Transnational Organization of Labour, Mobility, and Senior Care in Central and Eastern Europe

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, a gendered, transnational labour market for senior care has emerged and expanded rapidly in response to the increasing demand in Western and Southern Europe. This market provides transnational care arrangements in which migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) carry out care work in the West while their families remain behind, thereby creating care gaps in the sending countries (Lutz, in print; Solari, 2018). Consequently, the CEE region is becoming an area of destination and transit for migrants from other countries, including Ukraine, Serbia, and Moldova (Katona & Melegh, 2020).

The significance of care migration for Western and Southern European countries is well documented; however, its effects on the sending countries remain poorly understood. Over the past decade, there has been a shift in the organization of transnational care migration: While care work was previously conducted on an informal basis, it is now increasingly marketized and regularized (Aulenbacher et al., 2024; Farris & Marchetti, 2017). The processes of corporatisation and digitalisation accompanying this are slowly beginning to be studied by researchers; however, existing analyses tend to focus on receiving regions, while neglecting sending and transit regions.

In response to the scarcity of academic and policy discourse on care workers’ mobility to and from CEE, this thematic issue represents a timely initiative to bring together authors to stimulate debate at the intersection of research on intra-EU mobility and migration, and care drain, care gain and care circulation in the region.

The editors welcome contributions that explore issues, empirical research, and methodological approaches including policy responses to transnational migration, recruitment, and retention of care workers; emerging care markets in CEE; the role of transnational actors in long-term care systems in Europe; and research and methodological (ethical) challenges of co-producing knowledge with non-academic partners in relevant areas/countries.

References

Aulenbacher, B., Lutz, H., Palenga-Möllenbeck, E., & Schwiter, K. (Eds.). (2024). Home care for sale: The transnational brokering of senior care in Europe. Sage.

Farris, S. R., & Marchetti, S. (2017). From the commodification to the corporatization of care: European perspectives and debates. Social Politics, 24(2), 109–131.

Katona, N., & Melegh, A. (Eds.). (2020). Towards a scarcity of care? Tensions and contradictions in transnational elderly care systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

Lutz, H. (in print). The backstage of the care economy: Care-drain, transnational parenthood and emotional inequality. Pluto Press.

Solari, C. (2018). On the shoulders of grandmothers: Gender, migration, and post-Soviet nation-state building. Routledge.

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