Care on the Margins: Migrant Labour Regimes and the Reproduction of Segmented Long-Term Care Work in the EU

This article investigates how migrant labour regimes shape long-term care (LTC) work in Austria, Finland, and Slovakia, amid rising demographic pressures and EU-wide care workforce shortages. Drawing on 39 qualitative interviews with migrant care workers and stakeholders, we apply a layered theoretical framework combining labour process theory and migrant labour regime theory centred on legal dualism, transnationalism, and labour agency to analyse the lived experiences of migrant LTC work. The study reveals how migration, industrial relations, and welfare regimes interact with labour agency to produce segmented and structurally marginal care roles for migrants. Despite divergent pathways into LTC including circular self-employment in Austria, education-based integration in Finland, and informal agency recruitment in Slovakia, all three regimes converge in their reliance on precarious, undervalued migrant labour. Migrant workers navigate these conditions through individualised strategies of resilience and reworking, with limited access to collective representation. Our findings highlight the emergence of niche migrant labour regimes that sustain care provision while reinforcing exclusion from core labour protections. The article contributes to industrial relations scholarship by theorising migrant LTC work as a labour process shaped by legal differentiation, constrained agency, and multi-scalar governance, raising critical questions about equity and sustainability in European care systems.