In the lecture the systems of childcare and elderly care in Slovenia were analysed and compared across the care regimes in European Union. This was taken as the starting point for the reflection of the different consequences both systems of care have for the position of women in the labour market and consequently for their economic equality and independence in old age. As an indicator of women’s economic inequality between men and women in EU gender pension gap was taken, which on average in EU reaches 40%.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 1141613Collection of abstracts presented at the international conference Problems and Visions in Social care, organized within the project. Due to changing demographic, social and economic imperatives regimes of social care, which are an important element of the welfare system and a factor of equality including the position of women in society, have been transforming profoundly in the EU over the past decades. New boundaries concerning redistribution of costs, work and responsibilities for care between family, state, market and community are being negotiated by introducing new modes of financing, contributions, allowances and conditions for the rights to be cared for and to care for. Research reveals some worrying trends in these developments: instead of thorough institutional reforms states are withdrawing from institutional and formal provisions of care by substituting them with monetary subsidies, tax reductions, and encouraging family-based or other informal solutions for care. Familisation of care implies women’s responsibilities for provision of unpaid care while at the same time labour market policies target women to participate more and work longer in paid employment. Care is consequently increasingly outsourced also from the family while concurrently creating precarious pseudo employment statuses in private households manifestly supported by specific welfare, employment and immigration policies. Growing informal and private markets of care are nested in and further reproduce wider social inequalities along the axis of class, race/ethnicity, gender, and citizenship status. These contradictions represent a profound social and political challenge but at the same time also create new sites of resistance, imaginaries of social change and locations of transformative actions.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
COBISS.SI-ID: 285711104National coordination of international project Promote Equal Pay to Diminish Pension Gap, Poverty and Social Exclusion. (EC, Progress Program, Grant Agreement No. JUST/2013/PROG/AG/4881/GE 2014 – 2016). The project which includes partners from 5 EU countries (Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic and Slovenia) aims at awareness rising about the impact of gender based pay gap on pension gap and feminization of poverty. It takes into consideration the issues of unpaid care work shouldered by women in the family as well as precarity of youth at the labour market. The project includes initial national research, collecting and evaluating good practice examples, expert roundtables and general awareness rising campaign.
D.01 Chairing over/coordinating (international and national) projects
COBISS.SI-ID: 1098861While the mode how society organizes care impacts the prevalent type of care resources employed in the family (formal, informal, commercial), we claim that in practice different combinations of resources and the mixture of different types of care prevail in order to provide sufficient amount of care services. Families in Slovenia combine mixed modes of care and care providers (i.e. informal care of female family members and neighbours; a care worker in black market; limited public care services; specific market offers; volunteers) all at the same time in order to meet the needs of the users. Based on individual interviews (64 interviews were conducted all over Slovenia and 8 ‘care packages’ were included), we analyze how these very different care providers interact, how different modes of care (heavy care, lighter care, informal helping) is distributed between them and if their cooperation can represent a care partnership between formal and informal care. Proceeding from the Patsios and Davey (2005) classification we pay special attention to hierarchical, substitutional, task specific, supplementary and complementary relationships between diverse care actors who meet in one household and their effects for the users.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1191533The paper highlights how categories of gender, class, ethnicity and citizenship status and their intersections shape informal markets of care work in private households in Slovenia. Qualitative interviews with informal paid care workers witnesses that access to certain types of informal paid care work is structured according to ethnicity and citizenship status in correlation with socially constructed value of specific field of care work. The most unrespected and hard work of cleaning is accessible to global migrants and non-citizens; hard, but respected care of the elderly is accessible to assimilated migrants from former Yugoslavia with Slovenian citizenship; while socially most valued and constructed as pleasant work of child care is accessible only to Slovenians. However, if categories of ethnicity and citizenship status segregate and hierarchize the informal care markets, then, at least in Slovenia, the category of class (intersecting with gender) can be considered as a common denominator of Slovenians as well as non-Slovenians, citizens as well as non-citizens in the informal markets of care work. This raises the question of the crucial dependence of the provision of care in Slovenia not only on ethnicity and citizenship status inequalities, but more and more on specific gendered class inequalities.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 1092717