Creating a Gendered-Racialized Care Labor Market: Migrant Labor Policy and the Transformation of Care Work in Taiwan

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that a gender ideology that associates care with women within and beyond the family context shapes Taiwan’s migrant care labor policy and sustains the gendered-racialized labor market of care work in a transnational context. First, the chapter introduces migrant care labor policy in Taiwan and the relevant regulations of employing migrant live-in care workers. Second, it illustrates the daily techniques that Taiwanese employers use to stratify relations between them and migrant live-in care workers. Third, it describes the lived experiences of Taiwanese women to explain their “triple shifts”—from wage-earning work to household chores (including childcare) to elderly care. The employment of migrant live-in care workers does not challenge the gender division of care labor. Instead, it shifts daily care practices from one group of women to another. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the inequalities between women of different social classes and ethnicities to highlight the withdrawal of the nation state from organizing and providing public care and the consequences of this.