All rhetoric, no change? The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on working conditions in home care

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we talked about care more than ever. While the precarious and risky conditions faced by care workers were widely publicized, politicians pledged to improve the working conditions of “essential” care workers. What has come of these promises? This paper investigates under which conditions the pandemic has resulted in improved working conditions. The paper compares three groups of home care workers: childminders, home care workers working for long-term care providers and home care workers directly employed by households. It uses a comparative process tracing approach based on statistical data, media items, policy documents, parliamentary debates, collective agreements and interest group documents. The paper finds that there have been large differences in the visibility of the three compared groups of workers during and after the pandemic. While the pandemic led to considerable media and political attention for home care workers working for long-term care providers, the same has not been the case for childminders and care workers directly employed by households. Home care workers employed by long-term care providers have also been the only group out of the three that benefited from substantial wage increases through a collective agreement and their low wages have become an item of political discussion, though this has not yet resulted in policy change. Employers’ organisations and especially trade unions play an important role in shaping these developments. That the situation of childminders and directly employed care workers has remained so invisible can be explained by their lack of representation by interest groups and the persistent – though incorrect – political assumptions that such jobs are done by married women who “just want to earn something on the side”. The paper concludes that the Covid-19 pandemic only contributed to improved working conditions when political actors – like trade unions – were able to use the political momentum to push for real change. And even then, improvements have been moderate at best.