Connecting care chains and care diamonds: the elderly care skills regime in Singapore

Abstract

Research on the globalization of care work often faces the persistent challenge of building meaningful connections between the movement of care labour at a global scale and place-based frameworks of care access and delivery. In addressing this gap in this article, we propose to take a closer look at how the care-migration nexus produces ‘ideal’ care workers through a skills regime. Based on the case of elderly care in Singapore, in this article, we demonstrate how state institutions and private agencies attempts to fill local labour needs by producing care workers among both Singapore citizens and migrant women. This leads to contradictory strategies associated with lowering barriers for citizens to enter the elderly care industry, while raising standards and increasing pre-training demands for migrant domestic workers to perform more ‘professional’ care work within the household. We conclude with a discussion of how these strategies can be understood as a process of ‘filtering’.