Contextualizing Care Activism

Chapter 1 assesses the history of migrant care worker organizing in Canada, weaving together an overview of key policies on migrant care work alongside the responses of migrant care workers’ organizations. Within this analysis, one can see that every single instance of policy change that is grounded in improving migrant care workers’ lives in Canada came, in part, because of care activism. Migrant care activists saw care for each other and for their imagined community of past, present, and future migrant care workers as being central in their work. Migrant care worker activists saw the deep injustices woven into their own experiences with abusive employers and recruiters, their invisibilization in the policy landscape, and their separation from their families. This chapter, of course, makes clear that there are deep-seated ideological divisions between migrant care worker organizations. In other words, the migrant care workers’ movement is far from being unified. Despite these differences, however, their demands for change fundamentally rest on their care for their fellow migrant care workers.