Extracting care from women on the move: Nuances of exploitation in bordering and marketized care in the EU

This paper explores how practices of extraction in marketized care alter and intensify the exploitation of women on the move. Drawing on interviews with Czech cross-border workers in long-term care within the EU’s open borders, Ukrainian women refugees under temporal protection, and migrants with a work permit in Czechia, we analyse the interplay of market and state dynamics in organizing transnational care labour. Considering bordering practices that go beyond employment restrictions stemming from legal categories of mobility, we examine the marketization and transnationalization of reproductive work through the concept of extractivism. We argue that against the backdrop of care marketization, labour fragmentation, and everyday bordering practices mediated by the state and the market, the state institutionalizes the extractivist regime of exploitation.