Migrants’ characteristics, working and living conditions in the household services

The aging of the Italian population, the limited resources assigned to the welfare system, and the increasing entry of women into the labour market have produced growing demand for surveillance and care activities, for supporting elderly and vulnerable populations. Given native-born workers do not satisfy this growing demand, foreign population started to play a central role in the household services in Italy in the last two decades. Among them, single aged breadwinner women became the perfect candidates for occupying these positions. However, migrant women tend to suffer the penalization of being women, migrant background, and segregated. Enlarging the limited research on this topic and using the 2021 ad-hoc module of Istat Labour Force Survey on “Working conditions of immigrants and their immediate descendants” in Italy, we aim to analyse migrants’ working and living conditions to identify barriers preventing full integration and to define suitable actions to promote inclusion. Descriptive results highlight that, according to the literature, migrant women workers employed in the household services have different socio-demographic profile respect to the other average working foreign-born and native-born groups. Moreover, multivariate analyses show that they often find themselves in more unfavourable working and living conditions which make them more vulnerable.