The market, social justice and elderly care. A reflection starting from the Italian case

This paper will proceed by following three main steps. First, it will examine the meaning of “care work” in contemporary literature; second, it will discuss the role played by cash-for-care policies in Europe as revealed by current practices of care work outsourcing; and, third, it will analyse the consequences of such tendency, focusing in particular on the Italian situation. Based on some of the criteria described by Debra Satz in Why Some Things Should not Be for Sale (2010), this paper will argue that the care market can be considered as an example of an "obnoxious market", requiring special public regulation and scrutiny. In the contexts of child care and long-term elderly care—which represent the main focus of this paper—the relationship between supply and demand of a social value such as ‘care’ tends to produce negative effects that must be regulated (or, at times, avoided) through the role of the government and of the public administration. The most negative effects I will examine here are the consequences of the care market in terms of social citizenship. In fact, the care market gives visibility to the care work, on one hand, but it reduces citizens' fundamental needs to a private issue on the other. Ultimately, to quote Nancy Fraser (2013), it stops any political needs-talk “in which political conflict” may be “played out and inequalities” may be “symbolically elaborated and challenged”, similarly to what happened in the old, bureaucratic welfare state.