Securing Retirement Through Intra-European Migration: Older Romanian Women’s Transnational Struggle for Formal Social Protection

Abstract

This article explores through qualitative methods how structural inequalities and weak welfare states push women to migrate in their old age to piece together their pension across different countries. Based on in-depth interviews, observations, and ethnographic conversations conducted with Romanian women in Spain, it explores how they navigate the European Union’s (UE) law on Social Security to aggregate social insurance periods from the work performed in different member states and therefore get entitled to a state pension. We analyze how the accumulation of vulnerabilities (related to class, gender, age, and ethnicity) shape the trajectories of these aging women in a context of structurally unequal welfare systems. The paper thus contributes to the transnational social protection field with a timely focus on old age formal arrangements within the EU and use of life-course approach to understand the reasons of related with social protection older migrant’s im/mobilities.

Keywords

• intra-european migration
• older migrants
• transnational ageing
• pensions
• transnational social protection
• gender and class inequalities
• life-course