Care workers in Slovenia are mostly hired directly by private household and not registered, what means that majority of care workers lack paid social security. Care workers do not create their own collectives that act as pressure groups (like trade unions or social movements) in cases of abuse and in cases of low pay and labour rights violation. However, historical research show different picture of the collective efforts of housemaids in the previous century and in times of socialism. They were organised in different associations, the first one dated in 1906 as an Association of servants and several of them followed including an association of household support personnel that was established a decade after the end of the WWII, when Slovenia was already developed as a socialist country. We were focusing on collective efforts of care workers, themes raised in relation to their rights and status, main achievements and failures. We were also interested in the language used throughout the history to label care workers and the debate that followed the linguistic turns.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 4336997The 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.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 1092717The paper discusses how public care policies shape the informal care markets in Slovenia with respect to who undertakes informal paid care work, under what conditions and under what power relations. In childcare, characterized by good quality public institutional care facilities and reasonable parental social rights, one can observe the absence of migrants and exploitative power relations in informal market. In elder care characterized by public/private mix of care services in which responsibility for care is allocated to the family and is publicly supported by cash- for-care allowances under the means-testing conditions assimilated migrants and poor elder women step in and working conditions become more oppressive and undefined. While in the area of household cleaning, which completely lacks socialization and is entirely individualized, global care chain in its most oppressive form steps in.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 1053037