Intra-regional migration, gender and the care economy: policies, institutions and organisational actors (1)

Date and Time:

5th November, 2019   16:00–18:00

Venue :

Building 19, Room 710, Waseda Campus

* Free attendance, no registration required

Speakers:

Professor Ito Peng is an expert in global social policy, specializing in gender, care and migration policies. She has written extensively on social policies and political economy of care in Asia Pacific contexts. In addition to the analysis of policies, her research also involves analyses of Time Use Survey, General Household Survey, and in-depth interviews.

Professor Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. She is also a visiting researcher at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (Nov-Dec 2019). Her research interest  centers  on  social  inequalities  in  everyday  life  under  the influence of migration and globalization.

Professor Nicola Piper is a political sociologist. Her research interests focus  on  international  labour  migration  and  advocacy  politics  in relation to a rights-based and gender-sensitive approach to global and regional migration governance.

1. The care economy and migration in Asia: an East Asian perspective

Professor Ito Peng (Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy, Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy, University of Toronto)

Across the world population ageing and increased women’s paid employment outside of home have led to a huge increase in familial outsourcing care, and a growing acknowledgement of the importance and the value of care for social and economic functioning of our society. Studies show that care is now one of the fastest expanding economic sectors, and it will likely continue to lead further employment expansion in future.  In the US personal care aid is the largest expanding employment sector today, far out-stripping traditionally the largest service sector employment  of  “combined food preparation and service workers, including fast food employment”. The global projection suggests that the largest employment growth potential in care services will be in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The expansion of the care economy will not only draw women into the sector, but in many parts of the world including Asia, it will also involve an intensification of women care workers’ labour migration.

This presentation will provide an overview of the care economy focusing on Asian contexts. It then discusses the connections between the expansion of the care economy and the migration of care workers in the region, and the implications of these for social policy and gender equality.

2. Brokering Ethnic Difference and Care Culture: Migration Infrastructure for Foreign Care Workers in East Asia

Professor Pei-Chia Lan (National Taiwan University, Director of the Global Asia Research Center)

The literature on the recruitment of migrant care workers has mostly focused on either the macro overview of comparative regimes or the micro portrait of migrant subjectivity, lacking sufficient analysis on the meso level of “migration infrastructure” that facilitates and constrains the formation of global care chains,  including government  institutions,  for-profit  agencies, certification exams, and visa regulations, etc. This presentation will examine the divergence of care migration infrastructures in East Asia, especially by comparing the recruitment and training of migrant care workers from Southeast Asia to Taiwan and Japan. The comparison demonstrates how the receiving societies manage to uphold the social images of quality care by negotiating ethnic boundaries, cultural difference, and the ambiguous skilled-unskilled divide.

3. Gendering Migration Governance: the case of bilateral agreements in Asia

Professor Nicola Piper (University of Sydney, Director of the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre; British Academy Global Professor Fellow at Queen Mary University of London)

Bilateral labour agreements are the primary tool for “regularized” labour migration management in certain sectors, in particular domestic and care work, especially in Asia. This presentation analyses the gendered outcomes of BLAs by asking how they fare in terms of human and labour rights, and gender equality at structural and individual levels, applied to key migration corridors in Asia.