Native women work more thanks to migrant women performing domestic tasks

Notes: Job characteristics include controls for temporary contracts, tenure, sector of activities, professional qualification and commuting behaviour.

Fixed effects (FE) include season, year, region and region × year dummies.

Local controls include female unemployment rate, GDP per worker and population density at the LLM level.

Standard errors are adjusted for clustering at the LLM level.

*Significant at 10%; **significant at 5%; ***significant at 1%.

Source: Barone and Mocetti (2010: Table 4)

These results remain valid after a series of tests to assess causality. For instance, the tests show that:

• other groups of immigrants (that is, those not specialised in domestic services) do not exert a similar impact on the hours worked by highly skilled Italian women;

• specialised immigrants do not affect the hours worked by men, who are much less engaged in domestic work.

Immigrants ‘specialised’ in domestic services act as a substitute for welfare services provided at the local level; their impact is stronger in those municipalities where social and family policies are less developed. The weekly hours worked by highly educated native women increase by 40 minutes for those living in municipalities at the 25th percentile in terms of employees in welfare services, and fall by 20 minutes for those living in municipalities at the 75th percentile. Similarly, the impact of ‘specialised immigrants’ falls from 60 to 35 minutes when going from municipalities at the 25th percentile to those at the 75th percentile in terms of social public spending per capita.

These findings confirm that household production is the main channel driving migrant women into employment. They also show that ‘specialised immigrants’ act as substitutes for welfare policies. However, the issue of undeclared work is not taken into account in the analysis (see IT1001049I and IT0902049I).

Commentary

The Banca d’Italia working paper provides further evidence on the evolution of the Italian familistic welfare towards a liberal configuration, thus validating the argument put forward by Meulders and O’Dorchai in 2004 that these two models of welfare are very close because of a low level of public intervention. Indeed, the increase in the working time of native women is mainly due to the ability of highly educated women to buy domestic services from migrant women instead of relying on their families to carry out these tasks. Finally, it is worth noting that the unequal gender division of domestic tasks between partners is unaffected, as shown by Istat time use survey.

References

Barone, G. and Mocetti, S., Gli effetti dell’immigrazione poco qualificata sull’offerta di lavoro femminile [With a little help from abroad: effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply], Working Paper No. 766, Rome, Banca d’Italia, 2010.

Istat, Time use in daily life: a multidisciplinary approach to the time use’s analysis (5.11Mb PDF), Rome, 2008.

Meulders, D. and O’Dorchai, S., ‘The role of welfare state typologues in analysing motherhood’, Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2004, pp. 16–33.

Mario Giaccone, Ires