2024-2 Feminist Ethics
On Gheaus’s Care Drain: who should provide for the children left behind?
Criticizing a neoliberal approach to globalization, Gheaus upholds that care drain is both a morally harmful and unjust phenomenon that needs to be amended (Gheaus 2013: 6-12). According to Gheaus, the harmful effects of care drain are extensive: migrant parents (especially mothers) experience guilt over their children and face social blame; children are in an emotionally precarious situation due to the lack of continuity of care and secure love; and extended families bear the additional burden of caregiving (Gheaus 2013: 6, 9-10, 11). To mitigate this, she offers four possible policy solutions that require responsible action from those who unfairly benefit from care drain, including sending states, receiving states, and employers from receiving countries (Gheaus 2013: 14-15).
While countenancing her analysis and suggestions, I believe that the responsibility of receiving states and employers should be further emphasized. Gheaus mainly focuses on employer’s scalable benefit as follows: “Employers […] can buy work at lower prices than those they would have to pay, should they employ their compatriots” (Gheaus 2013: 14). However, as Bartky points out, emotional care givers also run the risk of becoming victims of epistemic and ethical disempowerment (Bartky 1990: 111). Such risks are often neglected in the supply-and-demand model and are aggravated by the asymmetric power relations between foreign workers and domestic employers. Moreover, since care drain often leads migrant parent to love their employers’ children more than their own (the so-called “love transplantation”), migrant caregivers become more vulnerable to the termination of contracts (Gheaus 2013: 8; Brake 2021: 217). This factor is also overshadowed by the mere fact that they are paid care workers. Overall, employers and receiving states dismiss their responsibility for these intangible hazards. Consequently, employers must recognize such moral hazards, and receiving states must redress the injustice situation caused by care drain.
References
Bartky, Sandra Lee (1990). Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and Disaffection in Women’s Emotional Labor. Femininity and Domination, London: Routledge.
Brake, Elizabeth (2021). Care as Work. The Exploitation of Caring Attitudes and Emotional Labor. Caring for Liberalism. Dependency and Liberal Political Theory. Edited by A. Bhandary and A. R. Baehr. London: Routledge.
Gheaus, Anca (2013). Care drain: who should provide for the children left behind? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 16:1, 1-23.