Abstract
Resilience, adaptation, survival, endurance, change, transformation, imbalance – these are all responses to crisis situations and social and economic stresses that are increasingly becoming the focus of academic and public interest. The Carpathian Basin is constantly exposed to strong external influences, to which the local communities, households, and individuals must respond in order to regain their balance, or to transition to a new mode of functioning. In the last three to four decades labor migration became one of the most prominent responses to economic and social pressures and a coping strategy. The convertibility of inequalities and resources between different regions is an opportunity for stabilizing the state of insecurity at home. For the last few years, it has been a common preconception in resilience theories that only strong entities are capable of resilience. Recent research shows that resilience and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive; I offer case studies which illustrate this point. I draw on 15 years of fieldwork with Central and Eastern European migrant women working as care workers in Western countries and Israel. These cases show that the experience of vulnerability and the skills and knowledge gained from it contribute to increasing flexibility, adaptability, and learning capacity, and thus practically lay the foundation for resilient behavior. My research also explores the controversial issue in resilience theories of how responsibility is constituted; i.e., whether the idea of resilience is related to the shifting of responsibility from the social classes in power to the vulnerable groups more prone to disequilibrium. In examining foreign women integrated into the low-level segment of the occupational structure, eldercare, I find that if their physical or mental condition deteriorates, and they are on their own, their vulnerability increases, and the disequilibrium resulting from systemic problems can no longer be corrected through individual resourcefulness alone.
Introduction
Resistance, adaptation, survival, endurance, change, transformation, disequilibrium – these are all responses to crises, social and economic stresses that are increasingly becoming the focus of academic and public interest. The Carpathian Basin is constantly exposed to strong external influences, to which the local communities, households, and individuals living here must respond in order to regain their balance, or to transition to a new and changed mode of functioning. Moreover, the last three to four decades have seen an increase in the frequency of stressful events, with exposure to crises becoming almost permanent. Actors at different levels of society try to cope with the effects of negative changes at the macro level, responding adaptively to new and unfamiliar situations.
After the regime change in 1989, the role of the state in the post-socialist region weakened, the economy was restructured, the social structure reorganized, the usefulness of previous resources and life management strategies became limited, the accumulated knowledge base and experiences have lost their validity, and other values came to the fore. Many of the basic functions previously performed by the state have been relegated to the level of smaller units of society, and the responsibility for their performance has been shifted to the self-organization of local communities and households. The global economic crisis of 2008 upset the newly emerged modes of operation and state of equilibrium that had just begun to stabilize, and posed new challenges for the region's inhabitants. Less than a decade later, in 2020, the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic hit, followed immediately by the Ukrainian-Russian war and energy crisis. A series of crises must therefore be faced and strategies developed at the individual, family, and micro-regional level in order to survive.
As a means of reorganization and survival, a significant part of the population in post-socialist countries chose migration,1 which proved to be a promising resilience strategy. We are therefore witnessing an accelerating process since the end of the 20th century, in which one of the most significant changes is the increasing proportion of women in the migrant population. Globally, women's mobility is trailing and in some years even exceeding that of men, a new phenomenon in world history. This is why the feminization of migration is being discussed in the social sciences, and why feminist research is also increasingly interested in this phenomenon (Castles – Miller 1993; Phizacklea 1997; Sassen 1999; Lutz 2011). Women's migration for the purpose of employment (i.e., not family reunification) is particularly linked to three sectors: domestic work, hospitality, and entertainment. Of these, domestic work is the most important sector in the global labor market (Lutz 2011).
After the initial migration of men in the 1990s, women in Central and Eastern Europe were also forced to enter globally organized employment networks, especially in the care sector.2 They were integrated into an existing structure, the framework of which was already in place. The domestic work industry – which started after World War II, intensified in the 1960s, and grew to global proportions by the 1970s and 1980s – began with labor migration recruited from Asian and Latin American countries (Andall 1997; Levitt 2001; Repak 1995; Cheng 2006; Lan 2006). Central and Eastern European women further elaborated this, and even created new patterns (e.g., rotational shifts and circular migration). They were drawn into a sector of the labor market that was by then mostly occupied by immigrants, which was reserved/ceded to migrants by the local population, and thus already bore the shackles of stratified inequality (Turai 2018:9–17).
The social anthropological perspective and research methodology allows us to explore and understand how women in Central and Eastern Europe, whose employment is not adequately provided for by the local and national economy, develop strategies to increase their survival and resilience. Through field research, it became possible to observe the cultural experiences and knowledge base they have in order to achieve resilience and survival, and what determines the feasibility of flexible and adaptive response alternatives. It is also important to examine what resources are activated to restore the state of equilibrium, where the boundaries of identity are, how long essential elements are being preserved, and where self-abandonment, the irreversible erosion and transformation of former values begins.
My experience of a decade and a half of working with migrant women shows that the experience of vulnerability and the skills and knowledge gained from it contribute greatly to increasing resilience, flexibility, adaptability, and learning, and practically lay the foundation for resilient behavior and coping. In my study I link to researchers who look at resilience from the perspective of agency, and with the methodology of social anthropology I analyze – at the level of smaller social entities (household, family, individual) – the ways of self-organizing through which families in precarious situations have tried to cope with the series of crises of the recent decades. At the same time, my research topic also provides an opportunity to explore the controversial issue in resilience theories of how responsibility is constituted within the framework of current economic, political, and socio-political regimes, i.e., whether the idea of resilience is related to the shifting of responsibility from the social levels in power to the level of smaller, more vulnerable groups more prone to disequilibrium.
Resilience as an interpretive framework
The use of the concept of resilience is gaining popularity, a phenomenon that could lead to its overuse and loss of meaning (Bollig 2014; Neocleous 2015), but in my opinion it's more likely to make it more nuanced and elaborate. This theoretical paradigm opens up the possibility of tracing crises and changes in their continuity and accelerating pace, i.e., a dynamic phenomenon that increasingly determines the functioning of our society.
The concept of resilience has come a long way in academic research, not least in the fields of politics and public administration. The theoretical heritage of the term can be traced back to the engineering sciences, when engineers began to use it to describe the property of metals in which, when subjected to external stress or pressure, certain materials bounce back, that is, regain their original shape (Scott-Smith 2018). A major change was brought about by Crawford Holling (Holling 1973), who applied the idea of resilience to living systems and introduced it in ecology to describe the complex, holistic process of adaptation in which a system absorbs the negative effects of disruption caused by external stress and recovers its original state of equilibrium. Holling's theory soon took root in ecological thinking and became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Two important features of this ecological approach are worth mentioning from the perspective of scientific history. On the one hand, I think it is important to underline that at that time the theory of resilience was still based on static categories and used for returns to a determinable static starting point. On the other hand, researchers focused on the functioning of the system: they were concerned with the stability of the holistic system, not its components, i.e., the concept of resilience was used exclusively for the analysis of macro phenomena (Adger 2000; Scott-Smith 2018). During this period, researchers in the psycho-social fields also adopted and began to incorporate the idea of resilience into their analytical model, which led to a major innovation in this paradigm: the concept was broadened and its scope of use was modified. The analytical focus has shifted from systems to individuals, and the research focus has shifted to the coping mechanisms of individuals (Scott-Smith 2018). This change can be considered a scientific turning point, as the study of human entities shifted the static approaches towards a dynamic interpretive framework, which later played an important role in the development of the concept of social and cultural resilience, and is therefore of particular relevance for my analysis.
The explosive proliferation of the word resilience was driven by governmental, political, and security interests. At the same time, the controversies, problems, and disagreements surrounding the concept also stem primarily from this. The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York City was a key event that prompted leaders in Western cultures to think even more about national security issues and how to deal with potential disasters and crises. In political discourse, resilience has become symbolic of the character of the American nation, which defines the freedom of a people in such a way that it can survive on its own despite adversity. Resilience encourages social actors to learn from disasters so that they can better respond to the challenges on the horizon, thereby improving their adaptability. However, resilience is not only an ideological project, it also relies on political and economic rationality (Evens – Reid 2013). Some analysts argue that neoliberal policies have transformed social responsibility, and that the ideology of resilience has contributed greatly to the government's ability to find excuses for delegating responsibility for dealing with insecurities to the local level, and to persuade/coerce communities to endure situations that they should not. The burden of crises is thus placed squarely on the shoulders of the globally impoverished, and, against their will, they must shoulder burdens that are social and global in scale. It has become a political and governmental expectation that smaller units of society (small communities, households, individuals) should be responsible for their own position in a social fabric that is inherently precarious (Evens – Reid 2013; Bourbeau 2013b; Raab et al. 2015). Neocleous, one of the most vocal critics of the resilience paradigm, goes as far as saying that resilience is the new fetish of the liberal state and models the neoliberal entrepreneurial self. In his view, the ideology of resilience recycles capitalist power relations, giving the appearance of equality and democracy, while in fact masking the fact that resources are unequally distributed (Neocleous 2015).
By the 2000s, the concept of resilience had broadened to the extent that it was suitable for interpreting and describing human systems. A pioneer in the development of the concept of social resilience was W. Neil Adger, who used a dynamic approach and observed how groups and communities cope with external stresses without changing the basic structure. He also pointed out that resilience as an interpretive paradigm is suitable for describing the ongoing major changes in society (Adger 2000). Learning, adaptation, and change have also been included in the domain of resilience. In the case of human systems, the resilient entity can no longer be considered static, and the reference point in the idea of restoring equilibrium is no longer a static state. The European Commission provides a flexible definition of the concept in its report on building resilience: resilience is “the ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, cope, adapt, and quickly recover from stresses and shocks such as violence, conflict, drought and other natural disasters without compromising long-term development” (European Commission 2016). The ecological context of the concept is therefore fading, and resilience is increasingly seen in the social sciences as the integration of adaptation, learning, self-organization, not just the general ability to resist change (Folke 2006; Obrist et al. 2010; Bollig 2014; Székely 2015; Scott-Smith 2018). In the case of human systems, it is not a return to a prior state of equilibrium but the emergence of a new state of equilibrium in which the damaging effects of an external shock are minimized by adaptive responses and the preservation of the basic elements of the previous system. Communities are in fact making moves to maintain their compatibility with their collective identity and changing circumstances (Bourbeau 2013a; Fejérdy – Karvalics 2015).
In this interpretive paradigm, resilience is a flexible ability to withstand something, i.e., an attitude, a disposition that helps one cope in difficult circumstances. Philippe Bourbeau (Bourbeau 2013a) considers it important to take into account not only exogenous shocks but also endogenous ones, and draws attention to the bias that assumes resilience might be an obstacle to change. Iván Székely (Székely 2015) stresses that despite the pressure of political discourse, resilience should be a value-neutral concept, since the positive and negative aspects of change or resistance are determined by the values and interests of the observer. Michael Bollig (Bollig 2014) nuances the picture by arguing that disruption is not only a negative and threatening factor but also an opportunity for innovation and change.
The idea of cultural resilience was elaborated by Michael Bollig in his aforementioned work. Bollig considered it essential to highlight the importance of social institutions and cultural patterns, as they play a major role in coping with adversity and in using adaptive strategies in crises. At the same time, he criticized the neglect of agency and introduced new levels of resilience into theories of resilience: small communities, households, individuals. In doing so, he created a bridge between anthropology and the resilience paradigm.
The power of vulnerability
Until recently, it has been a common preconception in resilience theories that only entities that are strong are capable of resilience, because only they are able to cope with stressful situations in a flexible and resilient way. Even W. Neil Adger (Adger 2000) has argued that resilience and vulnerability are mutually exclusive, since vulnerable communities are unable to absorb the effects of disruption and return to equilibrium without permanent erosion. As resilience has been addressed in more and more areas of social research, several researchers have highlighted that resilience and vulnerability are not mutually exclusive. In his research, Gilberto C. Gallopin (Gallopin 2006) observed that vulnerable communities are better prepared for stressful situations than those that have never encountered severe stressors, and based on this he concluded that, contrary to common perception, resilience and vulnerability cannot be opposites. This view was later echoed by Bollig (Bollig 2014) and confirmed by his anthropological research. According to David Chandler (Chandler 2013), although in early theories vulnerabilities were seen as a problem to be addressed through adaptation to market rationalities, more recent research suggests that vulnerabilities are an ontological product of complexity that should be welcomed and accepted, and it is the qualities of adaptability that need to be inculcated in the knowledge that market “rationality” is in fact a product of a complex, adaptive process that is not external to us but reflects our everyday choices and actions. Similarly, Brad Evens and Julian Reid (Evens – Reid 2013) have argued that resilience is based on the ability of the vulnerable subject to continuously regenerate from the circumstances of a series of emergencies. According to them, the underlying ontology of resilience is in fact vulnerability, and they see vulnerability as a precondition for resilience. My study is intended to corroborate this point of resilience theory.
Resilience and care migration
In the Central and Eastern European region, migration has become one of the family and individual responses to economic and social disequilibrium. After the regime change, the people living here have undergone a series of major economic and social changes for which a broad segment of the population could not find an accessible and sustainable solution neither at the national nor at the micro-regional level. They were thus forced to correct the imbalance by working abroad. The convertibility of inequalities and resources between different regions and economic groups creates the potential to stabilize the state of insecurity at home.
Migration is an important indicator of resilience. The existence, extent, and type of migration highlights the different characteristics of each region. Emigration is a sign of instability in a region and indicates that the community there is not resilient, that part of the population is leaving, and the demographic loss leads to an erosion that is irreversible. Circular and periodic migration is also triggered by disequilibrium, but this increases the resilience of the community. The reinvestment of human and material capital acquired through migration and using it at home contributes to long-term growth, strengthening, and social stability (Adger 2000).
Social actors involved in maintaining transnational migration exploit deeply entrenched and often hidden inequalities, the most important of which are: social class, gender, ethnicity, labor market structures, and hierarchies of regions and countries. Transnational mobility has grown to such an extent in the last half century that we can talk more about global networks and globally organized dynamics than about movement between countries. While migration is often a way out of hopelessness at the local and/or national level and increases the resilience of smaller social entities, overall, it creates a much more divided and vulnerable world (Melegh 2023).
Women from Central and Eastern Europe were able to integrate en masse into the reproductive sectors. The meeting of two needs and interests leads to interdependence, which, because of the mutual interest, maintains the framework conditions for globally organized care work in the long term. Different levels of vulnerability come together to complement each other to correct weaknesses and create sustainable stability. Tamás Fejérdy and László Z. Karvalics (Fejérdy – Z. Karvalics 2015) distinguish between primary vulnerability, which includes elementary imbalances that present themselves in an environmental, demographic, or employment “guise,” and secondary vulnerability, which results from the ability of developed countries to alleviate the pressures on them at the expense of less developed countries. It is therefore crucially important to our topic that these two states of disequilibrium build on each other to achieve resilience. The livelihood crisis on the one hand, and the social (care) crisis on the other hand is being corrected, thereby increasing the economic resilience of families in the issuing regions and the social resilience of families in the receiving regions by maintaining a global labor market for caregivers.
A new domestic and home care system has emerged, which is an integral part of the global economy, yet it is mainly found in the informal sector. Its specific characteristics are determined by the following factors: work is carried out in an intimate social space; social constructions give care work gendered connotations; there is a special relationship between caregiver and care receiver, which is highly emotional and characterized by mutual and personal dependence; moreover, the nature of caregiving is different from all other employment sectors (Lutz 2008). Care work in this form now has a monetary value and has become a commodity, i.e., it has moved from the reproductive to the productive sector, and this has restructured the economic sectors (Anderson 2000; Ungerson 2004; Parreñas 2006; Zimmerman et al. 2006a). Transnational mobility allows unpaid care work in one region to become a paid occupation in another region, and then revert to being an unpaid activity in the issuing region (Zimmerman et al. 2006b).
Migrant care work forms at the cross-section of the activities of several actors, when it is embedded in a complex and inadequate care system. Since the cooperation between state, family, and private sector does not adequately cover the responsibilities, there is a gap in the system. Women recruited from abroad are a low cost, flexible human resource, willing to work long hours (often 24 hours) and long stretches of time, providing partly professional and partly family care. Paying for care and domestic work can resolve the tension on the receiving side between the increased employment of women and the cultural norms that maintain home and family care. Employing migrant women creates an opportunity to ensure that the traditional model of care is less compromised, and the female members of the host family no longer have to provide care, only manage it (Degiuli 2010). Involving foreign workers thus factors into enhancing quality of life: the elderly can maintain their independence, without loss of control over their own lives, and another advantage is that members of the second generation can continue with their usual lifestyle, minimize extra burdens, not having to change their schedules, and maintaining their work and private lives at the same level as before the need for care arose.
The mobility of women from Central and Eastern Europe is a response to several global social problems, as they leave a region facing a systemic economic and social crisis and enter a niche market facing a systemic social crisis. They provide an alternative solution to the stress and imbalance that can arise at the micro level by organizing the difficult task of caring for the elderly at the global level, partly through formal and partly through informal networks. As we can see, migration and vulnerability are mutual activators and corrective factors. Social actors who have lost their equilibrium and face insecurity have become open to migration (as consignors on the issuing side, and as employers on the receiving side). Migration emerges as a resilience response to a difficult situation, but meanwhile, migration itself and migrant life creates new areas of vulnerability and exposure. In this capacity, it contributes to creating balance at home (on the employee's side) and solving generational problems (on the employer's side), making the insecurity inherent in migrant care work more tolerable. Like a chain reaction, these states of stress follow from one another. The experience of vulnerability is a motivation for developing a resilience strategy, whereby the new insecurities become more manageable by knowing that the gains achieved help to maintain a new equilibrium somewhere – albeit sometimes only partially – while the unequal exchange between regions and countries persists (Melegh – Katona 2020). The feasible conversion of inequalities and resources on a global scale allows migration – which causes many vulnerabilities – to become a sustained resilience response for vulnerable social entities.
Methodology
I have been studying the entry of Central and Eastern European women into the global eldercare sector since 2008. My research covered Hungarian women from Transylvania and Transcarpathia going to Hungary and Israel, Romanian caregivers going to Italy, and women from Hungary going to Austria, Germany, and Israel. The study includes all my experiences during this long period, but it focuses on new research conducted during the last phase of the Covid pandemic, between January 2022 and October 2023. Some of the interviewees I have known for a while, having talked to them on several occasions and in various locations (in Hungary and in the country where they work), so I had the opportunity to follow their trajectories longitudinally (e.g., in the case of Melinda and Anikó), while the others were newly added to my sample. Throughout the research, I conducted fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, and kept in touch with some of my interlocutors electronically over the years, which allowed me to follow the main events of their lives and careers as caregivers. Most of the interviews were conducted face-to-face, but recently I have also had online conversations with women who are currently abroad. I also collected additional information in a Facebook group called Folytassa, Nővér, Külföldiában! [Carry On, Nurse, in Abroadia!] I shared many of my research questions with the group members, who willingly shared their knowledge and experiences with me in public and private messages. Many of them have also become my interviewees.
When? Why? How long?
Entry into the global care sector is rarely the result of a direct link between eldercare and individual career motivations. Very few of these decisions can be traced back to the desire to embark on this path because they believed that this was where their talents would flourish and, based on their own aspirations, they saw this area of the labor market as an opportunity for personal development.3 Exceptional situations include those in which caregiving is discovered as a form of self-sacrifice and life-affirming expression following a serious illness. However, generally women get here via multiple moves: the way to earn money is to go abroad, the condition for going abroad is getting a job, and the social niche available to them abroad and the fastest way to earn money is eldercare.
“I had just divorced my husband after four years of marriage, and my child was three years old at the time, and the two of us came to live with Grandpa. And that was a very difficult period, because as the country was falling apart, the ruble ceased to exist, then came these coupons, in the millions, money had no value, so we had to switch everything, and nobody had a job, there was great chaos in the country, we were not yet completely Ukraine, but neither were we completely separated from the Soviet Union. It’s all in the mind. ‘Cause we would have stuck with that system, but we were thrown in the deep end, there were no jobs, live as best you can.”
“They gave me a small pension, and… and whenever I could, there were still Comecon markets back then, we’d go to Hungary with some merchandise: ceramic goods, some kinds of souvenirs, and who knows what else. We’d bring that to Hungary and would sell it there, and there were times when we’d only make 2,000 Forints, but we were so happy about it because it was still worth a lot back then, even 10 years ago. (…) For me, it was like that at that time, going back and forth to Hungary, and grandfather’s pension, well, that wasn’t mine, but we had to make do with that, too. And well, since I took up knitting, at that time the shops were pretty much empty, so people or the ladies would get their hands on some yarn, and then I took it on, knitting sweaters, and I did that at night. And we had a small garden, so we’d take what we produced in the garden to the market, some vegetables, some fruit. So these were minimal little things, just enough to make a living. And in 2000, I received 200 Forints in child support.”6
“And after that? After that, we found out that the… the… agricultural cooperative in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County was looking for seasonal hourly wage workers for cucumber picking. And then… well, we managed to get by for a year or two, I think from ‘96 to ‘98, until grandfather died, but after grandfather died, I could moved more freely, and right away I went to Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county to pick cucumbers. (…) It was only seasonal work, but the way I worked, every season I’d put away something, I’d be saving for the winter months as well. And in the winter, there was the knitting. And then some odd job opportunities would come up here at the café, at the local coffee shop. Every three months… because they would catch the young saleswomen making mistakes, and then they would always find others to replace them, so I would also work at the café in the winter. (…) That was the winter. And then the summer, for five years, that was always the cucumbers. But that would last until November, for the duration of the cabbage and apple picking season, and we’d… I’d go, I was able to go.”
“Well, there’s no gunfire in Transcarpathia yet, one might say, and may there never be any gunfire anywhere either, but one must cope with that siren mentally. We may not be affected as much in Transcarpathia because there’s no gunfire. But even still, Transcarpathia is part of Ukraine, however it is, and we get our energy, gas, whatever from there. Now everything is pretty much shot to pieces. (…) If there’s an air raid, the sound of it is quite difficult to bear. That is a fear. You hear the air raid siren on the street, you learn to live with it. Maybe one gets used to it, maybe one gets tired of it. But no, it triggers a fear, it’s not a siren going off because there’s no problem, it’s ‘watch out, people, something’s wrong’. And it’s always this fear, this stress. So I said I’d rather leave everything behind, but I would like my family to be safe and secure. It’s very difficult, because everything I’ve fought for so far, we left behind, because it’s human nature to want a home of our own. You know, an apartment, an orderly life. Now it’s upside down, like many others, because we don’t know where we’re really going to be yet. Going back there is a bit risky because we don’t know when that country will be rebuilt.”
Throughout her life trajectory, eldercare has thus gone from a way to earn money to a vocation, even a refuge. She seems to have successfully integrated and even managed to help her family flee the emergency. But as it turns out, this is still only a partial integration: she remains an illegal worker, is not part of a social security system anywhere, her friendships in her home country have deteriorated but none have developed in the new place, her sense of feeling at home is uncertain, in the crossfire of mixed cultural influences her affiliation requires explanation, her sense of ethnic identity is damaged and formed in the ambivalence of exclusion and positive discrimination, her local affiliations are questionable, and she is even unsure about where she wants to live after her active years are over, so planning for the future and preparing for retirement are more or less impossible. In such a complex system of relations, the possibilities of finding equilibrium and stability are shaped by more complicated relationships.
“My son was a military officer. He just graduated from college, or maybe a year or two before that, and he was stationed in Jászberény. And he lived in Jászberény with his wife and child, and then the regime change came, and his unit was disbanded. And then they stationed my son in Tata. The family stayed in Jászberény, and we were in Miskolc. Even his wife’s parents. So he decided that if he didn’t get an apartment, he would ask for a discharge. He got discharged, came home to Miskolc, where the steelworks had just closed down, and then it went bankrupt. There were no jobs that could really support a family, let alone buy an apartment. And that’s when I decided, since I had just retired the year before, early retirement, all that, I was working in chemistry, and there was also an X-ray lab, so they let me go earlier, and then I said, well, I’m going to Israel. And the reason I chose Israel was because a friend of my brother’s, or his friend’s wife, was already working there.”
At that time, she arrived without a visa, and in those years she did not even have to be affiliated with an agency in Israel. In the meantime, however, many legal regulations and restrictions have been introduced as a result of mass migration, especially the influx of workers after the global economic crisis of 2008. Significant changes included the requirement of having a work visa before leaving one's home country, the introduction of an upper age limit (55 years), and a limit on the time one could spend in Israel as an elder caregiver.
“You need to know that my daughter got divorced and was left with 3 children, and she lives in an area where there are hardly any jobs, she takes all casual jobs, everything she can, in addition to her own trades, and sometimes she gets official jobs, but these are only temporary. So I have to help. And now – I say this very quietly – there is a job that will actually pay. She’ll have to work, that’s true, but it will pay, and a lot, and then I won’t have to help anymore. (…) My heart is here [Israel], here too. But I have to go home because I have to be with my grandchildren when their mother is working day and night,” she said in Jerusalem in 2011.
“To tell you the truth, I have no idea where all I have been and in what order. Because I returned to Israel again, but at that time only as a substitute for three months, and then I went to Manchester to care for some twins, but only the one of them, because one was born with such a low weight that he was in the hospital for two months, I stayed with him. Then I went to London from there, and from London I went to Zurich, and I was there for five years (…) Well, that’s it. I come, I go.”
“And the reason I don’t stay home, I’ll tell you honestly, is because when I’m home for a long time, I just sit down, I read, I watch TV, and then by the end I don’t even feel like going to the store. You know? And then I’m like… I’m becoming such a real old lady. Well, that’s when I grab my stuff and go. I go work. (…) And as long as I’m able, yes, I think I will work. We shall see. We’ll see if my health holds up.”
The analysis of the life trajectories of migrant caregivers thus reveals that this work, which has changed from reproductive to productive in the global dimension, is taking place amidst a lot of fluctuations and uncertainties, in the context of a series of disequilibriums, and is open to women seeking employment, both in the transnational and supranational dimension. Economic scarcity and the compelling power of money is a major motivating factor, one of the most important drivers of mobility, but it is important to stress that the pressure of financial scarcity is almost always accompanied by personal, individual, and family considerations, as the examples above illustrate. The underlying dynamics of this type of employment is therefore modeled by a combination of these, and their interaction regulates the career of caregivers, the forms of care work, and the duration of migration.
How? – “With eyes closed on the edge of a cliff. Then I jump off, and I'll hit the ground somewhere, won't I?”
The recent crises have been a major shock to the families of our region. Moreover, they had to face a type of crisis, a threat to our health, which the active generations have no experience of – nor a direct family experience of – dealing with. Yet it seems that many people have developed individual skills (resourcefulness, resilience, learning, adaptability) that have enabled a part of society to get through this period in a resilient way without significant loss and disequilibrium. Workers in circular migration showed particularly great flexibility and adaptability, even though this period severely restricted freedom of movement, but they were still able to keep their jobs abroad without major disruptions, even in an employment sector where online work was not possible, as eldercare requires personal presence. The period and the phenomenon of Covid therefore provides an opportunity to take a closer look at how a resilient problem management and resilience strategy is created and works in practice in a major crisis.
The first news about the Covid-19 virus came in December 2019, but at that time it still seemed to be a distant problem, affecting countries with which the Hungarian population has no everyday contact. But large-scale international networking has rapidly made the local contagion global. Due to the rapid spread of the outbreak, countries in our region closed their borders within a short time for reasons of national security. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the epidemic that originated in China a global pandemic. On the same day, the Hungarian government also decided to declare a national state of emergency and no one but Hungarian citizens were allowed to enter Hungary. Within a short time, all European countries have decided to restrict free movement and reintroduce border controls. All of this happened so quickly that those working abroad were completely caught off guard and unprepared. There was a lot of uncertainty for people working abroad, and their lives became unpredictable and unplannable.
“It was uncertain, very uncertain, because she kept promising every month that she would come, she would come. So my tour was over, the twenty-eight days were up, and there was no question about her not coming. They called me that day not to expect the substitute, I mean, no, the day before, but I was already packed, because you’re so ready to go home, and I was already packed, and I wouldn’t wish that unpacking on anyone, and all that, that… Mainly that feeling that she couldn’t come, but maybe next week, but if not then, in two weeks for sure. So it went on like this until the end of the three months, that next week we would surely come. So, all that, and they didn’t come. And so it all went like this… the changeover was on Wednesday, so every Wednesday you expect, you hope that nothing comes up, there are no snags, and that they will come, but they didn’t come. So it went on like that for three months.”
Hungarian caregivers were hit hard by the border closure. Those working abroad because they were unable to return home for an indefinite period of time, trapped in housing and work conditions that were often very hard to bear in the long term (e.g., caring for elderly people with dementia), and managing their affairs at home (e.g., household maintenance) and their previously established transnational lives required reorganization and assistance. And the lives of the substitutes waiting at home because they were stranded here, it became unpredictable as to when they would be able to earn an income again and how they would be able to survive financially. The first phase of the Covid pandemic imposed rigid systemic measures, while at the individual and family levels, it imposed a greater degree of flexibility on those affected.
The shock was felt on multiple levels. Caregivers were in a difficult situation for the above reasons. Both employers and recipients of care were alarmed by the border closure, as the sustainability of the well-established eldercare system was suddenly called into question. The robust measures taken by the authorities have made it uncertain whether cheap foreign labor would continue to come to take over the reproductive work, or whether the burden of this social problem affecting a wide range of people would fall back on the shoulders of the host society's families. Thirdly, there was despair at the institutional and state level about the possible loss of foreign workers in the care sector, which would cause a major imbalance in Western countries that would shake the foundations of their social order. The presence and extent of the vulnerability that had been masked by migration has become apparent on several fronts at once.
“The German family is also pretty wily, because they don’t pay you, only at the end. And then you’re kind of being blackmailed, because I wasn’t there just to then come home without any money” – complained Krisztina, among others.
“If the substitute doesn’t come, you can’t leave an elderly person, you know, you just can’t do that. So then I waited, and waited, and finally, after three months, she managed to get out, and turns out she could have come, let’s say, on her own accord, but then it wouldn’t have been arranged by the company. So there were complications. The Hungarian companies are also very, very, how shall I say it, exploiting people, you know, you can only travel with them, you can only travel as they say, that’s how it is. Yeah, your hands are a little bit tied,” Krisztina explained the compelling circumstances.
“I was like, if I got stranded again, or I was in a bad place and got stuck there, I couldn’t do it again. And so I decided not to go at all,” said Krisztina, who had to endure three months with a dementia patient who also showed signs of aggression, and upon reaching retirement age, she decided to give up this line of work.
Most of the caregivers tried to maintain their established livelihood strategy. It is the development and maintenance of this option that truly shows the manifestations of the resilience habitus of individuals and actors.
Erika has been working in Austria since 2014. She lived in Western Hungary as a seamstress, and in recent years she has tried her hand at self-employment, since after the regime change the companies that needed seamstresses gradually closed down. The dumping of new clothes has made them easily accessible to all social classes, while cheap Eastern clothes and the Western clothes in second-hand stores have driven down prices. Ordering custom-made, labor-intensive clothes from seamstresses has almost completely vanished. Erika was forced to change course. As she was over 55 by then, her options were limited, and employers were not interested in employing a woman of her age with no other work experience or qualifications. That left the option of eldercare in Austria that she had heard about from many in her region. Thanks to the easily accessible network, she found a job within a day. Since then, she has been working for this family, caring for an elderly lady with dementia.
“By then, I had been abroad for the seventh year, and that’s when I actually realized that I had been in quarantine for seven years. I didn’t even notice. (…) So in that one month, I used to live in such a rhythm that I would leave the house four times. Well, I’ve been in quarantine for seven years. And that’s why it wasn’t strange to me, absolutely not.”
She asked her adult daughter, who lives in Hungary, to help manage her affairs at home, especially matters related to household maintenance. And she managed to maintain her transnational relations with family and friends with the help of unrestricted internet access provided by the Austrian family.
“Well, I think it’s not just me, but a lot of us, especially those who have no resources, no financial resources, and are living month to month, it’s taken a toll on the nerves, that’s for sure. For sure. We never knew what measures would be put in place next week that might actually cause you to lose your job completely. (…) I mean, it’s much easier now that everyone knows where they are going, how far they can stretch, what the options are, but when the measures were introduced, there was really that uncertainty that we didn’t know what to do, where to go, how to manage, but that’s, how should I put it, that has already been established for everyone in these two years,” sums up the situation Magdi, who has been coming to work in Burgenland from the Austro-Hungarian border region for 10 years.
“I’ve learned to adapt to that, but that feeling of constant uncertainty, that lack of planning, not knowing what’s going to happen. Will I be able to see my loved ones when I want to, or when I get homesick, will I be able to travel home safely, respecting the rules. Well, this certainly put a strain on my life, it upset everything, even though my livelihood and my finances had not deteriorated,” says Erzsike, who had been working in Germany for nine years by then, her three children lived in three different countries, and keeping in touch with her transnational family required considerable logistical arrangements during this period.
“At the moment, I could work with either a 48-hour PCR test or a 24-hour simple antigen test, but for now I think that in this difficult and confusing situation, the caregivers will not be checked immediately, because in principle I would get a €500 fine and the family would get a €3,000 fine. So that’s dangerous, but now that they’re easing and there are all kinds of other things, I’m still trying. I don’t want to get vaccinated. The family doesn’t even require me to get vaccinated, but the €3,000 fine is pretty rough,” says Magdi, who has tried to get through this period unvaccinated.
When things get worse in a crisis
The cases presented above may give the illusion that Hungarian caregivers have largely arranged their lives and employment the best way they saw fit in the crisis, or that, exhibiting some flexibility, they have successfully adapted to the new situation and settled back into the prior equilibrium. But this was certainly not the case. In a systemic crisis, individual crises brought increased hardship for those affected. The confluence of these two levels of vulnerability generated problems from which it was particularly difficult to find a way out. The degree of vulnerability has become cumulative at the individual level.
“Back then, I was able to keep in touch with the employment bureau, and they called me in once, but I was already home and I couldn’t go. I called them on the phone, I don’t even know how they closed the case, because I was entitled to this benefit for two years. But if I can’t be here alone, it’s no use explaining to them that I can’t be here alone. Because our apartment is in two parts, one upstairs in the attic, on the second floor, and one in the basement.”
“I can walk, it’s just that I can’t go that far, because on some level I feel… a kind of paralysis, I feel a numbness in my legs, in my muscles, and well, yes, I try to keep walking and moving. And I say that at work, yes, I’ll have that. I’ll have it, and if I can take my patient out, they usually have to be pushed in a wheelchair, or they walk with some kind of assistive device, and with that I can get around too. As I do now with the bike.”
Even after several months of trying, Mária was unable to find a job. Her case is a stark illustration of how vulnerable a migrant worker is. For foreign women integrated into the low-level segment of the occupational structure, in eldercare, this can be used as a resilient problem-solving strategy as long as their health serves them. If their physical or mental condition deteriorates, they are on their own, and their vulnerability becomes apparent. This is particularly problematic because many have worked/are working for a long time illegally or in the grey zone, and almost all of them have a fragmented career that includes several periods of not being covered by social security and are therefore entitled to social assistance and pensions for a significantly shorter period than they have actually worked. The form of eldercare that is based on foreign workers involves an important systemic failure, namely the failure to provide social security for the employees, at both the individual and the social level. In the absence of social security, informally or semi-informally employed elder caregivers (and a significant proportion of them belong to this segment) become vulnerable in the event of individual and macro-level crises, as well as after the end of their active years.
Summary: “Because there are loopholes, there are workarounds.”
The resilience paradigm offers a promising perspective for understanding the situation of foreign women employed in eldercare, as it allows us to plausibly grasp the constant change and crisis management that characterize this sector. The cases presented in this study demonstrate how, during successive disequilibria, a great deal of flexibility, resourcefulness, adaptation, individual and systemic maneuvering maintain the framework conditions through which foreign labor can be involved in eldercare. Since there are multiple layers of vulnerability (primary and secondary), and their correction is made possible through each other, there is a strong interest at multiple levels in making this work. In fact, maintaining the eldercare network abroad is part of the resilient problem-solving process for individuals (migrants), families (employers), and social systems (state-level stakeholders). The research conducted confirms previous findings that argue that resilience is not a unique feature of stable entities, but that, in fact, the experience of vulnerability explicitly promotes resilient behavior (Gallopin 2006; Chandler 2013; Evens – Reid 2013; Bollig 2014). The recent case of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of this, as social actors have allowed the development and maintenance of numerous loopholes, either legitimately or tacitly, even under the strictest regulations, in order to ensure that nothing stands in the way of this resilient solution remaining available. Its limitations, however, are evident at the individual level: physical or mental health impairments make an individual more vulnerable in this employment sector. At the same time, this also highlights the fact that the strategies that promote resilience, the structures that impose resilience, also shift to the individual level responsibilities that cannot be addressed on the individual level but would require a community or public framework. It is therefore important to use the concept of resilience in sociological and anthropological analysis as an analytical technical term that is clearly detached from the politically imbued resilience paradigm, which, in Neocleous' words, has become a fetish and a kind of expectation of the liberal state (Neocleous 2015). This differentiated view helps us recognize that the failure to address social problems at the societal level and the abandonment of individuals lead to the reproduction of inequalities, even if individual resilience and burden-sharing can mask this at times. The global eldercare system that relies on foreign labor highlights this systemic problem very clearly.
Acknowledgments
The study was funded by the project: ELKH No. 57004. Social and Cultural Resilience in the Carpathian Basin run by the Institute of Ethnology of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest.
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Tünde Turai is an ethnographer, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities (Hungary), and head of the Department of Social Anthropology. She graduated from Babeș–Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania), and received her PhD from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary). Her research interests include: the elderly, transnational migration, intergenerational relations, care work, social network, boundary, social resilience, adaptation, family, women's position in society. She has conducted fieldwork in several regions of Romania and Hungary, Austria (Burgenland), Ukraine (Transcarpathia), Serbia (Vojvodina), Israel (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem), Italy (Ancona), and the USA (Washington, D.C., Chicago, New York).
Since 2015, the words migration and migrant have acquired a specific meaning in public discourse: their range of meaning has narrowed to the population coming to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. In my study, I use these words in their original sense: they refer to transnational mobility and to persons involved in transnational migration in general.
See also Dóra Gábriel's analysis of the complex embeddedness of working abroad in life stories based on narrative interviews (Gábriel 2022).
See also Krisztina Németh's case analysis. In her study, she presents three cases that differ in this respect: Ilona took up eldercare in Germany with no professional ambitions, which has not changed since; as a health care provider, Ágnes took up eldercare abroad equipped with professional skills, but she could not fulfil her potential as she was treated as an unskilled home care worker, which left her feeling deeply disappointed; Ditta entered the field of eldercare without professional aspirations or qualifications, but over time her work abroad became part of her professional self-realization (Németh 2018).
All names in the study are pseudonyms to protect the interviewees. In the presentation of the cases, I include all personal data that are relevant for interpretation, but I exclude those that are not relevant for understanding the topic of the study. Thus, contrary to the tradition of ethnographic publications, I do not indicate an exact age.
Comecon market is a colloquial term for informal markets where one could obtain products that were not available in state-owned stores. The term began to be used with a pejorative connotation in the 1970s, to express that this is roughly how much everyday people benefit from the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. This idiom survived the regime change and the institution of Comecon and continued to be used for informal markets until they were supplanted by large department stores and Chinese markets.
In 2000, the average gross monthly earnings of full-time employees were 87,645 HUF. https://www.ksh.hu/docs/hun/xstadat/xstadat_hosszu/h_qli001.html (accessed November 10, 2023)
In the case of Polish eldercare workers in Italy, Kordasiewicz concluded that women use two strategies to clarify their ambiguous, hard-to-define position: either professionalization or personalization (increasing the personal dimension) - at least at the narrative level (Kordasiewicz 2014).
I interviewed Anikó several times since 2011, the last time in 2023.
In Northern Hungary, many people are familiar with the tax conditions in Slovakia, and because they are more favorable than in Hungary, some private entrepreneurs adopt the strategy of registering their company in Slovakia, paying taxes there, but continuing to live and operate in Hungary. Mária's family lives in Győr, which is also part of this region, so it is not surprising that this is an option in her plans.
