Results from the European project RESISTIRE show that the pandemic outbreak and related policies have reinforced pre-existing inequalities, spinning into what the project has termed a “spiral of increasing inequalities” (Axelsson, Callerstig and Strid, 2021). The care domain is a key part of this spiral and has been at the centre of debates and of some of the COVID-19 policy responses. However, for the most part, policy interventions on care have focused primarily on conciliation measures, in an effort to mitigate the effects of policies like lockdown, closure of schools and elders’ facilities.
Though significantly addressed in public debates, the impact of policy restrictions on domestic workers -a highly feminised and racialised sector- has not been a core concern among policymakers. Yet, these workers have been hit hard by the pandemic and related policies, not only in terms of exposure to contagion, but also in terms of exacerbation of pre-existing and intersecting inequalities of gender, nationality, and socio-economic disadvantage.
In few exceptions, national policies have tried to address the situation of domestic workers, but these interventions were far from effective and their underlying rationale betrays stereotyped understandings of care work and racist assumptions towards migrant workers. The Italian and Spanish policies on domestic workers enacted during the pandemic, with their different approaches, are illustrative of how public policy engages in gendering and racialising domestic workers. This paper compares the policies of both countries. It first provides a brief overview of the legal and institutional environment in which these policies have been developed and implemented. Subsequently, it shifts to the policies themselves, bringing to the surface the representations and implicit assumptions related to care work, and the gender and racial hierarchies underpinning them. To do so, it draws from Carol Bacchi’s approach in her book What’s the Problem Represented to Be. The analysis is not limited to the one policy targeting the group, but seeks to capture the broad socio-economic and legal conditions that contribute to locating migrant domestic workers in a disadvantage social position, with the aim of capturing the impact produced by covid-19 policies on pre-existing inequalities.
