Caring for the elderly: the embodied labour of migrant care workers in Singapore

Research on transnational care work has tended to focus on the migration of women for either domestic work or nursing, and the two bodies of work have remained largely separate. In developed countries such as Singapore, however, the high level of female labour force participation alongside a rapidly ageing population has led to the deployment of both groups of migrant care workers to alleviate the impending eldercare crisis. Migrant domestic workers are employed to look after the elderly in private domiciles while foreign healthcare workers provide eldercare in institutions such as nursing homes. Recognizing that the transnational labour migrations of women as domestic and healthcare workers are integrally linked in the care chain, we attempt to bring the two together in this article. We first examine how state policy differentially regulates the entry of these two groups to work in two very different spaces: the domestic space of the home, and the institutional space of nursing homes. Drawing on interviews with employers, we go on to argue that while the institutional mechanisms differ for the groups of care workers employed in these two spaces, Singapore's solution to its eldercare predicament is predicated on ‘othering’ the care worker's body along discourses of gender, nationality and notions of elderly care work as dirty, demanding and demeaning.