Importance of Care?

5 min read

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic threw a spotlight on the undervalued and under-resourced care sector. Care workers went from invisible and underpaid to praised and applauded for their dedication. Sadly, but somewhat predictably, in 2024, with the worst of the global pandemic in the past and multiple other crises having followed it in quick succession, the veneration for carers has been all but forgotten.

All the while, the importance of care services, in particular healthcare and long-term care will continue to increase in the coming years, due to the ageing of EU societies which results from to extending life expectancy and dropping birth rates. Across the EU, women are having fewer children later in life, not least due to the increasingly difficult task of combining both care and employment responsibilities, made more difficult by the widespread cuts in funding for social provisioning in the wake of the post-2008 economic crisis. According to the European Commission’s own data, there are glaring regional gaps in care service availability in the EU, with all Central-Eastern European (CEE) member states bar Slovenia, as well as Greece, Germany, Cyprus and Austria being under the EU average for the provision of childcare for children below the age of three. The situation is even more concerning when it comes to long-term care – a type of support that varies from occasional help with the completion of tasks such as shopping, cleaning and cooking, to complex healthcare and nursing services performed over an extended period of time. Government spending on these types of services is particularly low in the CEE and inadequate across the board in the EU, forcing households to take on increasing amounts of care work themselves.

In 2022, to address these trends, the European Commission released the European Care Strategy, which increased existing targets for the provision of early childhood education and care and set out standards for the delivery of long-term care in the EU. However, the strategy is comprised of non-binding recommendations and is not accompanied by funding which could ensure its implementation. The European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Facility was another lost opportunity in this respect: it did not require member states to earmark funds for care provision, despite purportedly aiming to address the fallout of the Covid pandemic. As such, improving care infrastructure was left up to the political will of member states, leaving limited hope that RRF funds would be used to address the ongoing crisis of care or the divisions of availability of care services in the EU.

At the same time, EU economic (and at times social) policies actively call for the reduction of budgetary expenses when it comes to care provision. Increasingly, the EU recommends increasing the numbers of migrant care workers in the care system to address labour shortages while keeping the budgetary expenditures low, thanks to migrant workers’ lower salary and working condition expectations. Coupled with the push to outsource care work to market-based providers, this puts intermediaries such as placement agencies in a position of taking advantage of care migrants, imposing working conditions that are far from decent and applying arbitrary fees, which further reduce their already low salaries. As such, EU policies are not actively contributing to the improvement of labour conditions in the care sector, but rather deepening the bloc’s dependence on a precarious and underpaid labour force and contributing to the creation of care, youth and brain drains in poorer countries within the bloc and in its neighbourhood.

Further reading:

Katona, N. and Melegh, A. (2020), Towards a scarcity of care? Tensions and contradictions of transnational elderly care systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Available at: https://budapest.fes.de/veranstaltung-detail/towards-a-scarcity-of-care-tensions-and-contradictions-in-transnational-elderly-care-systems-in-central-and-eastern-europe.html

Katona, N. and Zacharenko, E. (2021) ‘The Dependency on East-to-West Care Labour Migration in the EU’. Budapest: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Available at: https://collections.fes.de/publikationen/content/titleinfo/451676

Kampl, T., Mamaiev, D., Nam, J., Veira Silva, T., Zacharenko, E. (2024), Labour Migration from the Euopean Periphery to the EU’s core. Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies. Available at: https://feps-europe.eu/publication/labour-migration-from-the-european-periphery-to-the-eus-core/

Thissen, L., Towards a care-led recovery for the European Union?: A feminist analysis of the national recovery and resilience plans (2022). Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, EU-Office. Available at: https://feps-europe.eu/publication/towards-care-led-recovery-for-the-european-union/

Zacharenko, E. (2023) ‘Long‐term care in EU policy 1999‐2022: women’s responsibility, migrants’ work?’, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13476.

Zacharenko, E. and Elomäki, A. (2022) ‘Constructions of Care in EU Economic, Social, and Gender Equality Policy: Care Providers and Care Recipients versus the Needs of the Economy?’, Social Politics. Available at: https://doi-org.libproxy.tuni.fi/10.1093/sp/jxac014