Care work,‘caretariat’ and mobilisations as practices of ‘caretizenship’: Sociological considerations from the Portuguese case of an informal carers’ movement

The ‘caretariat’: A new labour subjectivity?

The act of naming has a constitutive power of social reality and group formation, of moulding shared representations of the world and is the object of symbolic struggles for the classification of reality (Bourdieu, 1987; 2021). Naming is a social operation, both epistemological and political. Without words to name a particular phenomenon, or a collective, it cannot be perceived autonomously. The emergence of the ‘informal carer’ category, a concept crossed by different and contradictory political, social and scientific uses (Cruz et al., 2023), should be analysed in this context. In Portugal, the term was essential to the collective awareness and political subjectivation that gave rise to the informal carers’ movement, which was particularly active between 2016 and 2019, and continues its intervention to this day. The concept of ‘informal carer’ should be seen as an emic term, appropriated by people who, by caring informally for children and young people with disabilities, the elderly or people with dementia, have come to self-identify and claim recognition for this activity and conceive of themselves as agents of change (Soeiro and Araújo, 2020).

Maria de los Ángeles Durán (2013) goes further and suggests adopting a neologism - the ‘caretariat’ - to name ‘a new social class emerging in developed countries’ as a result of ageing and also the development of welfare states, with an essential economic function but practically no rights (Durán, 2020). In her opinion, carers have ‘all the conditions that a social class theoretically needs in order to become a revolutionary social agent, except the awareness of being one’ (Durán, 2020: 4). The aim of her proposal is, therefore, to ‘end the consideration of carers as a dispersed conglomerate of individuals who care’, favouring, through a name with which they could identify themselves as a class, their conversion into ‘true social agents, aware of their role in the productive structure’ (Durán, 2020: 4).

To construct the concept of ‘caretariat’, Durán (2020) compares this alleged class with the proletariat and the peasantry. Like the proletariat, full-time carers do not own the means of production. But what is more, in the case of unpaid carers, they cannot even integrate into the labour market; they have longer working hours (potentially 24 h a day, 365 days a week, as the Portuguese informal carers said at the demonstrations), and they do not benefit from the rights inherent in formal salaried work (social protection, pension rights). Their lack of time inhibits them from accessing leisure, culture, sexuality or political participation. Still according to Durán (2020), there are other differences with the proletariat: the ‘caretariat’ lacks effective weapons of labour struggle, such as strikes, and does not have an obvious antagonist since they cannot ‘antagonise the people who receive their care work’, because this would go ‘against deep-rooted moral principles’ (of the responsibility to care as a family duty). The chance of finding an antagonist would only exist by shifting the responsibility for care onto the state, which is precisely what happened in the movement in Portugal when carers formulated their activity as ‘replacing the state’ and, therefore, ‘saving the state money’, as we read in the publication that is the epigraph to this article.

Unlike the proletariat, whose emergence is associated with a spatial concentration in industrial units, the ‘caretariat’ suffers, like the peasantry, from a spatial dispersion that weakens the processes of meeting and collective recognition. It also has another similarity with the peasantry: the existence of subclasses with ‘sometimes coinciding and sometimes opposing’ interests within it (as was the case with small landowners and rural wage earners). In the case of the ‘caretariat’, Durán argues, the division would be between unpaid informal carers and paid professional carers, with different moral justifications and ideological links to work, which can lead to fragmentation.

Durán's conceptual proposal is still being refined, as she recognises ³ (Batthyány, 2022: 290). For this reason too, its scope remains unclear. For the author, full-time unpaid informal carers would be ‘the conceptual core of care provision, not overlapping with other professional categories’, and would therefore constitute ‘the innovative conceptual reference as an element of distortion and incongruity in developed societies’ (Durán, 2020: 8). However, ‘although they are the sub-group of greatest conceptual interest, their numerical strength is relatively low, they are often of advanced age and have a low capacity to make demands’ (Durán, 2020), which is why the author prefers to incorporate part-time informal carers (i.e., those who combine unpaid care with a formal job in another area) into the concept, as well as ‘the small part of this group that carries out paid care work’, ‘often poorly paid’, ‘in the majority of cases migrants and women’. The defence of the inclusion of care professionals and part-time carers in the ‘caretariat’ stems from the following assessment: ‘if only full-time carers are included in the caretariat, the concept gains in clarity and consistency, but their numerical strength and the weight of their role in the social and political structure are so reduced that they are greatly weakened’ (Durán, 2020: 9).

From our perspective, Durán's contribution has the merit of drawing attention to a particularly invisibilised part of people who provide care work, and of subjecting informal carers to the same theoretical and political questions that have been asked of social classes, particularly by the Marxist paradigm. In other words, to identify their roles in the economic system, their relationship with the means of production, the mechanisms for creating a collective consciousness and their process of formation as a ‘group for itself’.

We disagree, however, that it is useful to include paid care workers in this concept - paid care workers, which, according to the ILO (2018), includes social support, cleaning, education and health workers, which extraordinarily broadens the concept and mischaracterises it. These care workers are similar to other salaried sectors, although they share with informal carers the type of tasks, their social devaluation and the gender hierarchies that underpin them. However, what differentiates the ‘caretariat’ and gives it its specificity seems to us to be not the tasks performed (similar to salaried carers), but the fact that informal carers have a different insertion into the capitalist system than employees (their work is unpaid!). It is this fact that marks their processes of subjectivation: they don’t have an employer who can be their antagonist and with whom they can negotiate wages; they don’t have trade unions; they don’t have the weapon of strike action; they are outside social protection systems and collective labour relations.

On the other hand, unpaid informal carers are, in familialist societies such as Portugal, the majority of carers and those who do so full-time are not small in number (in Portugal, there are an estimated 200,000, as mentioned above). Contrary to Durán's perception when she presented her proposal around a decade ago, a process of collective subjectivation of informal carers has been underway in recent years, as the Portuguese case shows. These carers too, and not just the paid ones, have acquired a collective consciousness and have become a social agent, demanding recognition for their work and overcoming an imaginary of family care as a purely interpersonal and individualised relationship. Moreover, attempts to include unpaid caregivers in a broader movement can be seen in the contemporary ‘women*'s strike movement’, namely in Argentina, United States, Spain, Switzerland or Iceland between 2016 and 2024 – and also in Portugal, since 2019. As highlighted by Artus (2024), this serves as an example of an intersectional mobilization, situated between unions and the feminist movement, where care struggles are considered a crucial connection between the fight against patriarchy and the fight against capitalism.

The informal carers’ movement as a practice of ‘caretizenship’

The 1st National Meeting of Informal Carers of Alzheimer's and Similar Dementias brought together 220 people in June 2016. It was an inaugural moment, where dozens of informal carers gave their testimony in front of their peers, who recognised each other's stories. From this meeting came a committee responsible for drafting a public petition addressed to the government and parliament, which was put online at the beginning of August 2016. This document summarised their demands in fourteen points, including: the creation of a Legal Statute to ‘socially and legally recognise the condition of caring’; social support; tax deductions; psychosocial support; training and counselling for those who care; mutual help groups and intervention teams; the strengthening of the National Long-Term Care Network; the carer's right to rest; the reduction of working hours to 50% of the working day, without loss of salary; the accounting of time dedicated to informal care to calculate retirement.

Between 2016 and 2019, informal carers organised numerous initiatives, using a diverse repertoire of struggle. They held a human cordon in front of Parliament (October 2016), two sit-ins (September 2017 and March 2018), a vigil (27 and 28 September 2018) and a joint action with the feminist movement to celebrate Women's Day (8 March 2019). They promoted the first national demonstration of informal carers (19 May 2019) in Lisbon, with around 150 people. They attended numerous public hearings at the Portuguese Parliament and were officially received by the President of the Republic (February 2019) and the Government (May 2019). Since then, they have organised annual national meetings (the ninth national meeting was held in 2024), as well as regional meetings in different cities. In June 2018, they set up the National Association of Informal Carers (ANCI), which has consolidated itself as the public and institutional interlocutor for this reality of unpaid work. In the period between the 1st National Meeting and the approval of the Statute of the Informal Carer, the carers skilfully took advantage of a ‘structure of political opportunities’ (McAdam, 1982) in which the Assembly of the Republic had no parliamentary majority (i.e., the government depended on agreements with parties on the left) and in which the President of the Republic decided to ‘sponsor’ the cause, contributing significantly to an apparent consensus on the need to recognise this reality. Since then, in addition to its regular mutual support and institutional advocacy activities, the National Association of Informal Carers has mobilised informal caregivers to participate in larger street demonstrations, notably on the 50th anniversary of the democratic revolution, celebrated on 25 April 2024, and in the May Day demonstrations organised by the main Portuguese trade union confederation. Moreover, a new petition to the Parliament was launched in January 2025 to amend the Statute of Informal Carers and labour legislation for carers, submitted with more than 9 thousand signatures at the end of June 2025, and which, at the time of writing, was still awaiting scheduling and debate.

Benefiting from the ‘novelty effect’, which made it possible to amplify the media impact of their actions, the group of petitioners and, later, the National Association of Informal Carers, has also been taking part in dozens of press, radio and television reports, as well as programmes (including general talk-shows and ‘entertainment’ programmes) in which, through biographical testimony, they removed informal care from the public invisibility to which it had been condemned.

Although the first political-legislative process was driven by a petition organised by informal carers of patients with Alzheimer's and other dementias, the demand for a Statute was quickly taken up by a myriad of other groups. These included groups of mothers and fathers of disabled children, groups of pensioners and older persons, and groups associated with specific pathologies (for example, the association of carers of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Despite the specificity of each approach and distinct concerns and experiences, the carers’ mobilisations unified them under a common identity and demands, reflected in the main slogans used at the gatherings, vigils and the demonstration: ‘What are we? Carers! What do we want? Dignity!’; ‘Justice for the status of the informal carer’; ‘Enough ignoring, carers exist’; ‘Informal carers work 24 h a day, 365 days a year! Respect!’; ‘Carers demand dignity! We want the Carers’ Statute approved’.

Where a view centred on the reproduction of social structures could only see factors of isolation, dispersion and conformist dispositions, the carers’ movement showed that the condition of informal carer was also an identity from which a collective consciousness of ‘caretariat’ could be built and a process of political mobilisation could take place. In this respect, the Portuguese case seems to be unique, since in other countries, carers’ movements are essentially led by professional carers (Hirata, 2021: 189; Lara et al., 2023). In Portugal, in a relatively short space of time (around three years), this sociologically improbable movement transformed experiences lived in isolation and often in a register of suffering into an identity of struggle and managed to achieve not only the ‘right to exist’ but also a centrality in public debate and a legal achievement, albeit with great limitations. In doing so, it has confronted Portuguese society with the demands of a ‘justice of care’ that implies an extension of existing public policies, but also the questioning of a familialist governance where there is a lack of universally accessible services capable of changing existing gendered orders.

In the diversity of its composition, the movement of informal carers has also revealed how an ‘ethic of care’ can be activated as a practice of resistance and contestation against the order that tends to atomise and privatise human existence. In this sense, it may be interesting to think of it as an expression of ‘caretizenship’. The term, which arose from a typo, was defended by Junco et al. (2004) as an alternative to citizenship. According to the authors, the liberal model of citizenship was built on the boundaries between public and private, which rendered the private sphere invisible; it was built on an individualistic and atomised conception of autonomy and of citizens as individual agents; on a conception of freedom with the market as its referent. For this reason, the rights of citizens in the public sphere have historically required the concealment of women in the private sphere. The fight to recognise care work would challenge these forms of exclusion, invisibility and the establishment of boundaries, pointing to an alternative model of recognition based on interdependence, mutual care, non-hierarchy and egalitarian relationships (Junco et al., 2004).

It seems to us that the reframing of informal care not as a family duty resulting from an ‘affective gift’, but as unpaid work that makes up for the lack of public provision of care, questions the inequality of the prevailing familialist regime of care and the conceptions of citizenship that underlie it, which are hierarchical, reproduce class inequalities in access and strong gender asymmetries in the distribution of care. When informal carers say that ‘We're not people, we're labour at zero cost to the state’ (in Frazão, 2024), they are basically warning of the absence, in the current citizenship model, of a true ‘caretizenship’ that recognises this invisible work. At the same time, the self-organisation of informal carers, combining political demands directed at the State and prefigurative practices of solidarity, collective care and mutual support also demonstrate the political potential of care. The self-organization of carers, the mutual support structures and peer networks, the advocacy that arises from lived experience, the informal care opposed to commodified systems can be seen as having a connection with do-it-yourself movements and a ‘politics of structural care’ that is being articulated by several movements around the world, from grassroots activist mothers to abolitionist antiracism movements such as Black Lives Matter, fighting for a world where ‘everyone can care, and where everyone matters’ (Ticktin, 2024: 69)

Public policies, between recognition of care work and familialist regimes of expropriation

The care regime in Portugal combines the family, the state, the market and civil society in a particular configuration of familialisms, which is culturally implicit, but also explicitly prescribed by law and supported by the state in a highly selective way (Saraceno, 2016; Soeiro, 2023). Particularly noteworthy is the familialist slant and the weight of informal provision; the overwork of women and the impoverishment of those who provide informal care; the scarcity of formal care on offer, the low level of public investment and the consequent limits on access to social responses; the relegation of care to the realm of solidarity rather than rights; the predominance of the private non-profit sector in formal care and a logic of externalisation on the part of the state in the provision of care for dependent people (Canha, 2022; Dias and Lopes, 2016; Ferreira and Monteiro, 2015; Moreira, 2020; Silva, 2002; Soeiro, 2022).

The Statute of the Informal Carer, approved in 2019, had great symbolic importance, but its effects on adequate recognition and support have been limited. The law provided for the existence of a reference health professional to advise, support, empower and train the informal carer; a ‘specific intervention plan for the carer’; participation in support groups; psychosocial support; temporary care for the carer for up to 30 days a year; a student worker status for informal carers; an allowance paid to carers, depending on household income; access to a voluntary social security scheme; the possibility of accessing long-term unemployed status after the time spent providing care, if the period of care is equal to or greater than 25 months (Law no. ° 100/2019; cf Gil, 2023). Labour measures were subsequently enshrined in the revision of the Labour Code in 2023, including a parental leave scheme, a teleworking scheme, carer's leave (five unpaid days per year, with ten days’ notice to the employer); flexible working hours and part-time work for up to four years; and legal protection against discrimination and in the event of dismissal (Law no. 13/2023).

In the negotiation between the different perspectives of the political parties and the government, the law seems to have prevailed as a kind of recognition of a partnership between informal care and the state, failing, on the one hand, to concretise alternative ways of responding to the family and, on the other, to tackle the dimension of gender inequality (Araújo and Soeiro, 2021; Canha, 2022). In this sense, the Statute confirms the familialist logic and may even perpetuate gender inequalities and the traditional division of roles: this is a risk identified when financial support measures for families do not specifically address gender inequalities (Canha, 2022; Pfau-Effinger, 2012). In essence, the Statute maintained the premise that informal care relates to the family sphere, which can be seen in the exclusion of neighbours that care, who do not live at the same tax address as the cared person. The cohabitation requirement has led many carers to abandon the recognition process (Gil, 2023).

In August 2024, there were 15.263 informal carers recognised by the Statute (84,4% women) and, of these, only 5.401 unpaid carers received the social benefit (carer's support allowance), the average value of which was then 351.94 euros (ISS, 2024). This figure contrasts sharply with the estimate of around 200,000 full-time unpaid informal carers. The ‘means test’ required to access the benefit has contributed to many carers being refused the allowance (CAMAI, 2021). This selectivity criterion based on income has limited the access of thousands of carers to the allowance, which only applies to situations of poverty (monthly household income cannot exceed 662 euros, in 2024), thus distorting the principle for which it was created (Gil, 2023; ISS, 2024). Furthermore, the allowance cannot be paid to those receiving an old-age pension, which excludes thousands of retired informal carers.

The Statute can thus be considered an ambivalent instrument of recognition, resulting from the combination of several conflicting political orientations. On the one hand, it recognised the existence of care work, via a specific policy and a set of support measures. On the other hand, the criteria for this recognition are the family bond between the carer and the cared-for person or cohabitation. Thus, the legal status given to care is combined with the reiteration of ‘family solidarity’ or intergenerational solidarity as a social duty. The conditionality of the carer support allowance (through the assessment of household resources and the formula for calculating the amount paid to the carer) has limited the scope of financial support. It means that rather than compensation for unpaid work, the allowance is a benefit to combat poverty, a far cry from the national minimum wage, which is the level claimed by the National Association of Informal Carers.

In a tension between a policy for informal care that would involve an attempt to regulate an activity recognised as work; and another that would conceive of care policy as a family support policy; and yet another that would fit it into policies to combat poverty, it is possible to understand the Statute as inhabiting the space of the ‘border struggles’ mentioned by Fraser (2022). Indeed, the legal framework, legal protection and recognition of care in public policies challenge established categories, firstly about what is and is not work, but also the divisions between the contributory and non-contributory Social Security system, between the family solidarity subsystem and poverty eradication. It also challenges the conditions for true ‘caretizenship’ (Casas-Cortés, 2019; Junco et al., 2004), i.e., broad citizenship that takes informal care work, and not just paid employment, as a platform for access to rights and protections, while at the same time critically confronting the risks of this recognition contributing to the reproduction of a profoundly unequal gender order. Essentially, it is a matter of considering how to articulate public responses, self-organisation of collective care, and transformation of the gender order that feminises care and renders it invisible. The Portuguese experience helps us to understand the paradoxical position of informal care discussed by Peterie and Broom (2024) and the difficulties of caretizenship.

Provisional guidelines to think about mobilisations around care

Based on our case study, and seeking to use it as a subject for a theoretical reconstruction, we advocate the adoption of four guidelines for thinking about practices and mobilisations around care.

Firstly, in the wake of Dalla Costa and James (1972), of Graeber (2014), or Hirata (2021), reinventing our imaginary of work, giving centrality to all the people whose work is ‘taking care of other human beings, plants and animals’, of activities whose purpose is to maintain life and whose aim is to maintain and increase the wellbeing and freedom of others, and not just to produce goods for consumption. In essence, as we have insisted, de-commodifyng and de-androcentrate our working-class representation.

Secondly, in the wake of Fraser (2022) recognising that labour struggles are not only carried out in spaces of market production. Domestic work, care work, emotional and affective work, the production of new generations of workers, and the work of maintaining social relations take place outside the market, but they are a precondition for the production of commodities. As Fraser (2022) explains, capitalism is not just an economic system but a broad ‘social order’ that depends on the non-market sphere. The struggles of informal carers are, therefore, not struggles ‘outside’ capitalism but are rather ‘border struggles’ both over what work is and around distinct ontologies of social practices that coexist in capitalist societies.

Thirdly, the challenge posed by the mobilisations of informal carers concerns not only the perimeters of work but also the freedom of the subject. Nakano Glen (2012) explains that the expropriation of care work involves multiple forms of coercion, ranging from moral persuasion to legal doctrines and legal duties, from internalised feelings to external constraints. The struggles of unpaid carers, insofar as they take place around semi-forced labour (Araújo and Soeiro, 2021), challenge the struggles for the emancipation of all labour.

Fourthly, it is important to think informal care not only from this political economy but also from its moral economy (Peterie and Broom, 2024), i.e., the ambivalent and contradictory forms of caring feelings and affective states that can originate and legitimise coercive relations and social injustice, but also forms of love, of knowing, of acting, and of relating that can create revolutionary political platforms and prefigurative practices of solidarity and joy (Ticktin, 2024)