Abstract
Female-dominated migration flows are suspected to create “care drain”—care shortages in the source country at the expense of care provided in the destination country. We ask if care drain experienced in the families of the care workers in Slovakia or transnational partnering leads to lower job satisfaction. While carers with small children are a minority, most care workers live with a partner. None of these groups, however, provide a consistently lower level of the generally very high job satisfaction. The lack of connection between satisfaction and family situation poses a question as to whether the situation of European migrant care workers is comparable to experiences of care workers from the Global South on which the concept of care drain was developed.
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Notes
- 1.
Further descriptive results can be found in Chap. 2.
- 2.
It should be noted that the average length of work in Austria was 6.2 years in 2016, compared to 3.7 years in the 2011 survey. This provides more time for changes in family situation.
- 3.
Later, in our multivariate model, we will test if this difference holds when controlling for their lower age.
- 4.
The 2016 questionnaire included also a question on who advised the carers against taking up care work. Carers living with their partners when they started to work in Austria report receiving support from their partners in the decision to work in Austria notably more often (58.1%) than being advised against (22.7%).
- 5.
41.6% of care workers in 2011 and 44.9% in 2016 were unemployed in Slovakia before they became care workers in Austria. The average income of the carers in our 2011 survey was around €770 while the average wages in the eight Slovak NUTS 3 regions ranged from €680 to €1157 in 2011.
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Bahna, M., Sekulová, M. (2019). Does the Family Suffer?. In: Crossborder Care. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97028-8_4
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