Who Cares about Healthcare Workers? Care Extractivism and Care Struggles in Germany and India

This paper suggests the concept of care extractivism to explore strategies and mechanisms which pursue the persistent low social and monetary acknowledgement of healthcare work in Germany and India. Recently, caretakers and nurses in both countries went on strike, pointing to a crisis situation in social reproduction and various forms of care extraction. In Germany, care for the elderly and nursing in hospitals are marked by strategies of familialisation and voluntarisation, of standardisation and digital surveillance and by transnationalisation through the import of migrant workers. In India’s rural health provision, voluntarism subsidises welfarism; in private and public hospitals, hierarchisation and contractualisation of employment deepen care extraction. Stereotypes of nursing as natural female, caste norms and various stigmata reinforce the low valuation of care work. In both countries, neoliberal policies merge with patriarchal structures of social reproduction, intensify care extraction and create a cheap care work force which however is no longer docile.