Ideal Workers and Suspects: Employers’ Politics of Recognition and the Migrant Division of Care Labour in Finland

The article explores the emerging migrant division of care labour in Finland. Drawing on statistical data, it first discusses how the social and health care sector is increasingly relying on foreign-born workers. Then, drawing on qualitative data and Nancy Fraser’s politics of recognition, the article analyses how Finnish employers recognise migrants as potential workers. Although employers seek to resist essentialising differences, migrant care workers are recognised as different from the norm due to their migrancy, that is, social status as migrants. There is an inherent dualism of being ideal and suspect simultaneously that functions as a practice to partially include migrant employees in work-places defined by the norm of Finnishness.