4.2 Non-communitarian immigrant women in the work market in spain  (Page 3/18)

The female immigrant is perceived as a suitable work force for domestic services, since it is not socially valued, labeled as “dirty” and barely qualified, assumed as something inherent of the feminine condition and fulfilled from the informal economy. Consequently, in the era of globalization, female international migration reveals an emergent “internationalization of reproductive work”; result of an increasing demand of feminine work force of other countries to take care of a series of tasks, which until now carried out by native women in the home, in an invisible form and without perceiving remunerations in return. All is translated in a “racialización” of the remunerated domestic work, whereas they are women of other countries, without citizenship, that take the relief native women of those tasks (Anderson 2000).

In the southern European countries, the internal domestic service constitutes a modality that expands in a greater quantity than other European countries, in which the State plays a more active role in the provision and financing of services for the families. In northern Europe, the intern employees of a home are few, and the domestic service paid per hour predominates; reason why it is common to higher a worker 4 hours once or twice a week, or 8 hours daily Monday through Friday (Ramirez 1997; Colectivo Ioé 2001a). In this sense, it must be considered that the internal domestic demand on watch is solely being satisfied at the present time through immigrant women, not only because of wages, but because it is a modality that prevents the workers to return home daily. The native women, including the domestic employees, no longer are arranged to work under these conditions and completely elude this modality of domestic service, in spite of the strong demand.

The internal domestic service, used especially to take care of an elder in a dependency situation, is preferred by the families before other solutions, in accordance with cultural and economic reasons. The solution of the internal domestic employee is similar to the “ideal” of a caring family model, in which an informal nursemaid – generally a daughter or daughter-in-law – daily takes care of the necessities of the dependent elder person in a non-remunerated form.  But opting on an internal domestic service not solely responds to a cultural “fit” strategy.  At the present time, counting with remunerated domestic personnel has stopped being a practice liked to luxury and exclusive to groups with greater spending power, extending also to segments of middle-class population. It must be considered that considerable parts of their plaintiffs, elderly who live alone and who receive a pension, lack sufficient resources to pay for the supply of private services (a geriatric residence, for example). The insolvency of the demand, absence of a public provision of services and resources to take care of these dependency situations, convert the resource of an informal economy and an immigrant worker, willing to work for an inferior wage, in the less expensive option and, in many cases, the only feasible strategy.