Care in crisis: Au pairing during a global pandemic

Abstract This article considers how the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a remarkable social experiment in the market for migrant ‘au pair’ labour in Australia. As has been illustrated in broader accounts of the pandemic’s ‘care crisis’, the global health emergency cracked open underlying fault lines, as capacities for social reproduction were stretched to breaking point. At the same time, the pandemic deepened the precarity of temporary migrants as they lost jobs and incomes, experienced housing insecurity, and were excluded from state emergency relief measures. Building on interdisciplinary feminist literatures on gender, work, migration, and social reproduction, this article adds to emerging scholarship on the growing phenomenon of au pairing in Australia to examine drivers of demand, migrant mobilities in and out of au pair labour, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the market. While au pairing emerged during the pandemic as a form of survival work where migrants had little negotiating power, the market ultimately shifted when emergency childcare measures were withdrawn, migrant labour became scarce, and visa restrictions on working hours were relaxed. In addition to providing new empirical insights into au pairing in Australia, the findings underscore the constitutive role of law and policy settings in shaping the distributions and divisions of reproductive labour, which can both consolidate and also challenge broader gendered care norms and distributions and the social reproduction bargain.