very different skills of
the worker (again, see Kofman, this issue). Care work is much more time-intensive
and, in the case of elderly and child care, requires the constant presence of the carer. It
is a type of bodywork (Twigg 2000; Wolkowitz 2006) and involves forms of emotional
labour (Hochschild 1983). Additionally, there are symbolic hierarchies within
domestic work, according to which some tasks are perceived as dirtier and less
valuable than others. In this article, I use the term ‘social care’ when referring to care
of the elderly, of children and/or of the infirm. I use both ‘domestic work’ and
‘household work’ interchangeably when referring to work that involves cleaning and
cooking. I understand both as integral parts of the globalised, privatised organisation
of welfare.
Another concept utilised in this article is that of migrancy. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, migrancy refers to ‘the state or condition of being a
migrant; the existence of a migrant population; migrants as a class or group’. I
understand migrancy as denoting the socially constructed subjectivity of ‘migrant’ (in
the Italian context: immigrato/extra-communitario  non-EU-member), or foreigner
(straniero/a), which is inscribed on certain bodies by the larger society in general and
legislative practices in particular. Very seldom*if ever*is its subjectivity embraced
by ‘migrants’ themselves. Who is categorised as a ‘migrant’ depends on time and
place. Very often the inscribed subjectivity of migrancy is not only attributed to those
who have migrated but also to second- and even third-generation migrants who are
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 605

citizens. Although the boundaries of migrancy are fluid and contingent, as a social
category it has very real effects on people’s lives. In fact, it can be argued that
migrancy has become as important a social category as those classics of the modern
era: gender, social class, ‘race’ and nationality. In this article, migrancy is understood
as an important social category which, together with gender and social class,
constitutes the social forces that stratify labour markets.

From Familism to Globalised, Privatised, Welfare Markets: Transformations of

Gender, Migration and Welfare Regimes in Italy
Paid domestic service is by no means a new phenomenon in Italy or elsewhere, but
rather a typical pre-modern occupation (Sarti 2006). However, domestic labour looks
very different in today’s globalised world than it did in the pre-modern era.
Contemporary forms of domestic service are configured at the intersections of
welfare, gender and migration regimes. Today, international migration has become a
global mass phenomenon, regulated by migration policies and deportation practices
(see, for example, Andrijasevic 2010; De Genova 2010); in Italy, in particular,
migration policies and a lack of regulation supports a particular, familistic welfare
state model.
The Italian welfare state has been shaped by assumptions concerning the role of
family, and gender and generational responsibilities within it. Family has been
understood as an economic unit, with a family head (usually male) who redistributes
income to his dependents, and a caring unit with carers (usually female) who
distribute care within the family intergenerationally (Saraceno 1994: 60). This
familistic welfare regime is characteristic of other Mediterranean countries as well,
and goes hand-in-hand with a high fragmentation of social policies, a low level of
public services and benefits for families with children, and a lack of policies that
would explicitly aim to ease the reconciliation of family life and wage labour (Ferrera
1996; Gonzalez et al. 2000; Trifiletti 1999). In the Mediterranean welfare regime,
families have a fundamental role as welfare-service providers (Esping-Andersen 1996:
51; 2001: 139
40). Within families, women*especially middle-aged women*many
of whom are housewives, bear the main responsibility for caring (Bettio et al. 2006;
Leitner 2003: 355
6). Nowadays, due to transforming gender orders3*especially
women’s changing occupational and educational roles and the ensuing demographic
changes*the foundations of the traditional familism of the Italian and Mediterra-
nean welfare models have eroded.
Changes in Italian women’s occupational roles have occurred slowly and unevenly.
Women’s labour participation increased by 7.8 percentage points during the decade
1997
2007 (ISTAT 2008) but, due to recent economic recession, the employment
rates have decreased. Although women’s current employment rate, 46.1 per cent, is
still significantly lower than the EU average of 58.2 per cent (EUROSTAT 2011; ISTAT
2011), there are regions in North-East Italy where over 62 per cent of women are
working outside the household (ISTAT 2011). Southern Italy lags behind, as less than
606 L. Näre

a third (25.7 per cent in the region of Campania) of women aged 15
64 are regularly
employed (ISTAT 2011). Nevertheless, even in the south, Italian gender roles have
transformed significantly over the past 20 years. There is a significant generational
gap in women’s roles: younger women are more educated and economically
independent than their mothers. This has altered the traditional male-breadwinner
model, and weakened the figure of the single male provider.
The Italian state has done little to meet the needs of working women. There is no
guaranteed childcare coverage for children under the age of two, and only one in ten
(11.3 per cent) of Italian infants under two years old had publicly funded childcare in
2004 (ISTAT 2008: 97, see also Saraceno 2003: 160). Childcare services are unevenly
distributed. In the region of Campania, in southern Italy, the services for infants
under three years are practically non-existent: only 1.5 per cent of children have
publicly funded childcare whilst, in Emilia-Romagna, in the north of Italy, the rate is
27.5 per cent (ISTAT 2008: 97). The situation changes drastically at three years: 88 per
cent of Italian children from that age onwards are in publicly funded childcare
(Meyers et al. 1999: 125). In other words, Italian families with small children and
working mothers are obliged to rely on the help of relatives*usually grandparents*
or to employ a child-minder, very often a migrant worker.
Significant demographic changes have eroded the basis of welfare provision in
Italy. Fertility rates have dropped from an average of 1.6 children per woman in 1981
to 1.41 in 2010 (ISTAT 2008: 23; 2011). In recent years, the rate has increased slightly
from the ultimate low of 1.19 children in 1995, however, 1.41 remains significantly
lower than the EU27 average of 1.59. The fertility rate in the south has dropped even
more dramatically: from 2.08 children per woman in 1985 to 1.35 in 2010 (ISTAT
2011). Concomitantly, life expectancy has markedly increased. Italians have one of
the longest life expectancies in Europe*78.8 years for men and 84.1 years for women
(ISTAT 2011). Whilst, in 1961, less than 10 per cent of the population was over 65
years old, in 2009 it was over 20 per cent (ISTAT 1997, 2011). In fact, Italy (along with
Germany) has the highest population of people over 65 in Europe (ISTAT 2011).
The Italian state has failed to develop public care services for its ageing population.
Public elderly care services include care homes and allowances for the care of the
elderly who are not self-sufficient. Care allowances that are direct cash transfers to
families encourage the marketisation of elderly care. As these allowances have not
been accompanied by other measures to formalise elderly care, they also contribute to
its informality (Gori 2002: 28). Cash allowances are municipal, need-based
subventions, given either to the care receiver or her/his family and used to pay for
private care assistance, or directly to the carer. Not all municipalities have such
measures, and they are more available in the north than in the south of Italy (Gori
2007). Institutional elderly care goes against the Italian ‘culture of care’, according to
which home care is seen as the ideal form (Näre 2009b). This is reflected statistically:
only 2 per cent of people over 65 are in care homes (Polverini et al. 2004: 47, cited in
Lyon and Glucksmann 2008: 115).
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 607

In sum, the continuing familism of the Italian welfare state, combined with
women’s increased labour participation, little help from male partners, dramatic
demographic changes, and a culture that values home care, has lead to the
marketisation of social care in Italy. In other words, Italian families and individuals
need to hire carers*often informally*who, in most cases, are of migrant
background. This brings us to consider the Italian migration regime.
The Italian migration regime is characterised by the important role of informal
labour markets employing migrants, especially in the tertiary sector, a high number
of irregular migrants,4 a heterogeneity of migrant source countries and segmented
labour markets structured by ethnicity and gender (King and Zontini 2000; Näre
2011). However, domestic work can be seen as a special case in labour migration to
Italy. From early on, the need for a foreign labour force in this sector was recognised
and domestic work was one of the few established routes for migration to the country
regularly. Until 1999, a chiamata nominativa (nominative call) system existed for
labour sectors where there was insufficient domestic supply (Andall 2000). Through a
nominative call, a work contract could be established between an employer and a
foreign national. The contracts were organised by Italian mediators, especially
Catholic Church missionaries (Andall 2000; Näre 2007; Parreñas 2001). Since the
abolition of the nominative call system, the only way to arrive in Italy legally as a
worker is through annual planning quotas established in 1997. A significant portion
of these quotas is intended for domestic and care work, reflecting the strong demand
for this work in Italy. In the quota of 2010, 30 per cent of the permits were intended
for domestic and care workers*the main labour sector.
However, annual quotas have been very small compared to labour needs and the
number of migrants irregularly working in Italy. For instance, the quota for 2004 was
only 29,500 people when, at the same time, the annual need for labour was estimated
by the Italian Union of Chambers of Commerce as anywhere between 136,000 and
195,000 people (Censis 2005: 52). The huge discrepancy between the number of
permits released and the requests for stay permits became clear in 2007, when over
711,000 applications were filed for a quota of 170,000 (Polchi 2008). Most of the
applicants were already working in Italy. In 2010, 400,000 requests were filed for
98,080 permits. Of these requests, over 300,000, or two-thirds, were for either
domestic work or elderly care-giving. The large number of applications can be taken
as one indicator of the continuous presence of irregular migrants in Italy, despite the
regularisation campaigns of the past. In fact, planning quotas have come to resemble
amnesties in terms of the large numbers of stay permits released, with the crucial
difference of more complicated procedures, as workers must pretend to reside outside
the country at the time of application. The discrepancy between annual quotas and
applicants is an indication that the Italian legislation is not adequate to deal with
migration.
In sum, the Italian migration regime is characterised by high irregularity, which is
in part induced by the state. This is due to several factors, including the lack of
continuity in legislative measures and measures that do not correspond to the
608 L. Näre

presence of migrants already working in Italy. Permits that are released for only one
or two years, combined with slow renewal processes, make it difficult to stay ‘regular’
(Näre 2011). The insufficient legislative measures are also a good example of state
compliance in creating pools of inexpensive labour by not granting a regular stay
permit to people who have found work in Italy. The continuous presence of irregular
migrants should be borne in mind during the discussion which follows.

The Expansion and Ethnification of Social-Care and Domestic-Work Markets in

Italy
There has been an exponential increase in the sheer number of domestic and social
care workers (DSCWs from now on) in Italy, largely due the increased demand
created by the structural reasons given above. The availability of a relatively
inexpensive labour force, combined with state subventions, has made it possible
for households from a lower-middle-class background to employ migrant labour
(Alemani 2004). According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT),
in less than ten years, during the 2000s, the number of DSCWs increased by almost
500,000 (see Figure 1). Nowadays, 10 per cent of Italian families employ a DSCW in
their home (Censis 2010: 5
6).
Unfortunately, the ISTAT data are not broken down by migrancy or gender. For an
intersectional analysis of these labour markets, we need to turn to data from the
National Social Security Institute (INPS). These data only include those workers
whose employers have registered them with INPS, so they do not give a very realistic
picture of the actual number of people working in this sector. In fact, the data reveal
that there were ‘only’ 943,524 DSCWs registered with INPS in 2009, whilst ISTAT
gives us a very different figure from the same year: 1,538,500 (see Figure 1 and Table 1).

Figure 1. Domestic workers in Italy, 2001
09

Source: ISTAT data from Censis (2010)
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 609

Table 1. Domestic and social-care workers (DSCWs) registered with INPS by ethnic
background, 2006
10

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Migrant DSCWs 342,955 464,033 530,032 782,741 710,938
Italian DSCWs 131,983 133,248 138,201 160,783 160,896
All DSCWs 474,938 597,281 675,413 943,524 871,834
% migrants of all DSCWs 72.2 77.7 78.5 83.0 81.5

Source: INPS: www.inps.it/webidentity/banchedatistatistiche/domestici/index01.jsp.

In other words, about 60 per cent of DSCWs are registered with INPS. If we now
assume that at least 80 per cent of DSCWs are of migrant origin and that there were
1,538,500 DSCWs in Italy (see Table 1), we can conclude that at least 1.2 million
migrants are working in this sector in Italy. Thus, this labour sector is a true migrant
labour ‘niche’ in Italy.
Although INPS data underestimate the number of people employed in this sector,
they give us a good idea of its gender and ethnic composition. First, by looking at
INPS data, we can detect a clear ethnification of social care. Until the early 1980s only
6 per cent of registered DSCWs were of migrant origin (Sarti 2004: 18). In 2006
migrants comprised 72.2 per cent of DSCWs and, by 2009, the percentage of migrants
out of all DSCWs was already 83 per cent. As Table 1 shows, the number of registered
Italian DSCWs remained stable at around 130,000 until 2009, when there was an
increase of over 22,000 native workers. We can speculate that this increase is due to
the reduced employment opportunities for women caused by the recent economic
recession. The number of registered migrant DSCWs has continued to increase from
342,955 in 2006 to 782,741 in 2009. This significant increase in the number of
migrant DSCWs registered with INPS reflects the impact of migration legislation and
regularisation campaigns.
Table 2 shows how the domestic work and social care sector in Italy was segmented
by gender and migrancy. We can see that this is a highly feminised sector: 83.9 per cent

Table 2. Domestic and social-care workers registered with INPS by

gender and migrancy, 2010 (percentage data)
Percent
All DSCWs 100.0
Women 83.9
Men 16.0
Italians
Women 17.4
Men 1.0
Migrants
Women 66.5
Men 15.0

Source: INPS: www.inps.it/webidentity/banchedatistatistiche/domestici/index01.jsp.

610 L. Näre

of all DSCWs were women. However, only a small share of the women were Italian,
compared to the vast majority, who were migrants. The share of Italian DSCWs is even
more marginal when we look at men: only 1 per cent of all DSCWs were Italian men,
whereas 15 per cent were male migrants. Thus, migrancy and gender are both
important social categories that structure the field of private social care, although
gender is a stronger stratifying factor. But these figures also diversify the emblematic
figure of the female migrant domestic worker. There are still ‘native’ women working
in this sector, as well as migrant men (see Näre 2010; Sarti and Scrinzi 2010; Scrinzi
2010). In fact, if we look at the phenomenon at a micro level, there are certain ethnic
groups in which the number of male domestic workers is as high or even slightly
higher than that of female domestic workers. According to INPS data for Naples, there
were slightly more ‘Asian men’ registered as domestic workers (1,872) than there were
women (1,815) (INPS 2010). Based on my fieldwork, I know that most of the ‘Asian’
domestic workers in Naples are from Sri Lanka (Näre 2007, 2010). At the local level,
the gender composition of domestic-work and social-care labour markets can appear
very different than at the macro level. Furthermore, the statistics tell us very little of the
actual work that these different groups of domestic workers do*whether or not
Italian household workers perform similar tasks to migrant workers, and whether or
not they receive similar pay. For this information we need to resort to qualitative data
and take a look at the micro level.
Drawing on interviews with Neapolitan employers, I examine the gendering and
ethnification of this field in Naples. The ethnographic data help to explain the reasons
behind the social processes recounted above and the different types of demand in
domestic work. In the following section, I discuss the demand for household work
and for care work separately.

Exploring The Demand for Household Work: Dirty Work Not for the Signore
In the existing research literature, the demand for paid care and household work is
often explained by women’s increased labour participation and men’s unchanged
domestic roles (see e.g. Anthias 2000: 25
7; Da Roit 2002: 40; Hoskyns and Orsini-
Jones 1994: 11). Although these structural reasons are important in explaining the
demand for domestic workers, they need to be supported by an analysis of cultural
and demographic factors that have eroded the enlarged family models. My
ethnographic research confirmed other findings which show that many households
employ live-in domestic workers even though the female household members are not
engaged in waged work (Anderson 2000; Miranda 2002). Of the 12 female employers
I interviewed, four were housewives who had always employed a household worker. It
can be argued that the demand for household workers remains a phenomenon
related to social class. Letizia, one of my interviewees who is from a working-class
background, confirmed that hiring a cleaner is closely connected to an upper-class
lifestyle: ‘[Hiring a cleaner] is part of the bourgeois mentality, it’s almost
unnecessary’.
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 611

The members of Letizia’s family took turns cleaning and managing the household.
Hiring household workers was particular to the bourgeois classes and often had little
to do with women’s employment. For instance, 74-year-old Signora Bruno had always
employed a household worker, who would do the heavy cleaning in the household so
that the signora could concentrate on the more prestigious tasks of cooking and
caring for the children. In the past, the cleaners she employed were young,
unmarried, Neapolitan women but, at the time of the interview, her daughter
(with whom she lived) employed a Sri Lankan cleaner. I explore the change from
Neapolitan to migrant household and care workers in the next section.
In a similar vein, a young lawyer, Gianluca Amato, explained the reasons why he
and his three friends who shared a flat employed a Sri Lankan cleaner:

It’s a question of laziness and practicality. . . . Because we have all lived at home
until 26 years of age and hence we are not used to [cleaning]. . . . But I am part of
the bourgeois class, so it’s very difficult to find families where children have to work
in the house. I sometimes helped my mother . . . but always very little. It cannot be
seen as a real habit. . . . The girls help a little bit more; they would help in the
kitchen, set the table.

Gianluca raises several interesting issues. First, there is the clear connection between
the demand for household work and social class. Later in the interview he says that,
in bourgeois households, the ‘norm’ is to have a cleaner coming at least three times a
week for half a day. Second, this quote points out the gendered roles in the
household. Boys from higher social classes are exempted from practically all
household work, whilst girls might do a bit. Third, this excerpt also reflects the
status differences within household tasks. Helping in the kitchen and cooking are
considered more prestigious than cleaning, which is generally perceived as dirty work
(Rollins 1985; see also Anderson 2000; Näre 2009b). In his classic text on the
sociology of occupations, Everett C. Hughes examines the different ways in which an
occupation can be considered ‘dirty’:

[An occupation] may be simply physically disgusting. It may be a symbol of

degradation, something that wounds one’s dignity. Finally, it may be dirty work in
that it in some way goes counter to the more heroic of our moral conceptions
(Hughes 1958: 49
50).

Of these three different ways in which work can be considered ‘dirty’*physically,

symbolically or morally*cleaning entails at least the first two. When cleaning, the
worker is physically in contact with dirt; but cleaning is also often seen as
symbolically degrading. It is a very different kind of work compared to cooking,
where the worker is in touch with food, which has high symbolic value.
According to the gendered and class-based divisions of household organisation in
Naples, it is the older married women, the signore, who usually organise the
employment of domestic workers, whilst the husbands, the signori, are quite absent
from the management of the household. The social-class aspect is also clear from the
612 L. Näre

various forms of symbolism related to the employment of household workers*for

example, requests that workers wear uniforms at work and serve at table*or the
common language employers use, such as ‘having’ (avere) and ‘keeping’ (tenere) a
worker. Employers commonly address workers as ‘girl/boy’, ‘woman’ or*in the case
of migrants*‘Pole’ or ‘Ukrainian’ instead of using their first names. Here, Signora
Rizzo and Signora Conti provide examples of the ways in which the employers
commonly spoke about the workers they employed:

First I had a Neapolitan person, because she was my mother’s woman [era la donna
di mia madre], so my mother . . . wanted to help me . . . and she shared her with me.

This first girl was excellent. I have to say that because I have had many more than
ten. I have changed many: one, two, three, five Polish girls (polacche) have taken
turns.

The idioms of ownership and the dismissive forms of address (girl, Poles,
Ukrainians) make apparent how the old-fashioned, almost feudal hierarchies still
exist in paid domestic work. Neapolitan employers discuss the workers they employ
as their property, as people they ‘have’ or ‘keep’, and whom they can divide or
exchange with others. I argue that such expressions reveal a great deal about how the
Neapolitans perceive household work relationships. These relationships are not
perceived as being between an employer and an employee, where the hierarchy
derives from the different contractual positions the parties hold, but as a moral
relationship between a mistress and her servant, in which the hierarchy derives from
absolute status differences between the parties (see also Anderson 2000; Näre 2009a).
In sum, the demand for paid household work has less to do with women’s
increased employment rates than with social class and status. It is closely connected
to an upper-middle-class lifestyle, according to which forms of household work that
are regarded as symbolically and physically dirty are not considered proper for the
signore of the households to undertake (see also Näre 2009b). In these cases, the
tensions between the domestic workers and their employers have the potential to
become very high because of the close proximity of the women and the status
difference between them (Rollins 1985). The demand for domestic workers maintains
and reproduces gendered divisions of labour within households, where men are, for
the most part, exempt from household tasks.

Exploring the Demand for Care Workers: The Ideal Home Care
This study shows that the demand for childcare is related to women’s labour
participation but, as with the demand for housekeepers, childcare is also an upper-
class phenomenon. Migrant live-in workers are often hired for childcare when the
child is a newborn and the mother still at home. Live-in carers also look after the
children of women who do not necessarily engage in wage labour; in families where
the women do work, carers are employed during the holidays.
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 613

As nurseries for children under three years are almost non-existent in Naples and
the Italian paid maternity leave is only five months in total (the norm is two months
prior to birth, three months after), working women are forced to rely on private
childcare for a period of almost three years after the birth of each child.5 If
grandparents are not willing to help with childcare, women usually hire nannies who,
in many cases, are of migrant background.
Signora Capasso is an entrepreneur and, at the time of the interview, was looking
for a live-in nanny when she returned to work after her baby was four months old.
She explained her situation thus:

I suffer so much from leaving A. to someone. I have to return to work and my

husband works. I don’t have my mother and I would never leave him with my
mother-in-law. So I have to hire someone.

Signora Capasso’s options are limited. At the time of our interview she was waiting to
hear back from a Polish woman to whom she had offered 650 euros a month to work
as a live-in nanny. When I asked why she did not hire a nanny only for the hours she
was at work, she explained:

I prefer to have a person notte e giorno because I see my friends who have [full-time
but live-out nannies]. . . one of my friends has a Sri Lankan nanny and she goes
always at six o’clock and [my friend] in any case pays a lot of money . . . and
sometimes in the morning the bus doesn’t come in time, or she has a headache or
toothache, she always arrives late. And my friend is always late from work and she
has to run to get home by six o’clock.

In other words, having a live-in nanny is convenient, as care work demands the
constant presence of the carer and clashes with an employer’s inflexible working
hours. This flexibility would also allow Signora Capasso to take time off from child
care: ‘If one evening I want to go to the cinema or to the hairdresser’s, I can go’.
As childcare is an intensive form of labour that requires the constant presence of
the carer, the demand for nannies did not cease when the parents were on holiday. On
the contrary, the demand for childcare often increased when the children were out
of the nursery, because they had longer holidays than their parents and because the
parents did not want to bear the load of childcare on their own. Signora Marrone,
who is married and, at the time of interview, had two children (two and five years
old), explained that working women had to organise the summer holidays as follows:

You have three options when school finishes. Either you put them in these summer
camps (. . .) or send them to the grandparents somewhere and you go back and
forth or you have separate holidays with your husband. This year I chose the [third
option].

The Marrone family had rented a holiday home on one of the islands in the Bay of
Naples. The Polish nanny who was working with them in their home in Naples was
614 L. Näre

also going back to Poland for the month of August, so Signora Marrone had decided
to pay for a Neapolitan nanny to help her and her husband during their holidays.
Signora Marrone explained her reasons for hiring help:

M: Because [the children] are of different ages. He is two and she is five, so he
cannot be all the day [on the beach] and I cannot leave her alone. I don’t know,
maybe I could see if I can have both of them by myself. If for instance, I need to
make her come back from the sea and she wants to stay. And especially in August
when my husband is alone. He cannot care for them on his own.
L: Why not?
M: Maybe he could, but he gets too tired. They have to be also a bit our holidays
too.

This quote illustrates three points. First, the idea that the individual needs of the
children (to stay on the beach/leave the beach) would not be met unless both had an
individual carer. Second, the perceived inability of the father to take on the care
responsibility all by himself. Although Signora Marrone contemplates the possibility
of caring for both of her children on her own, she is sure that her husband could not.
Third, caring for one’s own children is perceived as hard work. The end of the excerpt
is telling. As care work is a physically and emotionally demanding form of labour that
requires the constant presence of the carer, it would be no holiday for the parents if
they had no outside help.
Signora Marrone’s interview is consistent with those of Neapolitan employers who
pay for childcare. It shows that the demand for childcare does not cease when the
parents are on holiday. On the contrary, many migrant workers in my study reported
increased workloads during the holiday season. In fact, in previous years, the
Marrone family have relied on the help of the grandparents as well as their nanny to
manage childcare during the summer holidays. Employing live-in nannies, as Signora
Capasso and the Marrone family did, allowed the parents maximum freedom when
on holiday.
What about the demand for elderly care? As the population ages, there has been a
significant increase in the demand for elderly care in Italy. Employing migrant
workers has become the most convenient and inexpensive way to address this
demand. Home care provided by live-in migrant carers and partially covered by
municipal care allowances has become the most common way of organising elderly
care in Italy. This set-up frees the adult children, especially the women, from caring
responsibilities while, at the same time, conforming to culturally accepted notions of
ideal home care (Näre 2009b). This is how Signora Monti and Signora Conti
discussed their options for organising elderly care:

Think about these public care homes. I don’t know if you have read about these
care homes that are inspected by surprise and [the old people] are all abandoned.
Although these [migrant] care workers are not professionals it is a better option
than this absolute abandonment in these care homes.
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 615

In Italy the care homes are either private and very luxurious and so for very rich
people, like hotels, and there you are quite well. But they cost 2,000
2,500 [euros]
per month . . . for a care home that is almost acceptable. Otherwise like for this aunt
of mine, we paid one million lira [app. 500 euros] a month from her pension . . .
and she was in two care homes that were horrible.

What emerges from these quotes is the widespread cultural preference for home
care for the elderly. According to Signora Conti, even the most expensive private care
homes are only ‘almost acceptable’. Even though most migrant workers do not have
formal qualifications for care work, they are preferred over institutional care*at least
in its public form. What also becomes clear from these quotes is that the choice of
public (bad) and private (good) institutional care is class-related. Only wealthy
people can afford decent private institutional care, whereas the low wages paid for
migrant home-care workers is state-subsidised to the extent that even people with
low pensions can afford live-in carers.

The Choice Between Native or Migrant Workers: Flexible and Inexpensive

Migrants
As discussed earlier, women’s labour-market participation rate is much lower in
southern than in northern Italy. In Naples, women’s employment is low even for the
south; only 22.7 per cent of 15- to 64-year-old women were regularly employed in the
province of Naples in 2009 (ISTAT 2009). However, these figures do not take into
consideration informal labour (ISFOL 2007). In Naples, where women’s employment
opportunities are limited, domestic work remains a possible occupation for working-
class women (see also Colombo 2007). Nevertheless, even in Naples there has been an
ethnification and internal hierarchisation of this labour sector. It is these hierarchies
that I examine next.
Most of the employers I interviewed in Naples had taken on Italian household
workers in the past, and many employed both Neapolitan and migrant workers at the
time of the interview. Without exception, Neapolitans were employed for half-day
cleaning and/or cooking or sometimes as babysitters, whereas live-in elderly carers
were all of migrant background. Some employed two part-time cleaners, a Neapolitan
and a migrant and, in such cases, a Neapolitan cleaner could be used to substitute for
a live-in carer’s afternoon off.
The transition from a Neapolitan to a migrant worker often happened when the
demand for domestic work and/or social care increased. For instance, Signora Russo
employed a Neapolitan cleaner for 20 years for part-time cleaning until her elderly
mother moved in with her. At this time she ‘started to take these foreign people’ (Ho
iniziato a prendere queste persone straniere) as live-in workers: first Sri Lankans and
then, more recently, Ukrainians. At the time of the interview, Signora Russo was
employing a Ukrainian live-in carer for her elderly mother and a Sri Lankan cleaner
who would come once a week to do the ‘heavy cleaning’ in the house.
616 L. Näre

Often the change from an Italian household worker to a migrant worker was
brought about by a sudden change, e.g. the birth of a baby or the hospitalisation of an
elderly family member, followed by a need for intensive home care. In both instances,
the demand for care is full-on, 24 hours a day, or notte e giorno, which is the apt
Italian term for live-in care work. As Italians are not willing to be live-in workers,
many employers hired migrant workers.
In Maria Napolitano’s family, the need to hire a migrant live-in domestic worker
came about due to her mother’s sudden accident and subsequent physical
deterioration. The mother fractured her hip and, due to an operation which went
wrong, became partly disabled. Signora Napolitano first employed Italian nurses to
assist her mother during the night. However, employing Italians was too expensive.
Ten years ago the family paid 80,000 lire (around 40 euros) per day for two nurses.

When we realised that the situation did not get better, but that we had to employ a
person to assist with washing in the evenings and mornings when we (children)
were already working. . . . Then we started employing these Polish girls at first . . .
and then continued with Ukrainians.

When Signora Marrone had her first child, for the first year she worked part-time
and employed a Neapolitan nanny. However, when she started working full-time, she
resorted to a Polish nanny who moved in with the family, as the demand for care
increased and the Neapolitan nanny only accepted work in the mornings. The Polish
nanny stayed for two years, until the first child started nursery at three years old.
Signora Marrone then only needed help with the cleaning. This time she hired a Polish
cleaner in the afternoons. When Signora Marrone had her second child and the
demand for care increased, she again hired a live-in nanny, this time a Ukrainian
woman.
Many of the Neapolitan employers I interviewed chose migrant workers for the
same reasons as Signora Capasso, who had employed a carer for her elderly father
and, at the time of interview, also employed a cleaner from Sri Lanka:

I, in fact, tried to speak with a Neapolitan cleaner, before finding Antonio [the Sri
Lankan cleaner], but she told me that on Saturday she goes away for the weekend
and in the mornings can’t be here at eight o’clock. At that point, what am I
supposed to do? Migrants are more flexible, they do things that Neapolitans don’t
want to do anymore, and you can pay them less.

Whilst Neapolitans manage to negotiate working terms that enable them to

combine their own reproductive duties with social care labour, migrant workers are
expected to be as flexible as possible with working hours. Moreover, whilst Italians
very rarely accept live-in work, for migrants live-in work is often an ‘entry job’;
workers move on to hourly jobs when they have acquired sufficient language skills
and learnt domestic and care work (Näre 2011).
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 617

In the international division of reproductive labour, migrant workers have little

choice but to accept jobs that demand flexible hours, and to work such long hours
that it would take two Italians to do the job a migrant worker has to do:

For months I was looking for an Italian person. When I found one, she would have
worked with a rhythm suitable for a person who continues to ‘live’ [sic]. So you
would need two people to do the same work (Signora Caruso).

It is rather telling that the Italian caregiver Signora Caruso found only accepted
work on terms that allowed her to continue ‘living’*that is, to have a private life
outside work. In other words, the common terms of live-in work performed by
migrants in Italy*with only Sundays and Thursday afternoons off*conflict with
normal ‘living’. This acknowledgment of the harsh conditions of live-in work did not
stop Signora Caruso in her search for a migrant live-in carer. I return to this issue of
creating a double standard for migrants and Italians in more detail shortly.
In the rare cases where Italians accept live-in work, they are able to negotiate wages
that double or even triple those paid to migrant carers:

A Neapolitan nurse, you have to pay 25 euros an hour, so it is not possible to pay
such an expense. My friend had two Neapolitans who alternated, 24 hours one day
and then 24 hours’ rest. . . . And he paid them 2,000 euros each. . . . But these are
very rich people, I could not have done the same (Signora Capasso).

In fact, Signora Capasso found a Polish male nurse to care for her father. However,
she did not economically reward his skills and professional background. He was
initially paid 600 euros a month, which was then augmented to 800 euros for working
as a live-in professional nurse. Signora Capasso admitted that the pay did not
correspond to the wages a Neapolitan nurse would receive, but she explained the pay
discrepancy:

But think that, every three months, he went back home for two weeks, all paid. At
Christmas and [in the] summer his family came to ours. . . . And he lived with us, in
the sense that in the evenings he went out with us, the weekend he was with us. We
didn’t pay him much but he was at home, he could do what he wanted. . . . He
accepted the fact [that we didn’t pay him much] because he was able to do what he
wanted. Because in the end it was convenient for everyone. Often we gave him extra
money just like that or we took him out for dinner. We went to the spa and he came
with us. It was a relationship between friends. . . . He was part of the family.

This quote from the interview with Signora Capasso is a telling example of what
can be termed a moral economy of paid domestic work (Näre 2009a; see also Hess
and Puckhaber 2004; Keough 2006; Parreñas 2008). The economic and contractual
nature of employer
employee relationships is replaced by familial and moral notions.
Here, Signora Capasso stresses that the pay discrimination they practiced was
justifiable because it was ‘convenient’ for all parties; as a live-in worker he was ‘at
home’ and free (he could do what he wanted) and they offered him extra treats. What
618 L. Näre

Capasso leaves out is that ‘the home’ he had was with the bedridden father who
suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and that, in practice, his caring duties did not stop
during the night.
What emerges from the employer interviews is that ‘foreignness’, the subjectivity of
that of an extra-comunitario (non-EU-national, or migrant) or straniero (foreigner/
stranger), was perceived as being so different that the person did not need to receive
equal treatment (see Anderson 2007 for similar findings). The different treatment of
migrant and Italian workers was tangible when we discussed possible problematic
aspects of paid domestic work as a job. In many cases, although employers were aware
of problems related to hiring Italian domestic workers, they did not acknowledge the
same problems if we were discussing migrant workers’ status in a parallel situation.
For instance, when Signore De Filippo discussed an Italian live-in domestic worker, a
so-called governante (housekeeper) who used to live with his grandparents, he
described the situation of live-in workers in the following way:

It was a very common thing at least until end of the [Second World] War but it was
characteristic of the past era, the nineteenth century, that the domestic was part of
the family. And [she] lived there with a room of her own . . . but she didn’t eat with
the family but had to serve at table and had only one day free a week. . . . Now from
this distance in time, it strikes me, this thing. I don’t think that it’s positive. . . . The
person is some kind of hybrid, not a family member but not a stranger.

However, when I asked about whether it was the same situation for live-in domestic
migrant workers, De Filippo did not see any parallels:

The housekeeper of the nineteenth century had a subaltern role and stayed with the
family for years and did not have a life of her own. Instead these migrant workers
perform domestic services.

It was common for Neapolitan employers to use the perceived naturalised

difference of the foreigner as justification for lower pay (‘In their countries it is a
lot of money’) and for longer working hours (‘They are used to working hard’), and
also as an explanation for the common employment of migrant carers and cleaners in
general. This is how Signora Gatti explained why she had employed Polish carers for
her elderly mother:

I think it is in their tradition to have this habit of caring for the elderly. Because
they still have that family form that we used to have. An extended family where the
grandparents are present in the homes.

Signora Gatti places Poles in the traditional past, whilst Italians are situated in the
modern present. This allochronic representation (cf. Fabian 1983) of migrant workers
belonging to a past era was widely diffused in Naples. Such perceptions enforced the
idea of migrants being ‘naturally’ more inclined towards caring work. If migrant
workers were ‘naturally’ caring, it was also more understandable that their work did
 Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 619

not need to be remunerated as highly as the work Italians did (similar findings were
brought up already in the early feminist literature on migration*see, for example,
Morokvasic 1984). This reasoning overlooks the fact that the Italian ‘modern’ lifestyle
in many cases required the presence of migrants in pre-modern occupational roles.

Conclusions
This article has examined how, since the 1980s, the care and domestic labour markets
in Italy have transformed from markets employing nationals from a lower social
background to ones dominated by migrant workers. What emerges from this analysis
is how migrancy*understood as the constructed subjectivity of the migrant as a
stranger and a foreigner*and gender are interconnected as constitutive factors in
this labour sector. These intersections are crucial in the transformation of the Italian
arrangements for social care from a familistic to a global familistic welfare system,
where care services are bought and sold on informal labour markets.
Italy has seen a significant increase in the number of families and individuals
employing DSCWs privately, to the extent that care-worker employment, especially
elderly care, has been called the new ‘Italian model’ of welfare provision (Dell’Oste
2007). Underpinning this Italian model of welfare are state subsidies and the
availability of a pool of relatively inexpensive migrant labourers. The intersectional
analysis of the statistical data revealed that gender and migrancy weigh almost equally
in the domestic and social-care sector: almost 90 per cent are women, and almost 80
per cent of migrant background. Whilst Italian men are practically absent from this
labour sector, there is a small but increasing portion of DSCWs who are migrant
men. Amongst certain nationalities, such as Sri Lankans, there may even be slightly
more men working as registered DSCWs than there are women. In other words,
migrancy is transforming traditionally female labour sectors, such as domestic and
social care. The implications of this finding are (at least) two-fold. First, and more
generally, we should include migrancy as a powerful, stratifying social category
alongside the classic social categories of gender, nationality and social class. Second,
and more specifically, we need more research on how migrancy is transforming other
labour sectors at both the high and the low ends of job hierarchies.
This article has also examined how these macro-level transformations appear at the
micro level, particularly from the employers’ perspective. One of the starting-points
has been to analyse the demand for domestic labour separately from that of care
work. When exploring the processes of the ethnification of this labour sector from
below*that is, by analysing the increased demand for DSCWs*it is clear that social
class counts significantly in the case of the employment of domestic workers.
However, social class is also an important factor when it comes to the demand for
childcare, as many women who do not work nevertheless employ child-carers, even
live-in nannies, and when middle-class families are on holiday they often require help
with childcare. In the case of elderly care, on the other hand, the employment of
620 L. Näre

migrant carers allows people from lower social classes to have access to the ideal form
of care*home care.
In the international division of care labour the increased employment of migrant
workers in caring and domestic jobs for lower wages is radically transforming welfare
provision. It is also changing social-class structures and cultures of care in countries
such as Italy. The familistic care culture that, in the past, was based on women’s free
labour has now been transformed into an ethnically hierarchical care culture. In these
new forms of care culture, the stereotypes and perceptions of foreigners as strangers
(stranieri) who are inherently different and coming from the past function to justify
diverse forms of wage discrimination and pre-modern modes of domestic service.
These findings correlate with similar research findings on how pre-modern labour
relations and patriarchal structures sustain current globalisation processes (see e.g.
Wallerstein and Smith 1992; Yeates 2009).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the JEMS reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Notes
[1] Asher Colombo (2007) has questioned this argument by drawing on survey data from 2003,
according to which 2.5 per cent of Italian families reported having hired foreign workers,
whilst 5.2 per cent reported having hired Italian workers. It is questionable, though, whether
these results are reliable, especially as, in the early 2000s, the vast majority of migrant workers
were employed illegally. Also, the survey data say very little about the differences between the
types of job performed by migrants and those performed by Italians.
[2] I am indebted to Sirpa Wrede for pointing this out.
[3] By gender order I mean gendered arrangements and patterns of power relations between
masculinities and femininities within a specific societal context (Connell 1987).
[4] Irregularity remains a big issue in Italy although there have been efforts to regularise
migrants through amnesties in 1986; 1990; 1995; 1998, 2002 and 2009 and through yearly
planning quotas (since 1997). During the amnesty of 2009, aimed at migrants working in the
domestic and social care sector, almost 300,000 irregular immigrants received a stay permit.
[5] Maternity leave can be extended up to 11 months between the two parents during the first
eight years of the child’s life. However, most of my informants perceived this as economically
unfeasible for them.

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