This paper traces the development of the understanding of migrant care work in the literature on Global Care Chains (GCC), the global care economy, and the international division of reproductive labour, in conjunction with the development of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) protection regime for migrant (care) workers. While both the academic literature and the ILO regime have increasingly engaged with the challenges faced by migrant care workers in the last four decades, they have focused their efforts on the precarious state of care labour grounded in a mostly static understanding of social justice. In doing so, they tend to overlook the temporal, spatial and moral challenges that this article sketches.  

Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork among migrant care workers' networks in the UK, this article proposes a more robust understanding of social justice which accounts for changes in challenges and strategies intersecting personal and socio-historical developments over time. It employs a life course perspective which links individual biographies, familial processes, and broader socio-historical changes to make sense of social justice over time. In the process, it pays attention to societal liminality as characterised by concurrent insecurities facing Brexit and the ‘crisis' in health and social care.