MIGRATION STUDIES VOLUME 5  NUMBER 3  2017  356–368 356

Care as a fictitious commodity:

Reflections on the intersections

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of migration, gender and
care regimes
Helma Lutz

Goethe University Frankfurt, Institute of Sociology, Theodor W. Adorno Platz 6, Frankfurt, DE-60629, Germany.
Email: lutz@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Abstract
Over recent decades, migrant care and domestic work in private households has
evolved into an extensive global market. In the European context, the analysis of
(national) welfare regimes rarely acknowledges the repercussions of this development.
I will discuss the term welfare regime as introduced by Gøsta Esping-Andersen from an
intersectional gender and migration perspective and suggest an amendment of the
regime concept which critically scrutinizes both the de- and the re-commodification of
labor area. In addition, I will use Nancy Fraser’s pressing question, of whether society
can be commodities all the way down, to call into question the neoliberal understand-
ing of the state-family-market triangle. I argue that where a market gains the upper
hand and care is considered as a fictitious commodity (Polanyi), this will have serious
(unwanted) effects for the development of society and its reproduction.

Keywords: sociology, anthropology, gender studies, gender and migration

1. The global care market

Today a phenomenon called transnational ‘care migration’ accounts for the worldwide
increasing feminization of migration. During the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the demand for care workers grew exponentially—in the industrialized states of the
Western world and in the middle and upper class households of Asia (India, Singapore,
Hong Kong etc.), the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.), and Central and
Latin America. The International Labour Organization’s estimate for 2013 estimated that a
total of 52.6 million people worldwide were employed in private households, of which 83
per cent were women (ILO 2013: 32). However, the report mentions that given the inad-
equacy of the sources used, the figure could have been as high as 100 million (ILO 2013).
A report published in 2015 speaks of 67.1 million in total, of whom 73.4 per cent are women

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 CARE AS A FICTITIOUS COMMODITY  357

(ILO 2015). The majority of these workers are employed in their home country, and many
of them are internal migrants (for example in China). The number of international migrant
domestic workers is therefore smaller: 8.5 million women and 3 million men (ILO 2015).
Nevertheless, it is quite clear that data collection in this sector is weak and that no reliable

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figures are available. One indication of the inadequacy of the ILO’s data is the numbers of
workers given for Europe. For Northern, Southern and Western Europe the number of
migrant women working in the sector is calculated at 1.8 million (ILO 2015: 5, 6, 17); this is
odd, as estimates suggest that in Italy alone the number of registered domestic workers is
900,000, 85 per cent of whom are migrants. According to research funded by the Italian
Ministry of Labor, the total number of migrants working in Italian households is about 1.5
million. One Italian household out of ten employs a migrant as a domestic help, baby-sitter,
or care worker with the elderly (see Ambrosini 2013).
Although some scholars identify a growing presence of male domestic and care workers
in private homes (Sarti and Scrinzi 2010; Palenga-Möllenbeck 2016), the vast majority is
still female. Most female care workers migrate directly into a household in a richer country
or into a wealthy family’s home in less affluent countries, and often their new workplace is
also their place of residence (live-in workers, 24-hour care givers).
Reasons for the growth of this sector include the withdrawal of the (welfare) state from the
institutional provision of care and the introduction of ‘cash for care’ policies into private
households (as in Europe), and the absence of state involvement in general (USA). As a result,
care provision becomes part of a privatized employment sector, which is not subject to any
(state) control (Williams 2010). Some regions and states treat the recruitment of female
migrant care workers as a core element of a national labor market policy designed to
enable female citizens to engage in waged work, for example in Singapore (Teo 2014), or
less explicitly in the USA and Canada (Michel and Peng 2012).
These global trends are described as ‘a new international division of reproductive labor’
by Parreñas (2001), and as a ‘new world domestic order’ by Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001).
Taken together, these developments show that in many European countries as much as in
the USA, Canada, Singapore and in most of the global cities, middle-class women and men
have entered what Jacqueline Andall (2000) has called the ‘post-feminist paradigm,’ recon-
ciling family and work by outsourcing (parts of) their care work to migrant women. The
presence of migrants willing to do this work does in fact help them to balance work and life
and to cushion their gendered responsibilities. In addition, the outsourcing of care respon-
sibilities to another woman working in the private home leaves the gendered division of
care work in the families intact.
In Europe, the vast majority of ‘old’ Europe’s care migrants come from Eastern Europe, and
this leads to East–West migration. It also involves a differentiation within Eastern Europe, that
is, East–East migration with Moldavian, Georgian, and especially Ukrainian and Belarusian
women working in wealthy upper and middle class homes in the booming cities of Poland and
the Czech Republic. At the same time Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Latvian
women from rural areas are employed in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the UK, and
Austria (see Krzyz_owski 2013; Leon 2014; Cox 2015; Urbańska 2015).
Given its high demand for home care workers for the elderly, Germany is one of the main
receiving countries of care workers from Eastern Europe (see Metz-Göckel, Norokvasic and
Münst 2008; Satola and Schywalski 2016; Lutz and Palenga Möllenbeck 2010, 2011, 2014).
358  H. LUTZ

However, in the debate about welfare regimes, in Germany as in most of Europe, care
migration is almost completely invisible.

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2. Welfare regimes: (de)commodification
In his influential book on welfare capitalism, Esping-Andersen (1990) introduces the term
‘regime’ as a way of referring to the organization and corresponding cultural codes of social
policy and social practice where the relationship between three social actors, the state, the
(labor) market and the family, is articulated and negotiated. Key to his concept is the notion
that national welfare regimes vary in the degree to which they de-commodify labor, mean-
ing that ‘a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a
livelihood without reliance on the market’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 22).
This social entitlement to de-commodification helps citizens to avoid submission to
market dependency. The recognition of the state’s responsibility for social protection leads
back to the Socialist utopians of the nineteenth century (Engels, Marx, Bebel and Liebknecht),
although it was Otto von Bismarck (Chancellor of the German Reich) who, between 1883 and
1889, implemented the first national system for employment and social security legislation.
That system is now recognized as a pioneer model for national welfare state arrangements
(health insurance, accident insurance, insurance for old age and disability, etc.).
When, in 1990, Esping-Andersen compared the various welfare state regimes in Europe
that had expanded the original number of social rights over the past 100 years, he based his
analysis on the notion that a state was providing to its legal national citizens a protection zone
from the logics of the market; while the family and partly the state remain outside of it, the
logic of commodification can be reduced to the sphere of the (labor) market. In his typology
of welfare regimes (the liberal, the social democratic and the conservative) Esping-Andersen
demonstrates that the relationship between state, family and market varies over time, space
and institutional framing. Gender studies scholars (Lewis 1992; Ostner 1994; Sainsbury 1994;
Jenson 1997; Duncan 2000) reviewed this model, as it not only reduces labor to so-called
‘productive’ labor in gainful employment but simultaneously renders invisible unpaid labor
in the private realm, which ultimately leads to a glorification of the family as a location
untouched by market logic. Instead, the critics suggested that care and care work need to be
considered the central element of welfare state regulations. Care regimes are gendered and
European care regimes can be symbolized by a sliding scale, ranging from a conservative
gender regime (male breadwinner—female housewife) at one end to equality (double carer—
double earner) at the other. Jane Lewis (1992) differentiates between ‘strong,’ ‘modified’ and
‘weak’ breadwinner states. Meanwhile, the intersectionality of care and gender regimes focus-
ing on the distribution of care between the genders has become a key notion for the under-
standing of welfare regimes (see Esping-Andersen 2009).
However, there are new challenges to this concept. Within the European Union, the
‘reconciliation of personal, family and work life’ policy focusing on the dismantling of
hurdles that keep women from combining employment and care work is high on the
agenda. While care work is no longer purely seen as a ‘natural’ job performed by
women, the question of how states have become actors in facilitating this transformation
process has yet to be resolved. Although some European states have a record of providing
 CARE AS A FICTITIOUS COMMODITY  359

public services for children, the elderly and the disabled through subsidies for care work
(parental leave, crèches, elderly care and nursing homes), neo-liberal welfare state restruc-
turing now seems to be leading to a market-driven service and a serious decline of state-
provided social care services. The shift to so-called ‘cash for care’ payments in Europe since

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the early 1990s covers different forms of allowances, in the form of cash or tax credits and
incentives, designed to help finance care services provided by relatives or by migrant
nannies, domestic and care workers (Williams 2009: 17f.).
As the presence of migrants is now becoming increasingly important for understanding
welfare states’ care systems, I will turn to what I consider a necessary amendment of welfare
regime theory, the inclusion of migration regimes.

3. Re-commodification through migration regimes

Migration regimes determine rules for non-nationals’ entry into and departure from a
country. Based on the notion of the economic, social and cultural desirability of in-migra-
tion they decide whether migrants are granted employment, social, political and civil rights,
and whether or not they are given access to settlement and citizenship. Migration policies in
the European Union have been dominated by labor market needs, and gender norms were
always deeply inscribed in the definition of these needs. A good example is the West
German ‘guest worker’ system (1955–73), which was started not because of a general
shortage of workers but because of the welfare state’s preference for the ‘housewife mar-
riage’ which could only be continued by recruiting (male) workers from abroad, instead of
encouraging German women to enter the workplace. The entry of migrant care workers to
private households is another indication that changes in welfare and gender orders are
connected to migration regimes. Now, the ‘work-life balance’ and the ‘adult-worker model’
(Lewis 1992) in the European Union require the presence of female citizens in the labor
market while the necessary redistribution of care tasks between the genders in households
has not taken place. On the contrary, in most states, employment politics and pension
systems encourage all employable adults to work full time. While in most of the EU, with
the exception of the East European member states, state arrangements for child care have
become the important element of ‘social investment policies’ (see Jenson 2010), in Western
and Southern Europe migrants keep filling the growing ‘care gap’ for the elderly. The
German case, for example, reveals that care for the elderly is based on the premise that
elders prefer to be cared for by family members and the state reinforces the cultural desire
that care should be provided by the family at home. In 1990 a long-term care insurance
system was introduced where family members caring for their old and frail (grand-)parents
receive transfer payments which are a fraction of the payment nursing services receive and
are in no way a compensation for the loss of a salary. Allowances going to home-caring
family members are not monitored with regard to how this money is spent. In particular,
kin-carers who are coevally full-time employees turn to transnational placement agencies
offering migrant care givers from Eastern Europe; the result is a rapidly growing and mostly
uncontrolled market where state payments to kin are enhanced by private spending on the
appointment of a live-in migrant (Karakayali 2009; Theobald 2009; Lutz and Palenga-
Möllenbeck 2010, 2014; Satola and Schywalski 2016). Although this arrangement has
360  H. LUTZ

often been exposed in German newspapers and in television and radio programs over the
last 15 years, so far the government has not reacted. This supports the assumption that
official ignorance is intentional, as other options would be a strain on the national budget.
The German state is turning a blind eye to illegal employment practices by exempting

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private households from law enforcement (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010). This com-
plicity is an expression of changing cultural norms where, on the one hand, women who
were formerly considered the ‘natural’ care-givers for frail and older family members have
entered the work place, which reduces their availability at home, and on the other hand a
market in a juridical twilight zone where migrant women work for much lower wages than
German care agencies charge their clients is tacitly encouraged. In German statistics, this
transmission is invisible; the approval of a flexible and unregulated care market helps to
prevent an outcry from family members and elderly dependents concerning the absence of
care facilities and sufficient financial support. As a consequence, elderly care continues to
be considered a ‘family affair’, formally de-commodified, whereas in practice this sector is
undergoing a re-commodification (for more details see Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck
2010) and the migrant-in-the family-care model, which Bettio, Simonazzi and Villa
(2006) consider a special feature of the Mediterranean care regime, is not restricted to
this area any longer. The question of why most European states, which otherwise prefer
restricted migration policies geared to highly educated migrants for the IT sector, accept a
poor regulation of care migration, which is not part of the official migration regime, cannot
be addressed without taking into account more recent debates about ‘regimes’. The latter
shed new light upon and make visible the deficits of that terminology.

4. The advantages and disadvantages of regime

terminology
The concept of a regime as used by Esping-Andersen is often employed in relation to
policies understood as government regulations and enactments of the state. But recent
regime analysis has focused on the fault-lines arising from the tensions between the pos-
tulation of goals and the reality of social practices.
1. Here, the replacement of the term policies by regime is advantageous because ‘regime’
does not measure policy by comparing a particular policy’s outcome to its declared aims.
Instead, using ‘regime’ enables analysts to ask questions like how, why and when are par-
ticular social circumstances defined as a political problem. Which norms, perceptions and
interpretations come into play? In the words of Kenneth Horvath: ‘What is considered a
loss of control elsewhere becomes the signature of regimes and their manners of regulation’
(Horvath 2014: 36). By this twist, a regime does not presuppose social actions and practices
in a functionalist way, but the concept helps us to understand them as a negotiation of
unequal power relations where hegemonic and subversive groups of actors are mutually
imbricated in their actions. This understanding is an asset for two reasons: (a) it defines and
conceptualizes resistance as productive (Tsianos 2010), and (b) it re-conceptualizes the
response to the failure of regulations as an ability to quickly fix a crisis or a pressing need by
 CARE AS A FICTITIOUS COMMODITY  361

acting without repairing public enactments. I exemplify this with reference to Giuseppe
Sciortino’s definition of a migration regime:
To conceptualize a migration regime has many advantages. First, it brings to attention
the effects of norms in contexts, rather than operating a simple review of juridical rules.

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The notion of a ‘migration regime’, moreover, pays its due to the historical character of
such regulation: a country’s migration regime is usually not the outcome of consistent
planning. It is rather a mix of implicit conceptual frames, generations of turf wars
among bureaucracies and waves after waves of ‘quick fix’ to emergencies, triggered by
changing political constellations of actors. The notion of a migration regime allows
room for gaps, ambiguities and outright strains: the life of a regime is the result of
continuous repair work through practices. Finally, the idea of a ‘migration regime’
helps to stress the interdependence of observation and action. (Sciortino 2004: 32f.)

I will comment later on the idea of a migration regime as continuous repair work.
2. As already illustrated by the editors in the introduction to this special issue; between
the use of ‘regime’ by Esping-Anderson in 1990 and the current regime debate lies the turn
to post-structuralism and the emergence of governmentality studies. The poststructuralist
approach is suitable as it allows for the incorporation of signs, prevailing images and
emotionally charged normative judgments which organize the relations among various
actors, all of which ‘operate on the field of power’ (Adams and Padamsee 2001: 2).
According to Julia Adams and Tasleem Padamsee, a fully institutionalized regime consists
of four items beginning with s: ‘signs, subjects, strategies and sanctions’ (Adams and
Padamsee 2001: 16). Returning to the example of the German welfare state, one can
argue that ‘signs’ are imbricated in the ‘narrative’ which portrays Germany as a ‘home-
caring’ society where gender relations are modern and traditional at the same time, because
‘the’ family—that is women—care for the elderly. As a pacifying strategy towards those
subjects who (might) protest against the double burden, sanctions are not activated in a
labor market that is otherwise dominated by monitoring institutions.
Here, the discursive (the narrative) is considered a central element of analysis; the in-
clusion of cultural meaning has its own emergent logic, which cannot be read off or
deduced easily from social position or interest (Adams and Padamsee 2001: 7).
3. ‘Regime’ is now characterized by most users as something transnational, that is to say
reaching beyond national and regional state borders and at the same time operating within
them. This definition contributes to a different perception of boundaries, that is, those
between migrant sending and receiving societies; it enables an understanding of society in
which the constraints of national containers are transcended. ‘Regime,’ therefore, is seen as
a contribution to what John Urry (2008) calls the mobilities turn in the social sciences,
designating the twenty-first century as the Age of Mobilities.
A closer look at the use of regime reveals a number of differences. Some authors understand
a regime as a governing practice aimed at controlling (nation state) populations, while
others are of the opinion that in order to transcend or exceed the national policy-making
containers a regime can and should be conceptualized as a virtual quasi-state connecting
international political and economic processes, a definition which is employed in particular
by the proponents of ‘the autonomy of migration’ (Tsianos 2010). Others, like Adams and
Padamsee (2001: 2ff), warn against the strong claim of gender studies scholars who argue
362  H. LUTZ

for a causal autonomy of the gender regime (in the analysis of the welfare regime) by
emphasizing that gender relations are crosscut by discourses of race, class, and nation. In
other words, they dismiss the use of a master category.
So far, there seem to be multiple definitions and usages of ‘regime,’ but when it comes to

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methodology, more commonalities are visible. The majority of studies use content-analyt-
ical or discourse-analytical methods and designs which they prefer to traditional methods
(e.g. surveys). Following the work of Althusser (1977), Hall (1997), and Laclau and Mouffe
(2006), this implies that the question of what people think and say needs to be replaced by
the analysis of an effective mobilization of subject positions: How are people recruited/
invocated into specific subject positions?
The introduction of the discursive element into the analysis, of what is called a ‘narra-
tion,’ poses a challenge to migration research not only because it requires a multi-method
approach but also because it complicates research designs and research results. The message
will be less straightforward than it used to be, and the fuzziness of ‘regime’ may lead to the
demonstration of ambivalences instead of clear-cut dualistic allocations (of natives and
migrants, perpetrators and victims, etc.). In summary: with regard to the regime analysis in
the field of care, I follow the arguments of Horvarth (2014) and Sciortino (2004) empha-
sizing the ‘repair work’-dimension of the regime conceptualization, and Adams and
Padamsee (2001), insofar as they seek to understand regimes whilst identifying power
relations through signs, subjects, strategies and sanctions.

5. Interim conclusion
I have argued that changes in the labor market situation have led to revisions in the
underlying gender regime: an adult-worker model aspires to reorganize the work–life bal-
ance. The solution to the frictions emerging from this transition comes from the third
intersecting regime, the migration regime. So far, migrants are doing the repair work
needed because of the challenges caused by the aspiration that all adult citizens need to
be in an employment relationship. At the same time, many care-importing nation states
keep care work out of their managed migration monitoring practices precisely because it is
seen as a repair intervention, limited in time and space. On the one hand, gender relations
are in transition; some of the ‘old’ practices are no longer a given and care work is no longer
coded as unproductive and unpaid activity; on the other hand, the outsourcing of care to a
migrant (woman) poses a challenge to a gender regime that is fraught with new forms of
domination. Welfare regimes in ‘old’ Europe now profit greatly from the availability of
migrant care workers from Eastern Europe, but also from Latin America, Africa and Asia,
whose own care responsibilities are transferred to family members remaining in the coun-
tries of origin. Thus, the solution to so-called care-giving deficits in the wealthy parts of the
world is recruited from beyond the borders of the nation state. This can only be maintained
as long as the prosperity gaps with sending countries are kept intact or impoverishment
emerges in new regions of the globe. However, there is a precarious balance in this situation
as care-work can easily be re-de-commodified (to women) when illness, unemployment
etc. occurs. Moreover, from the perspective of many female migrant care-givers, the work
of care provides a breadwinning opportunity that is not available to them in their home
 CARE AS A FICTITIOUS COMMODITY  363

countries (Lutz 2011). Their situation is a catch-22, as in addition to their work in a foreign
household they need to organize their own care replacement in the home household while
in the sending societies they are often blamed for leaving their children behind and so
performing badly as mothers (see Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Lutz 2017). It follows

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that migration regimes must take into account both the receiving and the sending area. As it
stands, ‘signs, subjects, strategies and sanctions’ that characterize ‘regimes’ according to
Adams and Padamsee cannot be reduced to the narration of the receiving states’ cultural
ideals of home-caring families (signs), but also need to recognize the interests of various
actors on the receiving and giving side (subjects); by compensating care deficiencies in
receiving countries, new care gaps are emerging for care migrants, their children and
families left behind (see Michel and Grammage 2017 forthcoming). On both sides the
cultural definition of gender continues to define women as ‘natural care givers,’ and
when outsourced care stays in ‘female hands.’ With regard to strategies, care-receiving
nations may ignore undocumented working relations in the private household as a strategy
to pacify citizens, while the countries of origin welcome the remittances but turn a blind eye
to the needs of absent mothers and their families and deny them special support (Lutz
2017). The absence and presence of sanctions, used in both sending and receiving states, is
applied as a tool for quick fixes and to prevent protests and additional costs.

6. ‘Can society be commodities all the way down?’

If ‘care’ is, as Gerhardt (2014: 69) argues, both an analytical and a normative concept, the
commodification of care as a solution to the care crisis should be discussed not only in its
forms of appearance but also as a normative dilemma. What are the limits of the expansion
of the market? What aspects of care as a societal problem remain invisible if the (migrant
care worker) market is considered as the sole solution? It is obvious that this is the moment
to turn to Karl Polanyi’s work, The Great Transformation (2001/1944), in which he locates
the central experience of capitalism in ‘commodification’—in lieu of Marx’s exploitation.
In his ‘moral attack against unregulated commodification’ (Burawoy 2010: 301), Polanyi
critiques first and foremost the invention of what is called the self-regulating mechanism of
the market: ‘A self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separ-
ation of society into an economic and political sphere’ (Polanyi 2001: 74). The separation,
he argues further, causes a domination of the social and political by the economic sphere;
and the belief in the self-regulating capacities of the market is erroneous because it fails to
see that the driving forces of self-regulation destroy livelihoods, nature and human rela-
tions. In summary: ‘A “market economy” could only exist in a “market society”’ (Fraser
2012: 6). There is now very little dispute that the driving forces of a de-regulated market’s
unending self-expansion have become obvious in the crisis of twenty-first-century capit-
alism, where ‘the neoliberal cure for the ills of the market in nature is more markets—
markets in strange new entities’ (Fraser 2012: 10). Following this argumentation, the quest
for de-commodification of certain areas of life like care and affective labor is necessary.
However, the efforts of various types of welfare capitalism during the twentieth century to
protect and keep certain aspects of reproduction out of commodification by transforming
them into public services seems now to be endangered by the global neo-liberal trend to
364  H. LUTZ

privatize and commodify care and affective labor. This trend is challenged by Fraser’s
provocative question: Can society be commodities all the way down? One possible scenario
for neo-liberal welfare state regimes is what I call the ‘universal employer-model’, in which
the state retreats from organizing care facilities and instead every citizen in need of care

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should be prepared to become at some point in life the employer of a (migrant) care giver in
a private household. In this scenario, the state may or may not facilitate submission to this
model through the payment of care allowances.1 To date, the globally emerging care-mar-
kets point in the direction of a growing tendency to commodification of intimate life ‘all the
way down.’ However, there are more complications and dilemmas involved in the debate
about commodification. Fraser (2012) offers a critical re-reading of Polanyi’s original ideas.
According to Polanyi, labor, land and money were not originally produced for sale, but
rather seen as human activities (labor), nature (land) and symbols (tokens of purchasing
power: money). Therefore, they cannot be commodities, and only in the modern market
society where they turned into fictitious commodities (Polanyi 2001: 75). Fraser criticizes
Polanyi’s ‘ontological interpretation’ because it fails to register ‘. . . that social constructions
of labor, land, and money have typically encoded forms of domination, many of which long
predate their commodification—witness feudalism, slavery and patriarchy . . .’ (Fraser
2012: 7). She puts her finger on the blind spot of Polanyi’s perspective by referring to
the fact that his ‘construction of ‘labor power’ as a fictitious commodity rested on the
simultaneous co-construction of ‘care’ as a non-commodity’ (Fraser 2012: 9). Implied in
the Polanyian ideal of social protection is the idea that the ‘family wage’ is based on a
gendered hierarchy, which can be traced back to the gendered Marxist distinction between
‘productive’ and ‘un-productive’ labor. Generations of feminists have fought against this
form of protection and demanded women’s right to employment. Fraser criticizes Polanyi’s
blindness about the struggles around labor commodification: ‘they included not just free
marketeers and proponents of protection, but also partisans of ‘emancipation’, whose pri-
mary aim was neither to promote marketization nor to protect society from it, but rather to
free themselves from domination’ (Fraser 2012: 9). Social protection, from this point of view,
turns out to be oppression of one gender and makes it impossible for women to sell their
labor power. Although feminist struggles were not necessarily in favor of free-market liber-
alism, feminists as part of the middle classes now enjoy the fact that formerly unwaged
reproductive/ affective/ care labor is now—thanks to globally growing income, welfare and
life-prospects disparities—available on a global scale. The question of whether this is progress
or a dubious option is certainly answered in contradictory ways, depending on whether the
actors are situated on the receiving or giving side and on their normative position.

7. Summary
In this article, my goal has been to critically elaborate/uncover the theoretical assumptions
of Esping-Andersen’s conceptualization of welfare regimes and to suggest an amendment
of the interesting duality of care and gender regimes by a triangular intersection with the
migration regime as a third component. I have tried to demonstrate that the social con-
sequences of de-, re- and commodification are all part of the welfare state scenarios cur-
rently under discussion; in addition, I have shown how the insights from Nancy Fraser’s
 CARE AS A FICTITIOUS COMMODITY  365

discussion of de-commodification and care as commodified labor are important for the
debates about the regime perspective.
It is obvious that Polanyi’s plea to de-commodify labor and thereby keep care work out
of the market was based on the premise of a ‘family wage’ connected to a male breadwinner

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model, where care work would be unpaid and not even considered as ‘work’. But the
expansion of the care market, including the commodification of intimate and care work,
is only one possibility. Another one, one which is rejected as utopian by many people,
would be a re-coding of care tasks or a new division of care and employment between
genders and generations throughout all groups of society, in short Fraser’s ‘Universal Care
Giver’ arrangement (see Fraser 2013). This is even more promising, because projections of
the future like that of Davis (1982), who anticipated 35 years ago that house- and care-work
would become obsolete as a result of changes brought about by technical progress, were
wrong. Therefore, thought experiments going in the opposite direction, toward the re-
organization of society, are urgently needed. We know by now that changes in gender
regimes are dependent on and have repercussions for welfare and migration regimes, so
why not dig up some Utopian radical thinking and apply it to life in a post-growth society?

Note
1. As these allowances are often not sufficient to pay even a migrant worker, this model is
clearly preferred by middle-class households who can afford to pay extra.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, the editors of this
special issue for their patience and Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck for her engagement and sup-
port over many years.

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