Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
This study explores how Japanese care workers in New Zealand rationalized and accepted exploitative labor conditions in the care industry. Drawing on 10 in-depth interviews and analyzed through Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, the paper highlights several interpretative strategies participants employed to make sense of and rationalize their social suffering. These included relying on a dual frame of reference that compared their experiences in New Zealand favorably with their home country, valuing the gendered emotional rewards of caregiving, and emphasizing compensating amenities. Participants also framed their experiences as constrained forms of rational choices under conditions of limited English proficiency, unrecognized qualifications and visa precarity, while, at the same time, valorizing migrant cultural capital such as resilience and professionalism. Findings also reveal how participants internalized neoliberal values and structural inequalities and reframed precarious work as opportunities for empowerment or a personal growth. These rationalizations not only sustain symbolic violence but also shape distinct migrant/caregiver habitus. This study contributes to scholarship on migration, labor and care by exploring how both reflexive and non-reflexive processes of rationalization (re)produce precarious labor systems. It argues for structural changes that move beyond narratives of individual resilience to address systemic inequalities within the care industry and wider labor market.
Uekusa et al. (Tue,) studied this question.