Senior Home Care for Sale in Europe

In Europe, the trend towards forced commodification of migrant labor becomes not only evident in the increasing marketization of senior home care offered by placement agencies, but also includes accelerating transnational mobility and border regimes as part of transnational care and value chains. This development includes the return of private households as workplaces outside legal work monitoring. An exploitative mode of private care provision in seniors’ homes, brokered by placement agencies, has become part of the contemporary political economy of care migration. The European East to West and South migration is now a stable pattern in closing care gaps; it derives not only from the breakdown of the economies in former state- socialist countries, but is also closely connected to gendered patterns of care provision. This trend is supported and promoted by the European Union's interventions in the health sectors of its member states, by introducing an extensive commercialization of care. This paper deals with the various facets of the care economy.