VAM-Velferd, arbeid og migrasjon

The Buying and Selling Gender Equality research project examined paid domestic labour and au pairing in Norway. It assessed implications of this phenomenon for the equality between women and men, between ethnic majority and ethnic minorities and for social/economic levelling. The project focused on interviews with domestic laborers and au pairs, their employers, and on analysis of political and media documents. The study points to au pairs being heterogeneous group with different backgrounds, experiences and expectations. The interviews with au pairs elucidated the complex relations between employers and au pairs. These are often couched in the rhetoric of family relations, which have the effect of placing the au pairs in an unequal power dynamic. This familial rhetoric means that au pairs have little room for negotiation when asked to undertake extra work, and that the domestic labour they undertake is not acknowledged as work. This situation is exacerbated when au pairs are dependent on their employers for their residence permit. By doing work with which is undervalued and which has traditionally been undertaken by women produces the au pair as a specific type of worker, whose labour is undervalued and underpaid.. Norwegians who employ domestic labourers or take on au pairs are also heterogeneous group. They have different life situations, motivations for buying the services and different experiences with their employees. Interviews with employers showed that the decision to purchase domestic services was in general taken in order to be able to manage full time work, and to have extra time to be active parents and pursue their hobbies. As such employers conform to a naturalised worker-carer model without compromising their high standards of parenting and household management. Hiring au pairs and domestic labourers can be a way of solving "equality conflicts" in the family - housework is effectively is edged out of "the battle for gender equality". This means that buying private domestic services does in fact promote gender equality if gender equality is understood in terms of the de-gendering of paid work, and potentially more women in leadership positions. However if gender equality means the gendering of work traditionally associated with women, and gender equality between women, then the hiring of domestic workers and au pairs falls short of this ideal. Over the past 20-25 years, Norway has gone from being a country sending out au pairs to a receiving country, which is part of global feminised migration. Despite this Norwegian authorities have held on to the scheme as cultural exchange, This means that they effectively ignore the fact that it functions as a migration route for women and that most au pairing functions as a form domestic labour which solves the problem of the dual worker carer model. However the cultural exchange discourse has been ?useful? in helping to bypass difficult political debates about servanthood, avoiding addressing gendered migration policy, while enabling Norwegian society to maintain its images as equal. The result is an underpaid servant class out with political control. Gender equality as a central political value and goal is secondary to migration policies. The Cultural exchange discourse means that women come to Norway for many reasons, not least because they are providers. The fact that such providers are now no longer allowed to migrate means that gender equality in the form of economic independence is safeguarded for Norwegian men and women, while au pairs? independence and gender equality comes second. Au pairs are not on a par but are the colonised other. Au pair policy undergirds gender equality in the work place for Norwegian pairs, while care and care and domestic labour are devalued. The Buying and Selling Gender Equality research project produced two books, Elisabeth Stubberud?s thesis Au Pairing in Norway: The Production of a (Non-) Worker, and Paid Domestic Labour in a Changing Europe: Questions of Gender Equality and Citizenship, edited by Berit Gullikstad, Guro Korsnes Kristensen and Priscilla Ringrose (Palgrave, forthcoming 2016). The book was the result of the project?s collaboration within the European network it established, involving eleven researchers from nine European countries. The project members produced 15 article/chapters, delivered eighteen papers at international and national conferences, contributed to several public events and to arrangements organized by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and the Ministry of Children and Equality. The project?s final workshop was held at the Ministry of Justice and Public Security in April 2016. The project also maintained a high media profile, producing 15 media contributions, including articles in Adressavisen, Fagforbundet Klassekampen, Dagsavisen and radio interviews on NRK P1 and NRK radio P2.

This project will study the relation between gender equality and global feminized migration. The project is justified by the need for a deeper understanding of the significance of gender and ethnicity in the formulation of the equality politics of the wel fare state. Maternal participation in the labour market combined with the fathers' participation in the family is incorporated as gender mainstreaming. This way of organizing everyday life is particularly dominant in the middle class, but the ideal is of vital importance to the collective identity of all Norwegians. On a global market women have become pioneers of migration. By offering services as domestic workers outside the regular labour market they contribute to resolving conflicts related to work- life balance. This project examines these solutions empirically. Do such solutions interfere with the goals of the welfare state concerning equality and social/economic equalization with respect to gender, ethnicity and class? Does gender mainstreaming mi nimise one social inequality by producing new ones? The project will examine how gender, "race"/ethnicity, class and nation play together in the Norwegian employers attitudes towards employment of migrant domestic workers.The experience of migrant worker s doing domestic services in Norwegian households is examined as well, together with public debates and policy documents about these phenomena. Based on feminist postcolonial theory, we ask whether and how the new every-day-life practices and social imagi naries contributes in the structuring of Norwegianness and otherness - and support boundaries between "us" and "them" territorially and culturally. We will be involved in cooperation with other European researchers that investigate the rise of ethnic div isions in different welfare state systems. The project will also form part of the Nordic Center of Exellence in Welfare Research: The Nordic Welfare State - historical foundations and future challenges.