Represent
What’s the issue?
Representation of care workers is crucial to addressing women's time poverty and improving the precarious conditions many care workers face, particularly migrant and undocumented workers in informal employment. Ensuring care workers have a voice in decision-making helps advocate for better wages, legal protections, and formalisation of care and domestic work. Promoting freedom of association, caregivers’ public participation and collective bargaining fosters equal opportunities and contributes to the reduction of exploitation and carers’ precarity.
Local governments play a key role by supporting unions, creating migrant-friendly policies, investing in care infrastructure, and fostering social dialogue to ensure care workers’ needs and aspirations are represented. These measures not only protect care workers but also promote gender equality, improve social cohesion, and strengthen the care economy.
Public participation in policy-making
Mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that public consultations and participatory processes include caregivers and care receivers, giving them a voice in how city resources are budgeted and allocated, in what ways policies and programs respond to their needs, what decisions are made that implicate them, and how these are monitored and evaluated. Special attention should be paid to fostering participation processes that are accessible to women, people with disabilities, displaced persons and migrant groups, accounting for flexible hours, offline and online options, literacy needs, and safe and accessible locations that are close to other public spaces such as schools and care facilities. Special arrangements, such as transportation, childcare and meals, can be arranged to enable caregivers’ active participation.
Municipal Immigration Council, Barcelona (Spain)
A consultative participatory body at Barcelona City Council made up voluntarily of immigrant and host entities and associations, social officers, and municipal political groups keen to have an impact on the social, cultural and political environment and ensure immigrants can exercise full citizenship.
Information campaigns
Information is critical for workers to understand their rights and prevent precarity. Local municipalities can establish (mobile or permanent) information points to spread accurate information on workers’ rights, including the rights and regulations that govern domestic work and migrant and asylum seekers’ rights. Local governments can develop a webpage or toll-free hotline for citizens to call to access information on their rights and to better understand local regulations that pertain to their work.
Encouraging association, social dialogue and civic movements for care workers is essential in improving working conditions, enhancing the quality of care services, preventing burnout and valuing care work appropriately.
Care worker councils and alliances
Local governments can play a pivotal role in supporting or creating enabling environments for care worker councils, advisory boards, trade unions and diverse alliances for collective bargaining. This includes ensuring access to resources like venues for meetings, offering trainings on labour rights and financial support for organizing, and platforms for networking and alliances to form between care worker organisations and broader human rights, disability rights and migrants’ rights groups.
Reward