SOC352H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Foreign Worker, Physical Abuse, Neoliberalism
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Lecture 7: Global care chains
Recap:
• Divisions between work and care occurred during industrialization
• Ideological notions of femininity tied to being a “good mother” – care, nurturance, physical
presence
o Working mothers “doing motherhood” (Garey 1995)
▪ Focused on how working mothers negotiated their identity and used night shifts
to be able to stay at home during the day
▪ Focus on the symbolic importance of motherhood
▪ Focused more on care, presence and physically being in the home
• Transnational motherhood
o Migrant mothers able to take on both primary caregiver and primary breadwinner statuses
(Preibisch and Grez 2013; Tungohan 2013)
o Describes women who work in another country while the children work in their country
of origin
o How is care redefined across borders
o Both readings look at how motherhood is negotiated and redefined
o One of the common ways motherhood is described in both articles, which show that
mothers are described as primary caregivers as well as primary breadwinners
• “Rather than replacing caregiving with breadwinning definitions of motherhood, migrant women
appear to be expanding their definitions of motherhood” (Tungohan 2013)
o women are not replacing one form of care with another, instead they are expanding their
definition of care
o Women enact care in ways that go against typical norms of care
o Many women go outside to work because they are working as a form of care
o Thus these women tend to perform care what men typically do
For Today:
• Canada’s Caregiver Program
o Historical Changes and Implications
• Global Division of Labour
o How has the global divison of labour created conditions that allow things like the
caregiver program
o “Old” and “new” international divisions
• Global care chains
o How is care organized across borders?
o How has globalization impacted the work of care?
Canada’s Caregiver Program: Timeline
• Was designed to help Canadians get support for seniors and disabilities as well as for children
• Was unique within the temporary foreign worker program as it is the only program that provides
a pathway to permanent residency
o People who work for two years can later apply to the PR program
• Canada has been bringing workers since the early 1900s
• Beginning circa 1900: British and Nordic women granted PR upon arrival
o Came as nannies and governesses
o Their work was seen as necessary so they got PR status immediately
• Post WWII: women from Jamaica and Barbados brought in, but no PR granted
o There was a care gap and created an increased need for caregivers
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▪ Women were going to work in Canada and needed women to take care of their
homes
o These people were seen as reserve workers, they would only come to work temporarily
so they didn’t get PR status
o Restrictions started being put in place
o This is when women would fight for changes
• Caribbean Domestics Scheme 1955: Limited PR granted after 1 year, but heavy restrictions
o Eg. Had random pregnancy tests
• 1966 Points System: meant to end discrimination
o the idea was not to give preference certain people
o points for education, if you spoke either English or French
o but some argue that the requirements also have some bias because people of certain
countries had advantages over others
• Temporary Employment Authorization Scheme 1973: caregivers viewed as low-skilled &
disposable workers
o Classified work according to skill
o Caregivers were seen as disposable workers, they work was seen as low skill work
o Due to this it was hard to get PR status
Caregiver Program Cont.
• 1976: seven Jamaican women deported for not reporting dependents back home (later appealed
through SC and won right to stay in 1979)
o immigration officials were advising women not to declare their children that they had
back home
o because then it would be hard for them to get PR status
o even those these women did what the officers told them, they were deported
o they fought this case and won their case in the supreme court and were allowed to work
in Canada
o shows the inequality that exists amongst care workers in Canada
• Foreign Domestics Movement begins in 1981: right to apply for PR after working in Canada for
24 months
o sparked activism for caregiver rights
o fought for the government to realize that care work is necessary all the time, and not a
temporary need
o fought for PR rights and rights for them to be re-united with their children
o able to win some rights for careworkers
o write letters to ministers
• Live-in Caregiver Program developed in 1992
o it explicity recognized care work as a permanent need
o showed that there is a care deficit in Canada
o but the nature of program left the women open to different abuses (since workers were
kept in the care receivers homes
▪ eg. Physical abuse (sexual abuse), exploitation in terms of over work (hard to
distinguish boundaries between work and leisure)
• 2014: no longer required to live in employers’ homes; BUT live-out caregivers not eligible for PR
o have to have a labour impact assessment to see if their work is necessary (that their work
is important and no one else can do it)
o women who wanted to leave the employers home had to do this assessment and could not
get PR status
o 2019 is going to have a review to see if the changes are working
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