Free to move, bound to be exploited? The political economy of gender inequality in EU care migration

The provision of long-term care for the elderly is a pressing policy problem for the aging populations of European countries but also a challenge for comparative and European political economy. Using Nancy Fraser’s engaging political economy analysis of care in capitalism, we can see that the 2022 European Care Strategy (ECS) adopted in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic raises fundamental political economy questions about prevailing perceptions of productive work, the commercialisation of care, and regressive distributive effects of free movement by care workers in the EU. However, we also try to understand what stabilises this situation. We argue that social reproduction is shaped by enduring social norms and political agency, which may be at odds with imperatives of capitalist production. The concept of the ‘moral economy of care workers’ can explain how they resist exploitation while the EU’s rights-based approach in the ECS is of limited use to them.