Joint recommendations for the European Care Strategy regarding migrant care providers and service users
Together with other human rights organisations, ERGO endorsed Joint recommendations for the European Care Strategy regarding migrant care providers and service users.
This document sets out some joint recommendations for the inclusion of migrants in the forthcoming European Care Strategy and accompanying Council recommendations, both as workers and providers of care as well as care service users.
With a view to supporting the full inclusion of people who are non-nationals in every part of the strategy, the document is organised around key aspects that the strategy is expected to address, namely: access to care, affordability, sustainability, quality of care, workforce, and gender aspects of care.
Contributors and endorsement
- Caritas Europa
- EAPN – European Anti-Poverty Network
- EFFE – European Federation for Family, Employment & Home Care
- EFFAT – European Federation of Food Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions
- EFSI – European Federation for Services to Individuals
- Eurocarers
- ERGO – European Roma Grassroots Organisations Network
- Don Bosco International
- FairWork (the Netherlands)
- FEANTSA – European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless
- La Strada International
- Make Mothers Matter
- PICUM – Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants
- UNI Europa – UNICARE
- SIMI (Czech Republic)
- Social Platform and Red Acoge (Spain)
General principles and key messages
- People who have non-EU nationality living in the EU must be fully considered and included in every part of the EU’s care strategy.
- The availability, accessibility, affordability and quality of health, social and long-term care, as well as early childhood education and care, are essential for all, and especially those who, as non-nationals with various statuses living in the EU, may face particular barriers in accessing care, intersectional discrimination, marginalisation and in-work poverty.
- The COVID-19 pandemic both reinforced the essential role of the care sector and exacerbated the precarity of migrant carers. Appropriate and effective measures are urgently needed.
- The forthcoming European Care Strategy should:
- Recognise the essential role and contributions of both intra-EU mobile workers and non-EU migrant workers, including undocumented workers, in providing care in the European Union.
- Recognise that in many cases this care is being provided undeclared or under-declared, in exploitative conditions, impacting on the rights and well-being of workers and their families. This also impacts on care service users, and contributes to unfair and unsustainable social protection systems. Decent work should be integral to definitions and priorities around sustainable and quality care systems.
- Commit and set concrete actions to promote decent work for all care workers, regardless of their migration or residence status, including through targeted measures.
- Commit and set concrete actions to ensure that all people living in the EU have access to quality services on the basis of need, regardless of their migration or residence status.
- Recognise and support informal carers, including young carers, regardless of their migration or residence status.
- Meaningfully involve representatives of care workers, including migrant carers- as well as those in need of care – in the development, monitoring and evaluation of care policy-making and reform, and encourage member states to do likewise.
- Encourage member states to evaluate the impacts of policies – in particular in the areas of employment, education, health and migration – on people in need of care, families, care workers and informal and formal care service provision, including through gender impact assessments.
- Encourage the use of both EU and national funds, in particular ESF+ and the Child Guarantee national action plans, to improve access, affordability and quality of care services for marginalised and disadvantaged people and families, including mobile EU and non-EU migrants.
- It is important for the European Care Strategy to address both the differences and overlap between care and non-care services needed by, and provided to, people with care needs in their homes. The strategy needs to recognise the different professional and skills profiles of care workers. This should reflect the types of care that require professional qualifications, as well as the reality that in many home care arrangements, people are providing a combination of care and housework-related personal household services.
Recognise structural and institutional forms of racism which stem from many European Member States’ historical role in discriminating against racialised people., in the past and present.