Comprehending Care in Relation to

Power:
Power, Privilege and Globalized care
CLASCO
Joan Tronto, University of Minnesota
Review what we know about care:
• A vital part of human life, but its role is often unacknowledged in
philosophical, political, economic discourses.
• Is this a normative or an empirical claim? Or both?

• Why has care been so thoroughly discounted?

• Lower status people means care is discounted OR

• Care is discounted and therefore those associated with care become
lower status
Power: useful analysis for empirical work
• Hankivsky: 4 ways to think about power and care
• 1. dominant authority has made care relatively marginal

• 2. power relations exist within care relations

• 3. care work is shaped by state power in national and international contexts

• 4. power within institutions affects how those institutions can deliver care
Another dimension of power: Privileged
Irresponsibility (Tronto)
• Spiderman ethics: Uncle Ned to Peter Parker: “With great power
comes great responsibility.”
• Real life: with great power comes the ability to shun responsibility

• “Those who are relatively privileged are granted by that privilege the
opportunity simply to ignore certain forms of hardships that they do
not face.” (Tronto, Moral Boundaries, pp. 120-121
Bozalek’s example
• Social work class in South Africa where students were asked to draw their own
neighborhoods and where they thought they would be working as social workers

• White Students came to see their prejudices in how they conceived of where Blacks
lived and their own privilege

• Bozalek p. 54:
• “in South Africa, historically and also currently to a large extent the needs of one group
of people (whites) have been regarded as important and have been serviced by the
needs of another group of people (blacks). Through othering and inferiorising blacks into
homogenized categories of ‘maids and factotums’, whites were assured that an
extended population, designated specifically to provide services for them and meet their
everyday needs, would be available.”
• (What did the Black students learn?!??)
Care as natural and privileged irresponsibility
• If people think that the way they care is right or natural, it makes it
more difficult for them to see power imbalances
Global Care Work
• “Care Crisis” “exists” everywhere in the “global North”; that is, there
are unmet needs for care workers
• Both in the geographical “North”
• In places in the geographical “South” that are also really “North”

• (What assumptions are built into this statement already?)

• In places with high unemployment, e.g., Italy, there is still a large demand for
care workers
• The care worker needs of the global North deserve to be met

• What happens in the global “South”?

Jody Heymann
• dangers to families where families are doing too much work

Heymann, Jody. 2006. Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working
Parents in the Global Economy. New York: Oxford.
Heymann, Jody, and Kristen McNeill. 2012. "Families at Work: What We Know About Conditions Globally." In
United Nations Expert Group Meeting. New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development,.
Dimensions of the situation
• Private and institutional care structures use global workers:

• child-care/domestic work in households,

• various forms of dependent people in institutions and households through
state support;
• care for elderly in their homes and in institutions;
• hospital care;
Plight of workers
• Rhacel Parreñas: “partial citizenship”

• Subject to exploitation
• Hayes, Lydia J. B. 2017. Stories of care: a labour of law: gender and
class at work. London: Palgrave.
• Policies favor employers over workers (e.g., reporting abuse?)
• Bubeck’s general point about exploitation
Plight of the cared-for
• Care workers are marginal, high levels of turnover,

• Most of the institutions (e.g., elderly care in the USA) are organized to
make a profit not provide excellent care

• Standards for good care are lax

• See Lisa Eckenwiler, Long Term Care, Globalization, and Justice (2011)
Private exploitations
• Frequently asked to perform difficult tasks
• Subject to abuse
• Frequently not paid
• Treated as “a member of the family” and not
• (revisit Tronto, “The Nanny Question”)
A frequent frame of analysis:
“Global care chains”
• Global care chain defined:
• Arlie Hochschild: “a series of personal links between people across
the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring.” (quoted in
Robinson p. 65)

• Both strengths and limits of the concept:

• Strengths: makes a strong implicit normative argument that appeals
to women as Mothers
• Weaknesses: it focuses too much on personalized relationships and
limits the agency of the migrants
Structural Elements behind the Global Care
Chain
• Receiving nations
• Sending nations often incentivize leaving:
• Remunerations (but Withers, not so profitable really)
• Training
• Recruiters

• But—doesn’t each person make their own decision?

Thinking about “choice”
• What choice do people have??
• Neoliberal accounts say that the choices are free, but are they?

• What frequently happens to the children left behind is that they are
left in precarious situations, sometimes even to care for themselves
(Robinson)

• National borders are difficult to cross; can the rest of the family
come?
Migrant care workers fight back
• In recent years, many organizations have emerged:

• Some fight for rights and changes in status

• Some fight for cultural opportunities to connect with others

Questions:
• Servants have existed before, but the scope and scale of globalized care makes the problems worse

• Historically, in some locales, local supply of servants in households for a part of their lives, not a permanent status?
• Local knowledge would prevent or control some forms of abuse?
• Now, consider: what happens to workers as they become older or ill?

• Glenn’s distinctions (last time): forced to care because of status obligation v. racialized, gendered, servitude.
• Do the two models require the same solution?

• What are the solutions to these problems?

• What would a just regime in providing for care workers look like?
Justice and Care, again
• No care, no justice

• No justice, no care

• Next time: a political analysis