Inés Calzada

Multiplex Migration and Aspects of Precarization: Swedish Retirement Migrants to Spain and their Service Providers

Exploring the relations between different migrants who meet in Spain, this article discusses issues of mobility, the globalization of care and service work, and precarization of labor and livelihoods, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work and retirement conditions in Europe. A mélange of migratory processes are scrutinized along a Swedish-Spanish North-South axis. It analyzes longstanding conditions on the Spanish labor market combined with neoliberal de- and reregulation of work and welfare with a bearing on spatial and social inequalities across the European Union. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of the workers and entrepreneurs who provide care and services for them. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to organization of migration as well as work and services. Some of these workers, especially third country migrants, occupy precarious, and sometimes informalized, low skilled jobs in an ethnically segmented and gendered labor market.

Swedish Retirement Migrants in Spain: Mobility and Eldercare in an Aging Europe

This chapter discusses the conditions for mobility and independent aging for a wide range of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain. It illuminates the mobility of older Europeans in the context of Freedom of Movement—and its limits. When Swedish retirees in Spain become increasingly dependent on eldercare, they find themselves in a country with one of the lowest rates of public provision in Europe and are left with a patchwork of private solutions. Gender, health, socio-economic conditions, as well as Swedish and Spanish provision of health- and eldercare influence the mobility of Swedish retirement migrants, especially in the case of widows and single women with low income.