Unwaged elder carers in rural and urban Sweden: Variegated social reproduction?

Abstract

Demographic change marked by a growing ageing and the simultaneous decline of the working population seems to challenge the Swedish public elder care system. Effects, such as a lack of (waged) elder care workers, are visible at the municipal scale where elder care services are provided by the local government, but the severity differs between municipalities.

Despite providing universalized elder care in principle, the share of unwaged elder care provided by relatives has rapidly increased in Sweden since the 1980s, along with an expansion of marketization as well as privatization of elder care services.

The issue with the increase of unwaged elder care in Sweden is that it has multiple, intersecting and sometimes contradictory gendered, classed as well as racialized consequences. On the one hand, unwaged elder care is more likely to be provided by female, working-class relatives. On the other, it has led to the expansion of cost-effective, but exploitative alternatives to unwaged elder care such as low-paid, migrant domestic workers.

I therefore aim to explore the current forms that unwaged elder care as a social reproductive activity takes in different places in northern Sweden. For this, I draw on the concept of variegated social reproduction which arguably makes it possible to consider different experiences of unwaged elder carers across socio-geographical space as well as the changing social relations regarding elder care in the Swedish context.