Emerging home care markets in Central and Eastern Europe: Transformations of senior care, labour mobility, and housing in Poland and Germany

Abstract In light of current demographic, political, and social developments, but also driven by economic inequalities, there is a growing demand for transnational senior care. The article examines the key role of transnational agencies brokering live-in care, mainly for Polish careworkers in Germany, but also for the emerging care market in Poland. Firstly, it examines the macro level of this brokerage, its political dimension and its embeddedness in the respective welfare states (care, migration and labour market regimes), in which care is primarily provided at home by (migrant) women. Housing is considered another relevant analytical dimension of the organisation of care. Secondly, the analysis focuses on the meso level, by discussing how Poland is increasingly transforming from a country of emigration to a country of transit and immigration for care workers, and how marketisation, corporatisation, transnationalisation, and digital transformation are changing care work, migration, and the organisation of both. Thirdly, looking at the micro level, the paper analyses how transnational live-in work between two households affects the working conditions, (self-)care and housing of live-in carers. Both the familialistic care policy in Poland and work carried out in the household of a person in need of care in Germany have particular requirements, which are difficult to reconcile. The transnational political economy of care and housing therefore calls for empirical answers regarding who shapes (and how) the discourses and regulations of (migrant) domestic care (trans)nationally and how the tension between fair and comprehensive (self-)care and care for profit can be resolved.