The elderly care and domestic services sector during the recent economic crisis. The case of Italy, Spain and France.

Over the past ten years in Italy, Spain and France, the demographic pressure and the increasing women’s participation in labour market have fuelled the expansion of the private provision of domestic and care services. In order to ensure the difficult balance between affordability, quality and job creation, each countries’ response has been different. France has developed policies to sustain the demand side introducing instruments such as vouchers and fiscal schemes, since the mid of the 2000s. Massive public funding has contributed to foster a regular market of domestic and care services and France is often presented as a “best practices” of those policies aimed at encouraging a regular private sector. Conversely in Italy and Spain, the development of a private domestic and care market has been mostly uncontrolled and without a coherent institutional design: the osmosis between a large informal market and the regular private care sector has been ensured on the supply side by migrant workers’ regularizations or the introduction of new employment regulations . The analysis presented in this paper aims to describe the response of these different policies to the challenges imposed by the current economic crisis. In dealing with the retrenchment of public expenditure and the reduced households’ purchasing power, Italy, Spain and France are experiencing greater difficulties in ensuring a regular private sector of domestic and care services. In light of that, the paper analyses the recent economic conjuncture presenting some assumptions about the future risk of deeper inequalities rising along with the increase of the process of marketization of domestic and care services in all the countries under analysis.    

A view, different proposals: Concept of gender and public policy

This article analyzes the meaning of “gender” as a category of analysis in public policy. The concept has been transferred from the feminist theories and this has meant that the United Nations and European Union have incorporated the inequality as a structural inequality and an issue justice. So, the feminist demands enter the political agenda as an integral project which is characterized by the adoption of the gender perspective and its application from a transversal methodology (“gender mainstreaming”). In this sense, the "gender ideology" is a new paradigm against the “patriarchal ideology”. Now, political actions should be articulated in a double movement of correction and promotion to achieve real equality in societies more democratic and ultimately more just.

The Spanish reforms on domestic work regulation

This paper analyses the latest Spanish reforms regarding domestic work. The Spanish legislator, doubtlessly influenced by the ILO Domestic Work Convention nº 189 – which, however, was not later ratified in Spain- made a deep reform on domestic work in 2011. This legal reform implied a striking change that affected both working conditions and social security of employees in the family home. The aim of this reform has been to bring the regulation in domestic work closer to the general regulation for other workers, although maintaining certain specialties. Regarding working conditions, their setting as “particular employment relationship” has been held. However, the differences between this relationship and the common ones have been reduced. As for social security, domestic employees have been incorporated into the General Social Security System, but with important specialties, thus erasing the Special Domestic Employees System. The paper also examines the legal changes that have taken place in this field after the new Government arose.

Late-career international migration and reproductive work. A comparison between Peruvian and Ukrainian women in the Southern Europe

Research on the relationship between reproductive work and women´s life trajectories including the experience of labour migration has mainly focused on the case of relatively young mothers who leave behind, or later re-join, their children. While it is true that most women migrate at a younger age, there are a significant number of cases of men and women who move abroad for labour purposes at a more advanced stage, undertaking a late-career migration. This is still an under-estimated and under-researched sub-field that uncovers a varied range of issues, including the global organization of reproductive work and the employment of migrant women as domestic workers late in their lives. By pooling the findings of two qualitative studies, this article focuses on Peruvian and Ukrainian women who seek employment in Spain and Italy when they are well into their forties, or older. A commonality the two groups of women share is that, independently of their level of education and professional experience, more often than not they end up as domestic and care workers. The article initially discusses the reasons for late-career female migration, taking into consideration the structural and personal determinants that have affected Peruvian and Ukrainian women’s careers in their countries of origin and settlement. After this, the focus is set on the characteristics of domestic employment at later life, on the impact on their current lives, including the transnational family organization, and on future labour and retirement prospects. Apart from an evaluation of objective working and living conditions, we discuss women’s personal impressions of being domestic workers in the context of their occupational experiences and family commitments. In this regard, women report varying levels of personal and professional satisfaction, as well as different patterns of continuity-discontinuity in their work and family lives, and of optimism towards the future. Divergences could be, to some extent, explained by the effect of migrants´ transnational social practices and policies of states.

Migrant domestic workers, vulnerability and the law: immigration and employment laws in Cyprus and Spain

The intersection of gender, welfare and immigration regimes has been one of the main focus of a rich scholarship on paid domestic work in Europe. This article brings into the discussion the nexus of employment and immigration law regimes to reflect on the role of legal regulation in structuring and reducing the vulnerability of domestic workers. I analyse this nexus by looking at the cases of Cyprus and Spain, two states falling under the cluster of Southern Mediterranean welfare regimes, that share certain characteristics in terms of immigration regimes, but have substantially different employment law regulation models. The first part sketches the debate on the employment law regulation of domestic work. The second part starts by giving an overview of the immigration regimes of Cyprus and Spain in relation to migrant domestic workers and then proceeds to analyse the two countries’ models and substance of employment law regulation in domestic work. The comparison of these two divergent approaches informs the debate on how the legal regulation of domestic work should be best structured. In Spain there have been recent dynamic legislative changes in the employment law regulation of domestic work. The final part of the article traces these changes and reflects on why such processes have not taken place in Cyprus.

Migrant women’s employment in paid reproductive work through the crisis: the case of Italy (2007-2012)

Paid reproductive work, especially in the case of cleaning and home-care for elderly people, is an important sector for foreign women in Italy. For this reason, since the beginning of the current economic crisis, scholars have wondered about the impact of the recession on migrant domestic workers. They have looked particularly at possible competition with Italian women entering the sector for lack of better alternatives. Our paper takes this discussion a step further by assessing the overall changes affecting migrant women in the Italian labour market, 2007-2012. We will look at how their position has been transformed, by taking both an ethnic perspective, in relation to Italian women, and a gender perspective, in relation to migrant men. By way of a conclusion, the argument will be made that there is a substantial lack of competition between Italian and foreign women in the care and domestic sector due to differences in their earnings, hours of work and activities.

The gendered effects of family migration law: contextual interpretation as a possible judicial remedy

At all normative levels, family migration law can disproportionally and negatively affect immigrant women’s rights in this field, producing gendered effects. In some cases, such effects are related to the normative and judicial imposition of unviable family-related models (e.g., the ʻgood mother ̕ the one-breadwinner family, or a rigid distinction between productive and reproductive work). In other cases, they are due to family migration law’s overlooking of the specific needs and difficulties of immigrant women, within their families and in the broader context of their host countries’ social and normative framework.To effectively expose and correct this gender bias, in this article I propose an alternative view of immigrant women’s right to family life, as a cluster of rights and entitlements rather than as a mono-dimensional right. As a theoretical approach, this construction is better equipped to capture the complex experiences of immigrant women in the European legal space, and to shed light on the gendered effects generated not by individual norms but by the interaction of norms that are traditionally assigned to separated legal domains (e.g., immigration law and criminal law). As a judicial strategy, this understanding is capable of prompting a consideration by domestic and supranational courts of immigrant women not as isolated individuals, but as ‘individuals in context’. I shall define this type of approach as ‘contextual interpretation’, understood as the consideration of immigrant women in the broader contexts of their families, their host societies and the normative frameworks applicable to them. Performed in a gendersensitive manner, a contextual judicial interpretation has the potential to neutralize the gendered effects of certain family migration norms. To illustrate these points, I will discuss selected judicial examples offered by the European Court on Human Rights, as well as from domestic jurisdictions of countries with a particularly high incidence of immigrant women (Italy and Spain).

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Programa de Intervención Psicoeducativa para promover la adaptación socioescolar de niños y niñas en situación de protección

El trabajo de investigación llevado a cabo en esta Tesis Doctoral hace referencia al diseño e implementación de un Programa de Intervención Psicoeducativa, de corte cognitivo-conductual, cuyo principal objetivo ha sido optimizar el desarrollo socioemocional y promover la adaptación socioescolar de niños y niñas en situación de protección. Los participantes seleccionados han sido niños y niñas de 5 a 10 años que se encontraban acogidos en un centro de protección de la ciudad de Málaga. Los motivos de tal acogimiento eran diversos, y todos ellos estaban relacionados con falta de estimulación en sus familias, privación sociocultural, maltrato, abuso y/o abandono por parte de sus progenitores. El entorno elegido para desarrollar el Programa ha sido el contexto educativo donde los menores recibían la educación normalizada en los colegios de la zona cercana al centro de protección. Con la finalidad de poder comprobar la eficacia del Programa diseñado, se ha trabajado llevando a cabo un diseño longitudinal con mediciones pretest, postest y seguimiento con grupo control y grupo intervención, realizando un tipo de intervención individualizada con cada niño y niña participante. Para tal intervención se han utilizado además grupos de compañeros y compañeras de clase de estos menores con el propósito de hacer uso del refuerzo natural de los iguales ayudantes en las interacciones sociales. También se ha contado con la ayuda de los profesores/as de los colegios y de los educadores/as del centro de protección. El Programa de Intervención ha sido diseñado de esta forma teniendo en cuenta la situación especial que experimentan estos niños y niñas que están en el Sistema de Protección debido a una serie de circunstancias específicas que han experimentado en sus vidas. Se analizaron las siguientes variables: indicadores sociométricos (nº de elecciones, nº de rechazos y estatus sociométrico); percepción de profesores y educadores acerca de la agresión social y de las habilidades de interacción social; estrategias de interacción social observadas entre iguales (se observaron cinco grupos de estrategias: agresivas, prosociales, competentes, recurrir a la autoridad y pasivas); conocimiento de estrategias de interacción social (se agrupó el conocimiento en cinco grupos de estrategias: agresivas, prosociales, competentes, recurrir a la autoridad y pasivas); y competencia y aceptación autopercibidas (se obtuvo información de cinco dimensiones: competencia física, competencia cognitiva, aceptación de iguales, aceptación materna y autovaloración global). Los resultados resaltan la eficacia de este Programa ya que se consiguen mejoras, estadísticamente significativas, tras la aplicación el mismo en el grupo intervención, mientras que el grupo control no mejora en las mismas variables. Dicha mejora obtenida en el momento postest, en la mayoría de las variables se mantiene en el seguimiento, con algunas pérdidas ocasionadas por el tiempo, pero manteniéndose evidentes mejoras. Estos resultados concluyen que el Programa propuesto en este estudio para los menores en acogimiento residencial, mejora la competencia social de estos niños/as, reduce sus comportamientos agresivos, y les ayuda a desarrollar recursos competentes con los que afrontar las interacciones sociales con sus compañeros/as, promocionando así su adaptación socioescolar.

La Cuestión Rural y la Construcción de Paz en Colombia

Teniendo en cuenta la apuesta institucional del Gobierno de llevar lo acordado en La Habana a la realidad de los territorios del país y la deuda histórica que hay con el campo colombiano, este documento se presenta como un análisis de la relación entre el conflicto armado y la ruralidad, las estrategias de política social y de reforma a la institucionalidad que se han propuesto, con el objetivo de fortalecer el desarrollo rural y asegurando su correspondencia con las necesidades de la población campesina. Para ello, en primer lugar se analiza la relación entre el conflicto armado y la ruralidad para el caso colombiano, haciendo énfasis en el desarrollo económico insuficiente y desigual y el sesgo anticampesino que lo ha caracterizado. Luego se expone una definición para el campesinado colombiano y su relación con la Política de Desarrollo Rural, de acuerdo con el análisis de las propuestas encontradas en dos documentos: el borrador del primer punto de los Acuerdos de La Habana y el informe de la Misión para la Transformación del Campo. En tercer lugar se presentan las Zonas de Reserva Campesina como iniciativas que contribuyen a la construcción de paz territorial, a partir de la exposición de su marco normativo y del análisis de los Planes de Desarrollo Sostenible. Finalmente se plantean algunas conclusiones en torno a la discusión sobre la cuestión rural y la construcción de paz en Colombia.