Project

Social dialogue in welfare services

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The Sowell Project

The European labour market in the welfare sector is becoming particularly relevant in terms of occupation, given that around 20% of the European workforce is nowadays employed in this sector, while it was around 15% at the end of the 1990s. Among the most dynamics fields there are the care services, specifically the socio-educational ones for children aged 0-5 (Early Childhood Education and Care – ECEC) and social and health services for elderly people (Long-Term Care – LTC). Care services have drawn increasing attention from European institutions also as a part of the “social investment” strategy because of their high capacity in relieving (especially female) workers from caring responsibilities, thereby mobilizing the “productive potential” of citizens.

The dynamic growth of the care sector has triggered an unprecedented plurality in provision, including public, private for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, and individual caregivers. In such a complex network, the labour market has known a fragmentation in labour regulation within and across countries, entailing increasing inequalities and an overall deterioration in working conditions. Despite the relevance, these issues have attracted limited systematic research in the field of industrial relations and labour studies. Accordingly, the SOWELL project aims to examine the care services sector in an employment relations perspective, as a new arena for building solidarity and labour market coordination through social dialogue institutions in Europe. Therefore, the project focuses on working conditions, employment relations institutions, and social partners’ strategies in the arena of care services. On this purpose a multilevel comparative perspective is adopted, linking the developments taking place at European level with those occurring at national level across different institutional and regulatory context – Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Spain.

The European labour market in the welfare sector is becoming particularly relevant in terms of occupation, given that around 20% of the European workforce is nowadays employed in this sector, while it was around 15% at the end of the 1990s. Among the most dynamics fields there are the care services, specifically the socio-educational ones for children aged 0-5 (Early Childhood Education and Care – ECEC) and social and health services for elderly people (Long-Term Care – LTC). Care services have drawn increasing attention from European institutions also as a part of the “social investment” strategy because of their high capacity in relieving (especially female) workers from caring responsibilities, thereby mobilizing the “productive potential” of citizens.

The dynamic growth of the care sector has triggered an unprecedented plurality in provision, including public, private for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, and individual caregivers. In such a complex network, the labour market has known a fragmentation in labour regulation within and across countries, entailing increasing inequalities and an overall deterioration in working conditions. Despite the relevance, these issues have attracted limited systematic research in the field of industrial relations and labour studies. Accordingly, the SOWELL project aims to examine the care services sector in an employment relations perspective, as a new arena for building solidarity and labour market coordination through social dialogue institutions in Europe. Therefore, the project focuses on working conditions, employment relations institutions, and social partners’ strategies in the arena of care services. On this purpose a multilevel comparative perspective is adopted, linking the developments taking place at European level with those occurring at national level across different institutional and regulatory context – Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Spain.

Specific objective

The SOWELL project considers the care services sector in an employment relations perspective, as a new arena for building solidarity and labour market coordination through social dialogue institutions in Europe. It focuses on working conditions, employment relations institutions on the one hand, and on trade unions and employer associations’ strategies, on the other, in two specific care services – ECEC and LTC – selected for their relevance in terms of employment, and implementation of the EU social policy. Over the last decades and, especially after the 2008-09 economic crisis in many European countries, the growing demand of care services in conditions of permanent austerity in public finance has brought to an increasing plurality in the nature and kind of providers and to a fragmentation in the employment regulation and working conditions, within a labour intensive sector. Accordingly, the public authorities have to conciliate three different and often opposing pressures (a trilemma) towards the need to provide a growing share of services, to ensure fair and protected working conditions to the personnel involved, and to maintain a good quality in these services.

In this scenario, three specific and interlocked objectives will be pursued.

The starting aim is the systematic mapping of the characteristics and main transformations of the labour market, in the different countries (in terms of providers, share of overall workforce employed and its composition). This mapping exercise is functional to the examination of the labour regulation in terms of working conditions (employment contracts, wage levels, contractual arrangements,) and employment relations institutions. Within this specific goal the action will also focus on the role of multinationals as a relatively new but potentially important private provider in this field.

A second objective concerns the understanding of the role played in this field by trade union and employer associations, at both local and national level, to promote and sustain social dialogue in this arena. The aim is on one hand, to understand how trade unions and employer associations have tackled the threefold pressure described above in different countries and what factors have pushed for the adoption of certain solutions than others; on the other hand, to identify the conditions under which social dialogue is a suitable arena to reconcile the three pressures and to (re)build solidarity among different segments of society and of the labour market.

Finally, a third goal is to focus on the role of social dialogue at EU level: an increasing and fundamental part of the regulation in the care sector takes place at the EU level where the social partners are working to build a new sectoral social dialogue. Therefore, the project wants to explore how social dialogue has been developing at the EU level in relation to care services; who are the main actors involved and the nature of their interactions; how can social dialogue be improved and what are the repercussions on the national social dialogue institutions.

WP1

OBJECTIVES

FOCUS

  • To investigate the overall structure and the characteristics of the labour market in the care sector and how they have changed over time (in terms of providers involved, the share of the overall workforce employed in the care sector and its composition).
  • To map how the labour market in the care sector is regulated in terms of working conditions (wage levels, contractual arrangements, type of labour contracts).
  • The analysis specifically focus on early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long term care (LTC) services.
  • Hence it will included all the pre-school services and the long-term care services including both the domiciliary as well as the residential care services. According to the structural characteristics of each national context, informal domiciliary care can be included (e.g. in the case of Italy or Spain where the phenomenon is particularly widespread).

WP2

OBJECTIVES

  • To provide an overview of the main characteristics of the employment relations system and social dialogue institutions in the sector of care services, including the institutions of labour regulation (both individual and collective), the mechanism of coordination, the collective agreements adopted and their characteristics (coverage, etc.).
  • To map all the actors involved on the union and on the employer side and to investigate their main characteristics in terms of membership, role played, functions in the industrial relation system in the care sector and relationships.

WP3

OBJECTIVES

In WP3, partners will select two cross-country comparable case studies of local authorities responsible for the provision of care services (ECEC and LTC services), within their country or countries of reference. For each case study, the partners will first analyse the features of the local care services labour market in terms of workforce composition, nature of providers, working conditions and labour regulations. Second, they will map the characteristics and role of the actors involved in employment relations and social dialogue at local level, including trade unions, single employers and their associations, as well as public authorities. Then the analysis will focus on the strategies that social partners adopted to tackle the quadrilemma, with a particular attention on the arrangements aimed at ensuring fair pay and working conditions for the workforce and to contain the effects of deregulation and privatisation.

WP4

OBJECTIVES

In WP4 partners will reconstruct and analyse the main features of the sectoral social dialogue at EU level, focusing on how European social dialogue is born and is evolving, who the main actors involved are, what issues the social partners are emphasizing and pushing in the agenda of the EU institutions, what the formal and informal relationships between the European and national social dialogue are. More the analysis of the process of elaboration and approbation of some EU directives which had an impact on the sector (e.g. the work-life balance directive or the working time directive) will also help to highlight the role played by social dialogue actors and institutions and their capacity to affect EU decision concerning the care services. Within this WP, FESE will investigate in depth the role played by multinational companies in the care sector, exploring how and to what extent their action is transforming national care labour markets and employment relations by introducing transnational logic within them.