Gender, Migration, and the Pursuit of Security

Abstract

This chapter discusses how dynamic processes of gendering, racialization, and precarization make diverse people into personal support workers who lack security at the labor market and intimate levels. Enduring gendered inequalities that relegate more women than men to unpaid domestic work serve to structure and justify the concentration of women in this paid domestic work and its devaluation. What immigrant women from professional and working-class backgrounds had in common that shaped their eventual location in personal support was the marginal place of their nation of origin in the global economy vis-à-vis the United States, Canada, and by extension Britain. Gendered and racialized migration shaped the location of immigrant workers in North America, but their entry into personal support had as much to do with dynamics in the local labor markets of Toronto and Los Angeles, namely the intersection of racialization, gendering, ageism, and precarious employment, supported by the state. Social networks certainly opened up jobs to immigrant workers with few other options, but these jobs were precarious.