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Afterword: Further Questions about the Global Care Chain

From five geographic locations and perspectives, the authors take up a question first put forth by Arlie Hochschild about the impact of globalization on care. Globalization, she argues, has resulted in ‘a series of personal links across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’ (Hochschild 2000, 131). Caring, she notes, is increasingly part of a global chain, which adversely affects women and developing countries, and sustains and creates uneven dependencies and labor exploitation. Care itself becomes a commodity unequally distributed by class, such that to survive in a global labor market under contemporary capitalism, poorer women must sacrifice care for their own families in order to care for the professional-managerial class. Many scholars have elaborated this argument, as do the authors in this volume, demonstrating, among other things, that the distinction between productive labor and the work of caring has not been undone. In fact, that distinction, long criticized by many Western feminists, has been reinforced and given new meaning in a global chain where middle and upper class women enter the (formerly male domain) of public, productive labor but then can afford to participate in this monetized work only by exploiting the cheaper labor of lower class or migrant women, who perform the domestic caring functions (e.g. in the home, in health care, especially for children and the elderly) that they themselves then can no longer perform, or perform now inadequately, for their own families. Wage labor is still valorized over care work, much of which is still unpaid and, when paid, is some of the lowest paid work in the labor market. A free market ideology (often framed as a neoliberal project) is used to legitimate this valorization as well as to devalue all forms of activity and life that are not assimilable to the logic of markets and profit. The authors in this volume focus specifically on the relational qualities and power dynamics in this global care chain. They emphasize the contingency of definitions of care work and the moralizing that accompanies the process of arriving at and using these definitions. They also, importantly, modify the neoliberal claim, arguing that the state in some of the Global South, such as China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Vietnam, is in fact rejecting the hegemonic austerity policies of the Global North and instead increasing its involvement in welfare provisioning. Its involvement is often indirect, however, through third-sector institutions, thus combining privatization of state resources with a new ethics of voluntarism (encouraging of entrepreneurs and locating responsibility with the individual) and NGO provisioning. In some places, this new configuration encourages ‘familialism’ and a ‘new prudentialism’, a point emphasized in the Introduction