Changing social organizations of care: a comparison of European policy reforms encouraging paid domestic work

Abstract

In many European countries different types of policy reforms intending to encourage growth in the domestic service sector have been introduced. The methods and reforms differ but mainly the reforms intend to stimulate growth of a 'new' legal labour market sector within private households. This potential growth sector in combination with insufficient or declining welfare states, inclining female labour market participation and ageing populations could be viewed as explanatory factors to the increased demand for domestic services. A growing amount of those performing paid domestic work in European homes are migrant women with or without papers. The aim of this article is to create a model that enables comparisons of these reforms, with a special focus on changing social organizations of care for elders, children and other dependent persons. Included in the analysis are European countries that have introduced wide domestic service policy reforms as measurement to encourage growth in the domestic service sector, i.

The Gender Informal Care Gap

“…This suggests that also the type, configuration and timing of care service policies might influence the gender distribution of informal care. This might include the policy choice for institutional or formal home care services (Ungerson 2000), the support of the employment of migrant workers in households (Kvist 2012), or the moment in time at which services were introduced or extended (Béland and Durandal 2013). Further research should focus on these factors.…”

The Role of Domestic Employment Policies in Shaping Precarious Work

“…Studies at the micro level usually concentrate on the employment and working conditions and agency of migrant domestic workers (Lutz ; Anderson ). At the macro level, research has mostly focused on policies related to paid domestic work and the social, political and economic structures that shape the inequalities in the sector, stating that it is the intersection of different regimes (gender, migration, care and employment) that contributes to these conditions (Williams ; Kvist ; Hellgren ).…”

“…This affects both countries that have introduced policies to create demand for domestic services, such as Nordic and Continental European countries, and those that are regulating the already existing paid domestic sector, such as South European, Northern American and East Asian countries. In the former group, the regulation of the sector through household subsidies has caused debate and is criticized for only benefiting wealthier households (Morel ; Carbonnier and Morel ; Calleman ; Kvist ).…”

“…Even in affluent countries where labour standards are well established, paid domestic work is often less regulated than other forms of work (see ILO ). Hence, the policies, especially those targeted at traditional informal care work, may also form a challenge to labour laws and regulations (Kvist ; Pfau‐Effinger and Geissler ; Calleman ; Widding Isaksen ). On the one hand, they may indirectly enhance the professionalization of the sector, but on the other hand, policy choices may enforce informal and precarious employment and exacerbate the already existing gender inequalities by preserving the traditional and special nature of domestic work.…”

“…A growing number of scholarly works have examined the ways that different policy regimes, such as migration, care, employment and gender regimes, sustain specific patterns in paid domestic work (Da Roit and Weicht ; Williams ; Song ; Hellgren ). However, research on policies explicitly targeting domestic employment, especially outside European countries, has been scarce (Calleman ; Kvist ; Morel ; Michel and Peng ), and the little there is tends to focus on one specific type of policy, for example tax reduction schemes or migrant care worker programmes, or on one geographical area.…”