The paper focuses on the social situation and social practices of female care migrants (at the age of 50 and above) from the South Moravia (the region of Mikulov, Břeclav) who migrate for work to Austria as domestic workers-caregivers for seniors at regular intervals (circular migration). The main aim of the text is to argue that translocal female migrants paradoxically perceive their labour migration as a specific form of emancipation, despite the fact that they work in the so-called live-in-service jobs (where they live and work in private households) and often experience indignity. While in Austria they work in gendered and very demanding jobs with low wages, circular care migration provides them with the possibility to extend their gender power in the transforming Czech society. There is thus a paradox in that while they are marginalized in Austria, they are empowered on the Czech side of the border. This is achieved through paid reproductive work and better access to income, which leads to personal consumption based on their own interests and overall personal benefit. Special attention is paid to new forms of translocal care chains and new forms of these women’s partner cohabitation (living apart together).
This article focuses on welfare surveillance as a sociological sub-discipline and a specific issue that has emerged in the past two decades in relation to the neoliberal revolution and the transformation of social systems in the West. The paper has three main goals: (1) a theoretical conceptualisation of welfare surveillance based on an analysis of existing empirical research; (2) an analysis of socio-practical manifestations and impacts of welfare surveillance; and (3) a contextualisation of the implementation of welfare surveillance within the Czech social milieu during recent social reforms. Within the scope of the first two goals, the author shows that welfare surveillance is theoretically construed along the lines of a specific combination of social justice and neoliberal governmentality, and that welfare surveillance enables the application of specific illiberal practices to welfare applicants and recipients in order to effectively discipline and normalise them, which results in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of recipients. Given that there is relatively little research on surveillance in the Czech Republic, the article opens with an introduction to the issue of surveillance.