Abstract
This article provides a comparative analysis of two different care systems, childcare and eldercare, in Slovenia, an Eastern-European post-transition country, with a dual-breadwinner full-time employment regime, a relatively low level of migration and a fast growing share of the 65+ population. The analysis shows that both care systems follow two different kinds of logic of egalitarianism, which means that the national care regime is internally diversified. While care for children is public, universally accessible and defamilialistic, care for the elderly follows the principles of marketization, economy-based inequality in access and familialization. Such policies also have different implications for care mobilities: while childcare demands daily transfers between multi-local sites of care, which remained confined within the state borders, eldercare increasingly demands cross-border care loops. The comparison of both care systems along with the empirical evidence on the presence/absence of migrant care workers in care support the thesis that cross-border care mobilities emerge at points where the state with its policies is failing to adequately meet care needs of the citizens.
Introduction: evolution of childcare and eldercare systems in Slovenia
This article compares and contrasts two different care systems, childcare and eldercare, within one country, Slovenia, with the aim to analyse how specific policy mechanisms employed in public support of care for children and elderly in the context of a dual-breadwinner full-time employment regime and a relatively low level of migration produce different effects on care mobilities.
The two systems of childcare and eldercare were formed in two different economic and political systems and social contexts that established different normative frameworks of making care policies. The childcare system was formed during the 1970s in the context of socialist Yugoslavia (which did not belong to the Soviet bloc but developed a unique system of self-regulating socialism and politics of nonaligned countries). During socialism, public childcare was an important political priority due to the needs for a labour force in the post-war environment and in the newly industrializing society, and due to the high valuation of the economic emancipation of women. Enabled by the comprehensive childcare system, the dual-breadwinner full-time employment regime has typically existed in Slovenia ever since the 1970s. On the other hand, the system of eldercare entered the policy agenda relatively late, only after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and during the transition to the capitalist system, when in 2006 the long waiting lists for institutional care, its shortage and the lack of modernization became a concern (Mandič, 2016). There are several reasons why the regulation of the eldercare system did not become a political priority either in socialism or during the transition. Post-war socialism saw a high fertility rate, and while the demographic processes of the aging had begun to intensify as early as the 1970s, their impact on society was not obvious at the time. In contrast to the comprehensive public care for children, eldercare in socialism complied much more than in the West with traditional cultural patterns of informal care in the form of intergenerational solidarity within family as an alternative to the poor-quality medicalized institutional care. The period of transition in the 1990s and in the first decade of the new millennium was the period of fast and radical changes, of building and consolidating of the new system and political priorities, such as the accession to the European Union (EU), the Atlantic alliances and the monetary union. In 2008, these concluded with the 10-year economic crisis, austerity measures and shrinking of the welfare system. As studies show (Bettio and Verashchagina, 2010; Mandič, 2012; Saraceno, 2010), not only in Slovenia but also in other Eastern-European societies, eldercare has still been largely familialized and informal. However, with the aging of the population now showing its influence on the labour market, care deficit as well as on public budget, policymakers in the post-crisis context rush to find policy solutions, following the principles of economy and the shrinking costs of eldercare. The general belief within policymaking that gender equality has already been achieved because of the comprehensive childcare system and a high share of women’s full-time employment makes the effect of care for an increasingly large population of elderly people on the position of women become an irrelevant criterion for eldercare policymaking.
The article first presents the theoretical framework of the analysis and data collection. Then it outlines the labour market and migration situation in the country in order to contextualize childcare and eldercare policies that are analysed within the continuums of defamilialization and refamilialization, universalism and selectivity, cash benefits and in-kind services, and (in)formalization. In the fourth part the Slovenian landscape of childcare and eldercare are outlined from the perspective of care mobilities. Based on that, the conclusion reflects upon the specific policy mechanisms that set up the conditions for the presence/absence of the cross-border care loops.
Theoretical framework and data collection
The theoretical framework of the analysis is inspired by the feminist reflection of social policies, in particular the concepts of (de)familialization of care (Daly and Lewis, 2000; Hobson et al., 2002), with the assumption that cross-border care mobilities emerge at points where the state with its policies is failing to adequately meet the needs for care of the citizens (Polese et al., 2014). Defamilialization of care, which has in different directions and to different extents appeared in Europe since the 1970s, has happened because of the shift in family and employment patterns towards the dual earner model. It refers to the degree of an individual’s independence, when they need care, from family, the principles of reciprocity and affective links. Defamilialization of care means that a considerable proportion of care has to be shifted from unpaid care work mostly performed by women in the family to the formal provision of care by either the state, market or community (Daly, 2011; Giullari and Lewis, 2005). The public provision of formal care services or lack thereof forms an important factor of cross-border care mobilities. For instance, Williams and Gavanas (2008) find that sufficient availability of public childcare services explains the limited reliance on migrant care workers in Sweden. On the other hand, Weicht (2015) suggests that the lack of sufficient public eldercare services in Austria, accompanied with cash-for-care benefits causes a large number of families to employ migrant carers from the neighbouring post-socialist countries. However, what is important is not only the extent to which the state takes over the responsibility for care, but also the form of how it carries out its responsibility. States can directly provide in-kind services and create employment opportunities for care workers in the public sector (typical of the Nordic countries), or they can subsidize non-profit (common in continental Europe with Germany and the Netherlands) and for-profit care providers (for instance, in the United Kingdom, and increasingly in Sweden) either directly to organizations or indirectly through cash payments to the users. These forms have different impacts on the quality of employments in care, with employment conditions in terms of pay and working time often being worse in the private sector than in the public sector (Stranz and Szebehely, 2018; Van Hooren, 2014). Since 1990, a common trend, in particular in eldercare and long-term care, is to introduce cash payments to people in need of care to buy in-home care provision either on the market or in the family. These have been motivated by the avoidance of expensive institutionalization, offering users more choice, but also aimed at incentivizing and supporting care markets and care provided by the family. This, however, means that distinctions between formal and informal care, paid and unpaid care are becoming increasingly blurred (León, 2014). Research reveals large differences in cash-for-care schemes in various European countries at the level of regulation, generosity and selectivity. The effects of these schemes also depend on the diverse institutional contexts in which they were developed (Zigante, 2018). Depending on how cash payments are regulated, they can have different effects on the formal–informal division of care and on its (de)familialization. The rules range from cash benefits paid to the user with no control over whether the money is spent on care services at all (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy) to the market or family carer signing a formal employment contract with either the user (France and the Netherlands) or with the municipality (Sweden) (Da Roit, 2010; Da Roit and Le Bihan, 2010). Although it is recognized that, overall, the emphasis on cash payments reinforces family obligations to provide care, when strictly regulated, the use of cash benefits may encourage a formal care market and the complementary use of formal care services. On the other hand, research shows that favouring unregulated cash payments over in-kind services promotes the development of a particular form of home-based, often low paid, commodified care accessed privately through the often informal grey care markets (Van Hooren, 2014; Williams, 2011; Williams and Gavanas, 2008). This is where low-cost informal or migrant care steps in, because users tend to organize the care that they need with the financial resources available in the most economically efficient way. Care in the informal market is cheaper than that in the formal one, due to social contributions that the employers have to pay for the care workers who perform care in formal markets. Also, the informal markets are hierarchized in terms of price, with migrant care workers offering a lower price for their services and a larger range of care, including the live-in arrangements, than local care workers. Alternatively, unregulated cash payments may also create ‘incentive traps’, where family carers, often women, are encouraged to leave the labour market and take over care work (Zigante, 2018). The outcomes of cash payments are therefore also related to the employment and migration regime in the country, which have an impact on the available pool of (in)formal family carers and (in)formal migrant care markets.
In this article, I point out that childcare and eldercare systems in Slovenia in the context of a limited pool of family and migrant carers deploy contrasting policy mechanisms concerning the scope and type of formal services, care workers’ employment conditions, in-kind or cash provisions and unregulated use of cash payments which have meaningfully different effects on the needs for care mobilities.
Data collection was based on individual semi-structured interviews and on policy analysis. In the second half of 2015, 65 semi-structured interviews with users and providers of in-home care were conducted in the framework of the research project ‘Care work between individualization, socialization and globalization’ (funded by the Slovenian Research Agency, 2014–2017). The sample, which was dispersed across the country and included rural as well as urban areas, consisted of 10 users, 44 care workers (in a variety of positions: informal family carers, family assistants, care workers in public and private organizations, self-employed care workers, care workers in informal markets, among which five were migrant care workers) and 11 heads of private and public organizations that offer care services. The survey was explorative and dealt with care work in relation to gender, economic position, migrations, social citizenship, trends in care policies, violence, the ethics of care and activist movements in care. Interviews were recorded and transcribed for the purpose of analysis. In this article, I use the material from field research mostly as empirical evidence about the scope of multi-local and cross-border care mobilities and working conditions comparatively in childcare and eldercare. The article is primarily based on policy analysis, which traces the ways of how the state structures the systems of care for children and the elderly by shaping relationships between the different sectors of care (state, market, family), setting the criteria of eligibility to services and cash payments, defining the scope, standards and financing of services. It reveals the ways of (de)familialization of care and what forms of care predominate (paid/unpaid, formal/informal). The policy analysis was focused particularly on the following dimensions: the range and ways of provisions in kind (public services, institutionalization, personal care delivered at home); cash payments; time-related provisions such as time off work for care; equality in access to care; a range of services in the market, including informal markets; and the working conditions of care workers. 1
Analysis of childcare and eldercare policies in Slovenia
Labour market and the migration context of care policies in Slovenia
In the EU context, Slovenia is placed among the countries with a high share of full-time employment of women. In 2016, the share of women aged 20–64 years included in the labour market was 66.7 percent, with only 12.7 percent of them working part-time compared with EU28, where the average share of women working part-time was 32.4 percent. The employment rate of women aged 20–49 with a child of less than 6 years old was 77.8 percent. However, Slovenia has one of the lowest shares of employed women aged 55–64 years (less than 30%) in the EU (Eurostat, 2018a). This is the consequence of the retirement policy that comprised positive measures of shorter years of service for women and a higher pension assessment percentage as the compensation for inequalities that come from traditionally conditioned different social roles and in turn inequalities in the labour market. Early retired women with low pensions that are typical of post-transitional countries (Mandič, 2016) form a pool of informal carers in the family and in informal care markets. However, this pool has been shrinking, because the 2012 pension reform has equalized the retirement conditions for men and women. The pay gap in Slovenia amounts to 7.8 percent compared with 16.2 percent in EU28 (Eurostat, 2018b). During the economic crisis, the labour market was highly precarious with the growth of the number of fixed-term employments and self-employments, particularly for young, new job-seekers. The most precarious is considered to be the self-employment status, because it does not include or only partly includes labour rights from standard employment, such as the reimbursement of costs for lunch and transport to work, sick leave, annual leave, parental leaves, health and retirement insurance and the unemployment insurance. The sector of social care is highly gender segregated and Slovenia very much lags behind the EU average in terms of the share of the employed in social care, only reaching to 42 percent of the EU average in the number of the employed in social care per 100,000 inhabitants. 2 That is why this is a high labour intensity sector, but at the same time also the sector with a high share of those who receive the minimum wage.
Until its accession to EU in 2004, Slovenia was a country of internal immigration of migrants from the former Yugoslav republics. With its gaining independence in 1991 and during the Balkan wars, Slovenia was the destination of mass migrations of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo, who took refuge there from the consequences of war, and obtained citizenship in 2002. When Slovenia entered the Schengen area (2007), it saw a shift towards an internal liberalization with the freedom of movement within the EU for citizens of the member states, and a tighter control on the outer EU borders. This resulted in a strong regulation of migrations and the establishment of restrictive conditions for granting of status to migrants from so-called ‘third countries’ (Kogovšek Šalamon, 2011). Since 2015, in regard to the employment of foreigners the legislation has laid down a single residence and work permit that allows foreigners from ‘third countries’ to enter the country based on labour quotas and family reunification, and temporary residence and work in Slovenia. In 2017, there were 6.1 percent of foreigners among the population of Slovenia, with 91,632 of them having a permanent residence permit and 59,155 a temporary residence permit. Among the latter, there are 25,687 work permits, 27,710 for family reunification and 2491 for study. The largest number of migrants to Slovenia comes from countries of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia and Croatia), and to a smaller extent from Bulgaria, the Russian Federation, Italy and Germany. The share of women is significantly smaller than the share of men, amounting to around 34 percent. 3 Research shows that due to deficient integrational programmes, migrant women who come to Slovenia for family reunification have trouble integrating into the labour market, which is why they often participate in informal markets of cleaning and eldercare in private households (Pajnik and Bajt, 2011). Although the 2004 enlargement of the EU enabled unobstructed immigration among the member countries, during its transition Slovenia did not experience mass economic emigration, typical of most post-socialist countries. However, the economic migration of young people, people with higher education and daily work migrations to Austrian and Italian border cities increased with the 2008 economic crisis, with numerous women among the commuters, who clean and take care of older people in private households. Due to bad working conditions in the care sector, work emigration of women caregivers and medical nurses has also been on the increase after the economic crisis.
The socialization of childcare
In childcare policies, definitions of parental leave and its remuneration and the provision of childcare services for preschool children are key mechanisms through which the state affects (de)familialization and egalitarianism in care. During transition, numerous post-socialist countries, also under the influence of the interventions of the World Bank and other international actors that promoted the lean state, gradually deconstructed public childcare systems. For example, in the Czech Republic, childcare was reformed following the corporative-conservative model with the extension of parental leave and radical reduction of the number of public preschools. In 2004, a similar policy was introduced in Slovakia (and even before that in Poland and Hungary), namely an extended 3-year parental leave that involved a low flat rate monthly payment and abolishment of public preschools (Saxonberg, 2011; see also Souralová and Sekeráková Búriková, 2019). On the contrary, Slovenia, also due to the active feminist movement, preserved and even upgraded the socialist legacy of a public, institutional, universally accessible, publicly subsidized childcare, along with the leave scheme, hence consequently, the high rate of women’s full-time employment continued.
The childcare system, including care for children aged 1–3 years, thus remains an integral part of family and education policies. In the 1970s, the leave policy in Slovenia followed the Swedish model of short maternity leave (3 months) and a moderate-length parental leave (9 months), with the possibility of parental leave being shared between partners (Javornik, 2014; Korintus and Stropnik, 2011). 4 The financial compensation for maternity and parental leave is covered by the state, not by the employers, and amounts to 100 percent of the previous salary. In 2012, it was temporarily lowered to 90 percent which was the impact of the economic crisis; however, in 2019 this austerity measure was abrogated. Childcare leave is counted as years of service for retirement benefits. The labour legislation protects mothers by imposing on the employer the duty to provide the same job position after the mother’s return from her 1-year maternity leave. This enables women to provide care for the child in the first year and to reintegrate into the labour market after 1 year of absence due to giving birth. In addition, in 2003 paternity leave was introduced, which consists of 30 days of non-transferable fully paid leave for fathers, with the aim of fostering involved fathering and more equal division of care between women and men.
The development of public childcare for preschool children was particularly intense in socialism, when between 1971 and 1985, 70 percent of existing public childcare institutions were built (Vojnovič, 1996). Since 1980, the share of preschool children (aged 11 months to 6 years) included in public daycare has largely increased: 7.7 percent of preschool children were included in daycare in 1961, 15 percent in 1971, 41 percent in 1981 and as many as 76.9 percent in 2014 (Statistični urad Republike Slovenije, 2015; Stropnik and Šircelj, 2008). Currently, Slovenia has a comprehensive unified network of preschool care provided by public preschools (93% of kindergartens are public) that ensures a place to every child aged 11 months. The public kindergarten network is largely financed by municipalities, and partly by parents’ contribution that is calculated based on means-testing, which enables egalitarian access to the childcare services of the same quality to all families. For the second child in the preschool, parents only pay 30 percent of their contribution, while care for subsequent children is free of charge.
Although public childcare is an exceedingly feminized field of work, it is characterized by relatively good-quality working conditions. Employees have secondary and tertiary education, and mostly have full-time and permanent employments. On average, preschool teachers’ income reaches 100 percent of the average salary in Slovenia; however, the income of preschool teacher assistants is close to the minimum wage, only reaching an average of 70 percent of the average salary, depending on years of service and pay category. 5 While teachers perform tasks of upbringing, education and coordination of activities, teacher assistants do routine care work of personal hygiene, feeding, cleaning and putting to sleep. This indicates that the closer the content of work is to care the more it becomes economically devalued. Teachers in public kindergartens are unionized and have a strong public voice. The austerity measures during the economic crisis have worsened the working conditions with a temporary pay and promotion freeze.
In a situation where the state takes over a substantial share of childcare, commercial or informal care markets are of limited extent, because the demand is low. Everyday mobilities for childcare are multi-local, but remain within the national borders taking place between the home, the neighbouring kindergarten, grandparents and leisure activities. In a small share of families, the maternal ideology, according to which being a good mother means taking care of a child at home (Williams, 2005), leads to favouring familial over institutional care. In these families, mainly in rural areas, they tend to organize childcare with the support of a grandmother care pool. There are shorter care loops in rural areas because multi-generational households or grandparents living close by are very common. Research shows that less than 4 percent of families choose private paid childcare (Rakar et al., 2010). In urban environments and in wealthier strata, parents who prefer home-based care, especially for children aged 1–3 years, hire local retired women and students on the grey care market, who daily come in to the family to perform 8–10 hours of childcare. In the wealthier group of parents, informal paid childcare is also used for logistics of everyday mobility (Urry, 2007) related to accompanying a child to leisure activities and picking up a child from preschool in the afternoon in order to manage the stress and workloads related to logistics between home, work and kindergarten/activities. Kindergarten opening hours (from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m.) and a standard rule that a child can spend a maximum of 9 hours per day in the kindergarten create difficulties for some parents because of the prevailing culture of long workdays and an increase in nonstandard working hours. This situation is similar to that in Norway, where paid childcare services are increasingly used for managing imbalances between working hours and opening hours in childcare. The difference is that Norwegian families often employ au pairs to help organize everyday care loops (see Widding Isaksen and Bikova, 2019). In Slovenia, private paid childcare still occurs only sporadically, occasionally and for a short term and when it does, parents employ exclusively local retired women and students. An important reason for limited private paid childcare lies in the fact that the state ensures and financially provides comprehensive, good quality, universally accessible public kindergarten services and, in contrast to, for instance, Finland and Norway (see Näre and Wide; Widding Isaksen and Bikova, 2019), does not support private care with cash payments either in the family or in the market.
The familialization of eldercare
In 2017, the share of the 65+ population was 19.7 percent; 4.8 percent of older people were in institutional care and 1.7 percent received in-home care within the public network of home-based services. The state does not have reliable records about the share of old people receiving informal family care or buying services in formal or informal care markets. 6 While the need for care in old age is recognized in the policy discourse as a new social risk, the legislation that would introduce the compulsory insurance for long-term care has not yet been adopted.
In transition, the mixed economy of services was gradually introduced in eldercare, with the motive of ‘free choice and plurality of services’, and because the state estimated that it could not cover the growing needs through the public network. While in the 1990s the state opened the provision of services for private initiative, it did not leave this field completely to the market, but introduced controlled privatization, in order to retain control over the quality standards and the prices through issuing concessions and business permits. Recently, the number of public/private partnerships has been growing. In 2007, the network of organizations that provide the service of home-based care included 9 private businesses with the concession of the municipality, and in 2014 as many as 19. In 2014 the public network of the system of institutional care comprised 59 public institutions and 39 private concessions. 7 According to regular annual evaluations of the system, the average price for the user is higher and the total cost for the provider is lower with private concessions compared with public institutions (Lebar et al., 2015).
In a public/private network of institutional care, the cost of healthcare services is financed from compulsory health insurance, while payment for the elder home care service is entirely imposed on the user. In 2017, the costs for a standard double room with no need for assistance was €583 and amounted to €1300 if a user needed assistance in daily activities; staying in a single room was charged additionally. 8 The average pension amounted to €624 with over one-half of all pensioners receiving pensions lower than that (OECD, 2017), and therefore lacking the means to pay for institutional care. According to the subsidiary principle, the subject liable to pay for eldercare is close family, including children, who are bound by law to provide for their elderly family members. The municipality only subsidizes for care, if there are no relatives or they cannot pay, with, however, this money later being recovered from the inheritance. This means that the public co-funding of the costs of eldercare actually is a loan rather than a subsidy, unlike in the case of childcare. Such policies structure access to institutional care according to the economic situation of elderly people. In the conditions of high prices and a high poverty rate among working-class and increasingly middle-class elderly people, families often decide to care for their elderly on their own. Moreover, familialization of care is caused also by long waiting lists for vacancies in institutions. Despite insufficient and overly expensive institutional services, the public/private network of the home-based care services remains underdeveloped and these services are also not accessible to all elderly in need. Although the price of home-based care services is 50 percent subsidized by the municipality, it is still too high for the poor elderly. In such situations, the main responsibility for care rests upon the family carers. Research has already shown that mostly women take care of an elderly relative, that over one-third of informal carers do over 40 hours of care work a week, that care lasts on an average for more than 5 years, and that informal care critically worsens the carer’s position in the labour market (Hvalič-Touzery, 2009). Given that the majority of women work full-time, they often cannot manage the double or triple shifts. As European governments have begun to recognize the role of family carers in the provision of eldercare, the social protection rights in terms of pension credits, health insurance and reconciliation of employment and caring have started to appear (Zigante, 2018). This is not the case in Slovenia. The family carers only have the right to 7 days of paid work-leave for care for an elderly family member, but only if the receiver of care lives in the same household.
The state compensates for low pensions and the insufficient public care services with assistance and attendance allowance if the pensioner urgently needs permanent assistance and attendance for basic life needs. This modest cash payment is intended to balance the payment of the public services if they are available or to the organization of private care arrangements on the market or in the family. The state does not regulate or control the use of this cash allowance and it is not uncommon that, due to the high poverty among the elderly, it is used to cover the costs of living. Slovenian cash payment is similar to the German one, where cash benefit is calculated in relation to the needs of the user at three levels. For an elderly person who needs 24-hour compulsory professional help for permanent performance of nursing care, the cash allowance amounts to €419, for help in carrying out all basic needs, €290, and for help in carrying out most of the life needs, €145. The doctor’s opinion or the disability commission decides about the entitlement to the supplement. In 2017, among the 32,939 beneficiaries to cash payment (which is approximately 4 percent of all pensioners), only 787 users received the highest cash payment, meaning that selectivity is strict. 9 In contrast to Germany, where cash payment is about 30 percent lower than the value of in-kind formal services (Zigante, 2018), in Slovenia the cash payment amounts to approximately 30 percent of the value of in-kind services.
Compared with childcare where public in-kind services prevail, in eldercare services are provided by public or public/private organizations and as a completely market service, which can be formal or informal on the grey market. In the public and public/private network of services, work is economically devalued – eldercare is a minimum wage profession and care workers belong to the working poor. In our interview data, one of the participants told us that My gross salary is EUR 789.15 and I can’t survive on that. I get food packages from Karitas. We use my daughter’s scholarship to pay the bills. I’m very thrifty, the problem is heating, I usually borrow money to pay for it, I’m always in debt. (Darcy, 48, social carer, female)
10
Besides underpayment, intensification of work and long working hours represent the key features of the bad working conditions in institutional and home-based eldercare (Hrženjak, 2017).
Due to insufficient public services, the market offer is growing with an expansion of the mostly self-employed care workers, who offer home-based care services. However, the care policies determine that the state subsidizes only services provided by a public/private network, while the services of market care providers are not subsidized and the user has to pay the full market price. Given the low purchasing power of elderly people, despite unregulated cash payments to support private care, the elderly often cannot afford market services. This causes precarization of the market for self-employed providers. In the interviews, they report that they are usually underemployed, their income is unpredictable and they hardly earn a living in their job. They also face competition from the grey care market providers (many among them are poor pensioners) who, by not paying taxes, can ask a lower price than that set by the self-employed, who have to pay fixed monthly taxes regardless of their actual incomes. Another participant in the project said, There’s a big crisis in the markets and I only have three hours a week for now. A lot of people work unofficially. Mostly pensioners. I’m sure they have low pensions, but with their low prices they’re crowding us out of the market. After I pay my taxes, I’m in the red. (Maja, 39, self-employed home carer, female)
Under such conditions, market self-employed care providers are being systematically pushed either to engage in the local informal grey care markets, where by waiving their social security rights they can offer the lowest price in the market, or to commute to neighbouring Italy and Austria where the purchasing power is higher.
Differences between childcare and eldercare with respect to cross-border care mobilities
In 2009, a quantitative survey of the extent of domestic service in Slovenia revealed that approximately 5 percent of households employed a domestic worker: 81 percent for cleaning, 10 percent for childcare and 23 percent for eldercare. Cleaning sometimes concurred with assistance to the elderly. Because the majority of this work is done in informal care markets and the workers and users may end up being sanctioned, it can be assumed that these figures may be higher but rendered invisible by informalization. In 50 percent of the households, the main motive for hiring a domestic worker was for a family member in need of intensive care, which mostly refers to eldercare. In 37.8 percent, households buying in cleaning services was cited as a strategy to manage work and family conflict in professional dual-career couples with small children, who due to long working hours externalize the cleaning of their homes to be able to spend more quality time with their children; 11.8 percent of the households cited status and lifestyle related reasons for hiring a domestic worker. Domestic service was provided mostly by a poor pensioner (44.2%), but also by fully employed women as additional work (24.4%) and unemployed women (17.4%). These data show that informal paid care work is closely related to economic inequalities. In only 2.5 percent of the households surveyed, was the care worker responsible for providing care 24 hours a day, meaning that live-in services were of limited extent. In 81.4 percent of the households, the services were performed by a woman of Slovenian ethnic origin, and in 18.6 percent of households, care was provided by a woman who immigrated to Slovenia from one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia in the period from 1960 to 1990 and had Slovenian citizenship (Hrženjak, 2012).
The new qualitative study, which we made in 2015, points to the growing interest in the employment of live-in and migrant care workers in home-based eldercare. In this study, an elderly couple who live in their own house and – despite the public in-home care services and informal help from their daughter – need a larger range of assistance to further postpone institutionalization told us in the interview, We have placed an ad for 8- to 10-hour help per day or 24-hour in-living care. We have a one-bedroom apartment in the cellar, we received some applications, mainly from unemployed medical nurses. We hired one, she is 50 years old and retired early for disability. (Slavko and Danica, 91 years, m; 88 years, female)
Especially in urban centres and in well-off households, users look for women to live in their homes and be available for a 24/7 care that would encompass personal care and monitoring as well as doing household chores, cooking and cleaning. This can be also seen as a specific (economically based) strategy for avoiding care mobility. The elderly see this kind of live-in arrangement as a cheaper alternative to institutional care and as a way of not burdening their children who work in ‘greedy organizations’ and care for their own families.
While both pieces of research show that in Slovenia migrant care workers are not present in childcare, the 2015 research indicates that in eldercare, households have become open for the ‘new migrants’, who, while still coming from the former Yugoslav countries (in particular from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia), are now, in the context of the EU, defined as ‘migrants from the third countries’. As another participant in the project told us in the interview Some people hire women that are into this from Croatia or Bosnia, and they stay for the whole day, this is paid €30 per day. I know some of them who are very satisfied with that. For them who come from Serbia, Bosnia or Croatia this is good earning . . . They alternate per month or fortnight. (Mišo 76 years, male, taking care of his wife)
Current empirical evidence shows that with the changed status of neighbouring Croatia which became a full EU member in 2013, which allows for unobstructed migration between the countries, circular cross-border care migrations have been established. Two migrant care workers from Croatia are exchanged in a period from 2 weeks to 2 months in one household as live-in care workers. These kinds of cross-border care loops are extensively present also in neighbouring Austria and Italy, where eldercare policies prefer unregulated cash payments instead of public services (Triandafyllidou and Marchetti, 2013; Weicht, 2015).
Indeed, in this micro-region cross-border care loops are multidirectional and intensive. Unemployed and poor retired women from Slovenia daily commute to Austria and Italy to perform cleaning and caring work in households. Recently the media also reported about massive emigration of Slovenian nurses to Austria due to bad working conditions and low salaries in Slovenia. Unemployed women from Croatia migrate to Slovenia and Italy as live-in elder carers in middle-class households. Economically weak Slovenian elderly people migrate to border towns and villages in Croatia to become the residents of private eldercare institutions which are established exactly to target Slovenian users. Compared to Slovenian institutional services, Croatian family run small residental services are considerably cheaper (even by as much as 50 percent), but also of lower quality. This eldercare strategy is enabled by the economic differences of the two EU states, but also by their historical, cultural and language proximity. Dwelling in an eldercare institution in Croatia demands frequent cross-border care loops of different forms, for instance, for family visits, maintaining social networks and for medical care. Given that the elderly dwelling in Croatian elderly homes have their health insurance and permanent medical services in Slovenia, they often travel from Croatia back to Slovenia for health treatments. Those who need hospitalization have to temporarily return to Slovenia. On the other hand, as a standard rule Slovenian elderly homes also include health services, which means that the elderly who migrate into Croatia for affordable institutional care do not have equal access to health services due to their weak economic situation. Cross-border loops in eldercare are a relatively new phenomenon in Slovenia that has not yet gained research and policy recognizability, but has mainly drawn the attention of the media. Also, there are no official data as to how many Slovenian citizens live in elder homes in Croatia, because they are not registered in them; namely, if their permanent residence would be outside Slovenia, they would lose the right to assistance and attendance allowance.
Conclusion
Analysis of the systems of childcare and eldercare in Slovenia showed that from the aspect of egalitarianism and the needs for care mobilities, the situation in both fields of care is very different. The childcare system, which was formed in the 1970s within socialism, establishes a strong partnership in care for children between the state and the family. It is characterized by firm social rights of parents (length of parental leave and financial compensation), a high degree of defamilialization of care with the universal coverage of needs by the public network of preschools, including for children aged 1–3 years and quality working conditions to preschool teachers. As such, the Slovenian childcare system is different from the post-socialist model (see Czech Republic and Slovakia in this issue), where in transition, childcare systems have been reshaped in the direction of the corporative-conservative model with the extension of parental leave and a radical reduction in the number of public preschools. The Slovenian childcare system is close to the Nordic system of extensive public services and universal access, but is still different, because it does not support private care arrangements with cash-for-care allowances, women’s part-time work or employing au pairs. It can be observed that the Slovenian childcare system kept a uniquely socialist logic of egalitarianism supported by a strong public consensus that it represents a necessary condition of class and gender equality by enabling women’s participation in the labour market and providing childcare of the same quality for families in different socio-economic situations. Informal care markets are present in a very small range and migrant care workers are not present at all in childcare compared to many EU countries and compared to eldercare in Slovenia.
In contrast to childcare, the eldercare system complied much more with the post-socialist familialistic than with the Nordic public and egalitarian model of care. The high rate of actual familialization of eldercare is undoubtedly conditioned by reliance on the traditional pattern of informal family care both during socialism and in transitional Slovenia. The high poverty rate among the elderly and the absence of an integrated long-term care system, both typical for Eastern-European countries, also contribute to this situation. However, the comparison of childcare and eldercare systems also indicates that specific policy mechanisms or the lack thereof contribute to the high familialization and informalization of eldercare. Public/private networks remain insufficient in provision of both institutional and in-home services. Institutional services are insufficient, expensive and charged to the user or their family, which is why the poor elderly, and increasingly those from the middle class and their families, can have access to institutional care only if they pawn their real-estate. Cash payments that present a supplement to low pensions and a compensation for the lack of public services is very selective, too low considering the cost of formal services and completely unregulated. If the beneficiaries do not use it to cover their life costs or to balance the payment of public services, they redirect it to the providers of home-based care on grey care markets. In economically weak families the care needs are met either by familialization of care or by cross-border care loops, while well-off elderly people overcome the need for care mobility by buying live-in care services, including from migrant care workers on informal care markets. Unlike childcare, eldercare has not yet been recognized as an important issue of gender equality whether that is from the perspective of informal carers, of care workers or of users, even though the large majority in all three groups consists of women.
These two different kinds of logic of egalitarianism in care are related to different kinds of care loops and care mobilities. In childcare, needs for care mobilities are limited on daily care loops between different local sites of care: home, kindergarten (alternatively grandparents) and leisure activities. Because of the full-time dual-breadwinner working regime daily care loops are sometimes supported by local informal paid care workers and more often by intergenerational solidarity. On the other hand, care mobilities in eldercare are cross-border, multiple and intensive: due to poor working conditions and low wages, elderly people who hire migrant live-in care workers and those who migrate to the neighbouring Croatia for affordable institutional services are joined by caregivers and medical nurses as ‘daily care commuters’ to Italy and Austria.
The current system of eldercare is on the verge of a new reform that is promising to introduce a compulsory insurance for long-term care, and regulated and more generous cash payments along with more support for informal carers. In a few years, it will be possible to evaluate whether the new system will have stopped the negative trends of growing gender and economic inequalities and increasing cross-border care loops in eldercare.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Slovenian National Research Agency (ARRS, J6-6838, 2014 - 2017).