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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Introduction. The Global Old-Age Care Industry. Tapping into Care Labor Across and Within National Borders

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A few weeks after the first COVID-19 infections were diagnosed in Germany, NGOs and experts in the field of old-age care warned of acute bottlenecks in the provision of care for older Germans. They feared that care workers from Eastern Europe who were travelling back to their home countries might not be able to return to Germany due to the closure of borders. As a result, up to 200,000 migrant care workers could be missing after Easter. The weekly German magazine Der Spiegel quoted one NGO’s spokesperson saying: “We already had a shortage of care workers, the crisis has been here for a long time.” Another NGO’s spokesperson was particularly concerned about older people in need of care who were living at home with a live-in migrant carer: “Where should all these people stay? Old-age and nursing homes are full.” This NGO asked for financial compensation for people in paid work who reduced their working hours or temporarily left their job to care for relatives who were left without care due to the coronavirus pandemic (Der Spiegel, Engpasse in der Pflege wegen Coronavirus. Die Betreuungskrise, 2020; Lehmann, Kontrollen und Personalmangel wegen Corona. An der Grenze, 2020). Such a compensation scheme did not materialize, but Germany and several other EU countries have temporarily relaxed their national qualification requirements for care professions in order to tap into another source of care labor: refugees and other recently arrived migrants (Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, How does the Corona crisis affect the conditions for migrant workers in the EU?, 2020).