VICTIMS OF CARE DRAIN AND TRANSNATIONAL PARTNERING? Slovak female elder care workers in Austria

The paper studies Slovak female elder care workers in Austria. It evaluates the relevance of the care drain metaphor using a representative survey of the carers. It asks two sets of questions: (1) How widespread is the care drain phenomenon? Does migration of elder care workers create care shortages in Slovakia? (2) How do care workers evaluate their employment setting? Is it influenced by experiencing care drain and/or transnational partnering? The higher average age of the care workers means that only a minority has small children in Slovakia. The potential for care drain is therefore limited. Moreover, very few have elderly family members in need of care. On the other hand, most live with partners in Slovakia, so transnational partnering problems could be expected. The average job evaluation of the care workers is highly positive and comparably more enthusiastic than job assessment of women employed in Slovakia. Care workers with small children or partners in Slovakia do not provide a less positive evaluation of the job or its impact on relationships within their families. However, higher earnings and relatively good health of the patient influence the evaluation positively. This focus on earnings and work conditions indicates that care work is probably more similar to other forms of labour migration than anticipated by the current approaches to female migration flows. Indices suggest that these findings could be valid beyond the studied case. A cautious application of the care drain metaphor in intra-EU migration where living standards between countries are not as divergent as between post industrial societies of the West and the Third world is advised.