The varieties of informal work

For the interviewed migrant women one of the key motives behind the switch from paid employment to unpaid work was associated with the pregnancy. Both Aziza from Kyrgyzstan and Irina from Latvia had worked in Northtown prior to their pregnancies. After the childbirth and maternity leave, both women, in spite of their preference to return to the local labour market, did not engage in paid employment. The main factor causing this behaviour seems to be related to the difference existing between the cost of childcare and the level of wages available in Northtown’s labour market. Both stressed that the earnings in the jobs which they had performed prior to the childbirth would be insufficient in covering childcare expenses. Hence the choice was to stay at home and to take care of their

children themselves. In both cases, their husbands were in full-time employment, one working for the police (he was from ‘White’ British background) and another (a Pole) for kitchen furniture manufacturer. Moreover, the changes in the family composition could provide their own dynamics: when Irina returned to work after the birth of her maternity leave, she realized that she was pregnant again. The childbirth and the decision to stay at home full time was not only associated with the loss of income coming from paid employment, but also with the losses of certain kinds of welfare support. Irina’s husband explained it in this way:

When my wife lost her work, we also lost financial support in helping to pay for the nursery. It works here like this: if both of us are employed, then we can expect a help in paying up to eighty percent of childcare fees. But, when the wife was made redundant, I had to pay one hundred percent of the cost. One hundred percent means here a payment of £500 monthly or even more. This is almost the amount of Child Benefit she is receiving. It all looks like a bad joke to me since when she is unemployed, we need more support, not less. But here we go, she stayed at home. When the second child was born, she continued to be at home, in any case she is the best carer for the children

On the surface the decision to become a full-time home maker appeared to look like a voluntary choice made by Irina – Jan’s wife. However the conditions under which this choice was made were significant in understanding the switch from paid employment to full-time unpaid domestic work at home. Firstly, Irina said that the pay offered by her last employer (a packaging company of cosmetic goods) prior to second pregnancy was around the NMW. Continuing being a low wage worker meant that the large part of income would be spent on covering childcare costs. Moreover, although, in her words, this employer was helpful and accommodating during her first pregnancy, at the time of second pregnancy the firm went bankrupt. As a result of it, Irina was made redundant and left without the option to return to her workplace after statutory maternity leave. From the start her choice was affected by the structural duality in the form of low-wage composition of the local labour market and local repercussions of international and national economic crisis.

It also seems that structural economic contexts interacted with the relations within the family. Looking at Irina and Jan’s testimony from a different angle, there was a noticeable degree of compliance with some aspects of traditional division of household labour. In the cited quote, her husband assumed that Irina as a mother was the best person to look after their child and suggested that staying at home full time is something natural to do for a woman. Notably, he intervened while I was interviewing her and asserted this opinion. Although Irina nodded her head whilst Jan provided this explanation, none the less, it would be possible to identify something more than simply a mutually agreed decision of the household. Both Irina and Jan recognized that the decision to remove their first child from the nursery has hidden costs: their child was learning to speak English at the nursery – picking it up very quickly, as they noticed, while he could not do it at home since they spoke Polish and Russian (here once again the use of language pointed to uneven gender relation between the two: Irina, a native Russian speaker used Polish rather than vice versa). This example illustrates complex interactions between individual and intra-family decisions on one hand and the combination of such structural mechanisms as childcare costs and the predominance of low pay in the local labour market on the other. Furthermore, it might be argued that the gender based expectation acted as an additional factor in affecting the decision of Irina of becoming a full-time homemaker.

Neither Irina nor Jan had an extended family living in Northtown (apart from Irina’s brother who was temporarily staying in their house). This fact is important because grandparents and other relatives often can act of as a source of informal childcare support. Another female interviewee – Aziza, who found herself in a position similar to Irina’s, with an exception that she could rely on extended family. This combination reveals both differences and similarities of challenges faced by migrant women. Aziza said explicitly that she would be much more content to have paid work outside home rather than to care full-time for her one year old daughter if the level of pay would be sufficient in terms of covering childcare expenses and allowing making basic savings. In this sense, she was in the same position as Irina. However, there was a significant difference: Aziza was married to an Englishman (a police officer) whose relatives lived in a close proximity to their house. It allowed

Aziza and her husband to get occasional assistance in caring for their child from other family members. It gave Aziza space to engage in the activities beyond home, for example she started to work in Northtown’s hospice as a volunteer. Working in the voluntary sector was something she enjoyed and also saw as useful in terms in acquiring communication (i.e. everyday spoken language) skills. However it was the possibility to develop social ties rather than pragmatic considerations which gave this experience the central significance:

It is so interesting for me, I adore this thing. If would have more free time, for example, I was single and did not have to take care of the children, I would probably stay there day and night. It is enjoyable to talk to the people, they are so nice and interesting. At the moment, I go there once or twice a week depending how much time I have got

What Aziza described as free time came from the periods when her mother in law could take care of her new-born child. It was also her mother in law who first brought her to the hospice and introduced her. This kinship tie was instrumental in finding this voluntary activity, which had a positive symbolic significance for Aziza, as well as giving her time to engage in it. While spending time in Northtown’s hospice, Aziza managed to draw positive emotions in spite of psychologically difficult nature of the environment present in this institution – the patients included people who had HIV AIDS and other grave health conditions. She claimed that it was particularly rewarding to share time with other volunteers, to be respected and befriended by them. Even though this form of work outside of home was unpaid, it gave her intrinsic satisfaction and helped to widen the circle of acquaintances in Northtown.

The experiences of Aziza reveal two issues related to informal work: firstly, staying at home and providing childcare full time can be explained not only by a personal choice, but by the level of pay available in the local labour market. Furthermore, the availability of extended family support can allow migrant women to engage in unpaid voluntary work, which in turn can be seen both instrumentally and symbolically meaningful for the individuals involved in it.

This function of informal work - the possibility to build broader interpersonal network among Northtown’s residents, has been also noted in the testimony given by an Estonian interviewee Helle (she took part in one of focus group interviews). She said that informal unpaid work involving meal preparation which she did for a local Pentecostal Church allowed her to interact with many people whom she would not met otherwise. She stressed that those interactions allowed her to feel in Northtown at home for the first time – in her words, even the ‘English’ food was good. It shows that some social activities involving unpaid voluntary labour can act as a bridge between newly arrived migrants and members of established communities. Northtown can be seen as a new destination for migrants not only because of the particularities coming from migration history or greater ethnic homogeneity, but because migrants such as Helle and Aziza are new to Northtown. Since they do not know many locally people, the involvement in social activities can allow them to develop emotional bonds with people coming from established communities and enable them to feel more comfortable in Northtown.

However, by looking at the narratives of other participants, it appears that the significance of informal work activities cannot be reduced solely to broader forms of socialisation. They can play an important economic role as well. While Aziza’s actions can be described as the representation of altruistic and non-financial approach to informal work, the gathered data points to the existence of grey area cases, when migrant participants have chosen to find a modus vivendi between their desire to help Northtown’s residents and get greater social exposure on one side and the need to generate additional income on the other.

The combination of the knowledge of migrants’ social needs in Northtown and the experience in certain occupations in the countries of origin could open venues for informal forms of work at home. Alina, who had long-term experience as the teacher of music in the religious school in Poland and worked formally in one of Northtown’s nurseries, spotted an opportunity to run her own pre-school childcare provision in Northtown. Her calculations were based on the dissatisfaction felt by local Polish migrant families in relation the quality and price offered by the registered private sector providers of childcare in Northtown. She also utilised the extensive network of contacts which she built as an organizer of Polish themed

events in Northtown. After she and her partner managed to secure more spacious accommodation in Northtown through local social housing association, she came out with an idea to turn their house into a home based nursery for the children of Polish labour migrants. Since she also became pregnant around the same time, staying at home and bringing some income appeared to constitute a zero sum game. From the start, it was an informal arrangement: she had not registered her home based nursery with any statutory body and the attraction of clients was based on the word of mouth. She called herself a ‘telephone nanny’. She explained the activities associated with this chosen role:

When parents need to go somewhere, need to travel somewhere or are busy with work, they call me. Obviously I am taking care of their little ones, the children at my home. I am very content with it because now I spent most of time at home, moreover, I am pregnant and all of it is a good distraction for me. So I think it will go on this way for some time…

Notably, she stressed that her activities were not only designed to accommodate working patterns of migrants, but also helped them to parents from childcare responsibilities when they were not at work. Alina’s activities could be perceived as controversial and problematic from the point of view of children safety and accountability, and, moreover, there are potential legal dangers for her. On the other hand, it was a way to bring additional untaxed income during her own pregnancy, when she withdraw from formal paid employment herself. She also perceived it as a way to serve her own migrant community locally by providing culturally sensitive services. Unlike her other, more ambitious ideas – she thought about opening a Sunday school, but could not convince local migrant parents to support this idea, the home based nursery had succeeded. Moreover, it should be noted that her scope to provide informal childcare also depended on the ability of her husband to earn stable wage in the local factory (the car bearings’ manufacturer), and also his willingness to help in setting the logistics of informal childcare provision. By their own admission, he would bring children to their home and would drive them back to their parents when he would return from work.

Alina could run the services relatively smoothly because both of her children reached the school age and were outside of the house at the time when it was used as an informal nursery. The combination of the factors ranging from children’s age to social networking and work experience allowed Alina to run the whole operation. During the interview Alina stressed that this form of informal work was preferable to the sort of paid employment she has experienced in the local labour market. In effect, the dissatisfaction with low status work available formally contributed towards the pursuit of informal work which gave her greater autonomy and satisfaction.

Alina was not the only interviewee who has chosen the path of informal work which led to the generation of financial income. While Alina’s informal work was built around helping migrants looking for alternative form of childcare, Malgosia dedicated her time to teaching adults. Malgosia was in her late 20s when she arrived to Northtown; she and her partner did not have any children. Significantly to her employment perspectives, she had a degree from a University in Poland in English language and literature. It gave her higher expectations in finding work, and unlike other Polish migrants in Northtown, many of whom had to start working in manual jobs because of difficulties related to the language, she managed to find an office based work in a call centre. However the job was not very well paid and, as she stressed in the interview, she found it to be extremely uninteresting. She simply did not see a long term perspective for herself:

I do not want to work in some kind of call centre

Eventually, she decided to give individual and group classes to Polish migrants at her home. The idea to engage in this activity occurred to her gradually: because many migrants heard about her education, she was approached on numerous occasions with pleas to interpret. Malgosia was keen to help, but eventually it started to irritate her and she begun to perceive those requests as something putting a heavy burden on her. But she did not want to stop helping out fellow migrants, instead she changed the nature of those interactions. She gradually realised that there was a need of the English language tuition for Northtown’s Polish migrants and her skills were in high demand.

While Northtown has recognised institutions of English language training for non native speakers, e.g. the local college, it was oversubscribed and the timing was not always suitable for everyone, particularly for those migrants who worked afternoon shifts. It has occurred to her that teaching English privately in exchange for fees should allow to earn extra income. At the start, she began to teach migrants in a rented room in the town’s centre. However it was not ideal: significant part of income generated by teaching was spent on the rent. Eventually, it seemed more reasonable to teach at home rather than to rent special premises. In their home (rented through public housing association), she set a study room or ‘a business room’, as she called it, where she run individual and group classes. In effect, she used the private space of her home as an informal workplace: the apartment became not only a place to live but a place where additional pay (outside of the formal labour market) was earned. Malgosia’s ‘business room’, which she showed to me, was a medium sized room with a desk, four chairs and some teaching material – a very cosy and welcoming room, which distinguished it starkly from bigger but much less attractive rooms of the local college (at least, in my ethnographic comparison). In total she had sixteen students: twelve came for one to one tuition, the remaining four constituted a separate study group. This was also very different from the type of learning available through mainstream public (the ESOL classes require payment of tuition fees, the classes consisted of twelve or even more students) sector provision. As in the case of Alina, however less controversially in terms of the age of participants (the classes were attended only by adults), Malgosia’s activities were undertaken beyond the boundary of the formal labour market.

One of the issues, which Malgosia mentioned during the interview, was the relation between her work, that is, the teaching of English to local Poles, and her interests. She valued her activities in for two reasons: firstly, it allowed her to earn extra income from the activity which she preferred to formal employment available in the local labour market, and secondly, as a way to help improve language skills of fellow Polish migrants. She spoke with pride about one of her students who managed to improve his language skills very quickly. She added that it was a pity that he had to work for a local kitchen furniture manufacturer – a dull

and low status job in her opinion. In contrast, she with her English language and organizational skills could avoid such kind of employment and run language classes. Moreover, she did it independently without the help from any local statutory or voluntary organization: this form of activity brought her income and a degree of autonomy which would not be possible if she worked for any formal