**7. Discussion**

#### **7.1 The challenge of migration and antiracist social work**

There are many problem areas to study when it comes to the organisation of eldercare. Relatively small changes have been made over several decades in terms of the content and nature of the work. Of course, more people have training now than before, but the staff's level of training, composition, enrolment and working conditions have not developed satisfactorily. Eldercare is a broad arena and can be about everything from the older adult's living conditions to development assistance assessment, relatives' care, housing, care and nursing efforts to personnel issues and how those who perform care work perceive their work situation [54]. Care is perceived as something women practice and as something women do naturally. These ideals (ideas) come into conflict with standards that, among other things, concern gender equality in paid work and professionalism. One way of understanding the conditions of eldercare work is to study the concepts by which eldercare is surrounded. Examples of such ideas are the notions of care, female dominance and paid work, and how those concepts are essential for emotions at work, professionalism and social hierarchies.

Eldercare workplaces also have a relatively high personnel turnover, especially in the metropolitan regions where there are often short-term jobs and temporary positions, which creates instability in the workplaces. The main reason for the shortage of labour is not only that the older adults are becoming more numerous but also that fewer people want to work there. Staff turnover is thus high and young people do not apply there. Smaller, private companies may also find it difficult to provide full-time employment and thus become dependent on short-term workers. Short-term employment with a low employment rate, often with a spread of working hours around the clock, creates insecurity and poor working conditions. Research on working conditions in eldercare is of great importance in understandings about the so-called crisis that the skills supply issue is described as right now. Previous research has shown inadequacies such as overtime, time pressure, unreasonable tasks such as local coordination, unnecessary tasks with IT hassle, lack of clarity in goals and tasks and high demands on social interaction [55, 56]. 27 per cent of eldercare workers have stated that they want to leave the profession within a three-year period. It shows that the younger you are, the more inclined you are to change profession. Unfortunately, many people consider work in eldercare as a transitional profession, something you do for a while and then moves on from. This is something that management needs to consider when it comes to affecting leadership and further improving the management of the eldercare. For the future, it is about creating attractive and inclusive workplaces.

The main ambition of this chapter has been to present an understanding of how aspects of migration become useful for leadership in eldercare. A primary drive is to shift the focus from ethnicity per se to the relational part of constructions of race. This is done by showing how the ethnic dimension often is in language use, the relations created by various discourses and their institutional conditions. These conditions also create spaces of power in working life, pockets of mastery and

subordination and the social hierarchies that go with them. This chapter mainly presents experiences, expressions of racism in eldercare services, and how personnel deal with racist situations. It also illustrates how black women deal with racism and vulnerability in the workplace by taking moral responsibility for the racist contexts that subordinate them. One nursing assistant has explained that she uses strategies such as exposing herself to degradation. Staff members also describe their encounters with people who humiliate them and continue working under challenging conditions. Their statements demonstrate aspects of the struggle in working life to maintain both the profession's status and value as a human being.

Health and care services reflect incidents that are part of working life for one person, while it is the private life for the other part. Encounters between caregiver and client involve power relationships, and their interactions are fundamental in work. Simultaneously, collegial relationships are also essential to ensure a pleasant working environment that promotes growth. The care workers cannot exclude the emotional aspects of relationships with their care recipients, and it is impossible to perform care duties without feelings. The workplace culture and morality regulate expressions of these emotions. In the moral practice of behaviour, individuals constitute themselves as moral subjects. Foucault [57] views individuals in terms of subjectivity. The individual is an effect of discourse, which is always social (and collective). This perspective on the issue guarantees a social subject, where subjectivity is neither stable nor uniform but somewhat contradictory and constantly changing. One's actions become a manner of conduct, an attitude toward other people, regulated through shared views and perceptions about prohibitions, values, ideals and what is and is not fun. The personnel have a primary moral responsibility in their relationships with their older clients. They endure their vulnerability by viewing it as their job and infantilising their older clients. Those aspects of the working conditions are extremely important to be recognised from a management perspective.

However, is it reasonable to place the responsibility of dealing with racism on those subjected to it? Racism involves activities that we shape together, our thoughts and actions. The experience of racialisation is something that occurs through interactions with others. Therefore, racism is not one specific performance but rather a result of social activities or doings of various types. We are all morally responsible for bridging unequal relationships at work. Racialisation processes and doings have many serious consequences. These consequences include subordination, inequality and various forms of domination, which promote exclusion and discrimination in working life. Such effects result in more unsatisfactory living conditions for certain groups of individuals. Therefore, racialisation affects activities at a meso, macro, and micro level, as indicated by several of the chapter's examples. These activities depend on racist conceptions for their existence, created at a macro level. Racism in eldercare services is a complex issue that reflects the dynamics of inequality in society. Thus, well-considered and feasible efforts are needed to create equality at work. We are in a social climate with an increasing focus on the importance of origin, when racist organisations are rising and hate crimes have reached an alarmingly high level. That is why racism has also become essential for understanding eldercare services' conditions and practices are creating more profound inequalities.
