Social rights and employment rights related to family care: Family care regimes in Europe

摘要

In early welfare states, social rights predominantly derived from formal employment relations. Within the past two decades, however, some European countries have opened these social institutions to care work also. Cash-for-care and social entitlements for periods of at-home family caregiving have changed the characteristics of informal care work that family members traditionally provide to older relatives. Formerly based on unpaid kinship relations, it has changed towards new paid and more formalized forms of care work by family members. But it can be assumed that long-term care work by family members is constructed differently across welfare states.The paper is guided by the following research question: How do welfare-state policies differ in the degree to which their policies towards family care for senior citizens create social risks for the caring family members? We use the conceptual framework of "family care regimes" as our analytical framework for the comparative research.To do this, we compare care policies towards older care-needy people in the welfare states of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. The findings show that a common feature in all three countries is that the situation of family carers is to some degree being formalized: in all three countries a frail senior citizen can chose a family member as the care provider, and the welfare states support the family care providers. Still, the legal situation as well as the quality and level of social rights for family caregivers differ considerably among the three countries. It is shown that the institutional framework for senior care by family members in Germany and the Netherlands represents a family care regime that supports semi-formal family care, and that in Denmark it can be classified as a family care regime that supports formal family care. We show that these different types of family care regimes differ considerably in the social risks they pose to family carers.