From Everyday Racist Incidents at Work to Institutional Racism: Migrant and Minority-Ethnic Workers’ Experiences in Older-Age Care

Abstract

Through a focus on experiences of racism and discrimination at the workplace level, as narrated by respondents themselves, this chapter attempts to shed light on some of the mechanisms that foster disintegration by impacting negatively on migrants’ and racialised minorities’ access and outcomes in the labour market. It explores non-EU migrant and minority-ethnic care workers’ experiences of racism and discrimination, as well as their coping strategies, within older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid. The chapter highlights that, against the background of contemporary manifestations of racism in interpersonal interactions being less overt, victims of racism often feel insecure about their ability to challenge such forms of racism. The chapter further analyses how, in the cases under study, managers tolerated manifestations of racism or sided with the dominant group. The chapter equally examines how managerial practices were, at times, directly discriminatory, ranging from unfair workloads to bullying and stigmatisation. Finally, it explores how workers coped with racism and racist discrimination and why these situations were particularly difficult to challenge legally. These lived experiences are, furthermore, inscribed in structural discriminations produced by the intersection of migration, employment and care regimes. The chapter sets out to relate the level of individual interactions to the workings of institutions in order to inform our understanding of how policies can produce disintegration. It argues that challenging these inequalities, and the resulting configurations of power relationships at the workplace level, requires a political economy analysis of the conditions under which racism and discrimination thrive.