Situating Men within Global Care Chains: the Migrant Handyman Phenomenon, 2008-2009

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This is a qualitative data collection. Research has documented the return of paid domestic labour in the Global North. Studies have shown how it is migrant workers who are supplying much of this domestic labour, and the concept of global care chains has been developed to capture this. The research has tended to focus on how women are situated within these global care chains. This project, however, aims to illuminate and make sense of some of the ways in which men are positioned within the relationship between globalisation, migration and social reproduction. The project will focus on situations in which families buy-in the labour of migrant handymen to undertake traditionally male tasks of social reproduction such as home maintenance and gardening. The project combined quantitative and qualitative research methods. A range of existing data sets was analysed in order to provide a descriptive statistical portrait of the prevalence and characteristics of the migrant handyman phenomenon in the UK. In-depth face-to-face interviews with migrant handymen and labour-using households were conducted in order to explore themes such as why, how and with what consequences households use migrant handymen, and the processes by which migrants come to be inserted in this type of work.Main Topics:1. Accumulate data on the scale and characteristics of supply of and demand for migrant handymen in the UK; 2. Understand the determinants of the supply of and demand for migrant handymen; 3. Understand how the use of migrant handymen affects employing households', and especially men's, work, family and leisure practices; 4. Explore the implications of the commoditisation of male tasks of social reproduction for gender and parental relations; 5. Understand the migration paths of migrant handymen and ties with their homeland; 6. Explore migrant handymen's work and family biographies, and their experiences of being a migrant in terms of their living and working conditions, and especially the characteristics of the relationship between them and the men of the households they work in.