Migrants’ characteristics, working and living conditions in the household services

Abstract

The aging of the Italian population, the limited resources assigned to the
welfare system, and the increasing entry of women into the labour market have
produced growing demand for surveillance and care activities, for supporting
elderly and vulnerable populations. Given native-born workers do not satisfy this
growing demand, foreign population started to play a central role in the household
services in Italy in the last two decades. Among them, single aged breadwinner
women became the perfect candidates for occupying these positions. However,
migrant women tend to suffer the penalization of being women, migrant
background, and segregated. Enlarging the limited research on this topic and using
the 2021 ad-hoc module of Istat Labour Force Survey on “Working conditions of
immigrants and their immediate descendants” in Italy, we aim to analyse migrants’
working and living conditions to identify barriers preventing full integration and to
define suitable actions to promote inclusion. Descriptive results highlight that,
according to the literature, migrant women workers employed in the household
services have different socio-demographic profile respect to the other average
working foreign-born and native-born groups. Moreover, multivariate analyses
show that they often find themselves in more unfavourable working and living
conditions which make them more vulnerable.