Deskilling Migrant Women in the Global Care Industry by Sondra Cuban Author: Sondra Cuban Title: Deskilling Migrant Women in the Global Care Industry Cost: £49.78 249 pages ISBN: 978-0-230-342330-0
Reviewed by Peggy Warren
Peggy Warren teaches in the field of work-based learning. She is currently undertaking research on women working in the healthcare field who have transitioned from vocational to academic studies.
I came to this book from personal and professional interests. I work within the National Health Service and I am currently undertaking a PhD which explores the nursing education experiences of postwar black Caribbean immigrant women in the United Kingdom. Deskilling Migrant Women is a true page-turner; it invites the reader into the private and professional lives of highly skilled, professionally educated women who migrated from the Philippines, India, Poland and Zimbabwe to fill what they perceived to be qualified healthcare positions here in the UK. The women were not expecting to be handed professional roles on a silver platter; they fully understood that they would develop into the UK roles following appropriate conversion programmes. “Deskilling”, the author tells us (49), 'generally refers to the underutilization of skills leading to contradictory social mobility.'
This book provides accounts of exploitation, subjugated professional trajectories, the women's acceptance of lost dreams and subordinated (deskilled) roles as well as, in a few cases, narratives of grit, determination, resilience and liberation. Sondra explicates the complexity of some of the issues she had to consider and work through as an academic researcher. These included, power relations and ethics. She outlines the tensions that presented as she considered her positionality in the study with her participants and described (2), 'a feeling of being implicated by using people in the study who were migrating on precarious visas.'
The theory of intersectionality ('a theory of specificity, of examining intra-group differences and
acknowledging how women are different from one another… [which] puts inequalities at the centre rather than the margins of social theory' [18-1]9) is used to examine intra-group differences through an exploration of the women's experiences as well as their gendered identities as migrant women, outsiders and foreign staff. The author focuses on the women's race, gender, class and language and discusses how each aspect of the migrant women's lives were used to discriminate against them within a work setting. The author ascribes to an ethics of care, giving a voice to, as well as protecting the participants. The women's voices are presented through narratives of their experiences. There is story after story of exorbitant fees paid to unscrupulous agents and accounts of false and unfulfilled promises made by employers and agents who promised that the women's overseas degrees would be respected in the UK following short term conversion courses. All were promised training, financial support to get started in the world of work and respectable remuneration as well as professional recognition. Their realities however were worlds apart from the promises. The women shared experiences of ten-hour shifts, duplicated paperwork production, mandatory National Vocational Qualifications, personal and professional isolation, subjugation by British colleagues, patients and managers.
Financial support was received by a few in the form of a loan from their managers to purchase a car for working in a rural setting, but was only levered to keep them in their subordinated spaces. The women explained what the impact of failing to convert their “academic capital” into “economic capital” had on their health and wellbeing, describing somewhat depressive episodes. They shared how they chastised
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