Veronica Nilsson:“A commitment made by representatives of 40 national governments will not on its own end the global healthcare workforce crisis. But ministers and officials have made that positive commitment and we should hold them to account and work with them to achieve [...]Read the full article
“The work of a caregiver is no joke. We make all other work possible, and we work not only with our hands but with our hearts, because the people under our care also deserve love, respect and dignity.”Read the full article
“Everywhere I go within care and speak to our members, they ask us, why can NHS staff negotiate their pay on a national level, but we can’t? The care workforce is bigger than that of the NHS, and the skill sets are very similar. Collective bargaining is the first level of investment we would [...]Read the full article
The success of the far right in Argentina “cannot be separated from a critical political and economic situation [with galloping inflation] that makes you feel like your income is losing value from one minute to the next. It’s a daily battle through the economy, which causes tremendous [...]Read the full article
“In addition to being a health crisis, the pandemic has resulted in a global restructuring of our living and working conditions,” says Chilean psychologist Alondra Carrillo, former spokesperson for the Coordinadora Feminista 8M and member of the Constitutional Convention of [...]Read the full article
Jesús A. Núñez Villaverde:Global military spending has continued to rise for the eighth year in a row. Seen from a traditional state security perspective – which generally assumes that more weapons means more security – this could be interpreted as good news. But is [...]Read the full article
As rural areas increasingly empty out, communities are left with fewer and fewer resources, whether public or private, to address dependency and loneliness. Elderly inhabitants are forced to choose between living alone or spending the final stage of their lives in a nursing home far from their [...]Read the full article
Tuscany Bell:“Long-term care facilities are subsidised to a large extent by public money. When financial risks aimed solely at increasing profitability do not pay off, it is the state which must ultimately step in to ensure the welfare of care recipients, once again from the public [...]Read the full article
Workers and trade unions have long argued that the management of dependency care – like health and education – should be public. They argue that as public sector employees, not only would their working conditions improve but so too would the care they [...]Read the full article
The Indian trade union SEWA has created childcare cooperatives and a home-based elderly care service that are boosting the economic participation of women care workers by solving their own caregiving needs.Read the full article
Experts have applauded the Canadian government’s decision to move toward a universal childcare system, but are also warning that it will exacerbate geographic disparities and create long waiting lists for subsidised childcare.Read the full article
“Rather than universal systems of care, what we have is a chain of precariousness, with some women paying other women what they can to care for their children.”Read the full article
Despite increasingly trying to gain recognition as a profession, the sector is still largely embedded in the informal economy and many of its workers are undocumented migrant women. Could regulation of the sector open up new avenues for legal [...]Read the full article
It is estimated that there are 12 million refugees with disabilities around the world. At higher risk of violence, exploitation and abuse, they are among the most vulnerable groups of refugees.Read the full article
While workplace childcare policies are relatively new in Bolivia, the country is making progress, for example by promoting breastfeeding rooms and day-care facilities. However, such policies are of little use when employers fail to respect labour [...]Read the full article
Jan Willem Goudriaan :Organising care on a not-for-profit basis is good for society, good for taxpayers, good for people who need care and support, and good for care workers.Read the full article
As the ageing of the world’s population accelerates, what of the older people on the move within its fastest ageing region, Latin America?Read the full article
Christy Hoffman:The broken global long-term care system can be repaired, and worker power is a fundamental part of the solution. The pandemic has proven this.Read the full article
With songs, TV series, books and podcasts, creators from all over the world are giving visibility and generating debate around anxiety, depression and even suicide. A taboo subject until recently, the pandemic has placed mental health front and centre in the global [...]Read the full article
Home healthcare is a fast-growing sector in the United States, with a large percentage of women, minority and immigrant workers. However, the appreciation for such essential labour during the Covid-19 pandemic has not translated into acceptable pay and conditions, with many workers unable to [...]Read the full article
a cross-party alliance of Members of the European Parliament:Collective bargaining is essential. It’s time we ensured essential workers benefitted from it. We join over 100 MEPs across party lines to call for companies to only be awarded public contracts if they have implemented collective agreements. Here’s [...]Read the full article
A report by Alzheimer Europe estimates that around 1.3 million people in Italy suffer from dementia. If ageing trends continue at their current pace, this figure could double by 2050. The country faces a major challenge in providing care for this growing number of [...]Read the full article
Owen Tudor:Ten years ago, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted Convention 189 and Recommendation 201 on the rights of domestic workers. Since that ground-breaking step, 35 countries around the world have ratified C189, but only seven of them are in the Commonwealth, which covers a third of [...]Read the full article
Rachel Moussié :“Understanding how some workers face overlapping systems of discrimination will be key to finding effective Covid-19 response measures.”Read the full article
Manuella Libardi:Given the amount of research that shows how ineffective punitive laws are in curbing the number of abortions women carry out, it is difficult to imagine any other reason that they exist, other than to keep women out of the workforce and in [...]Read the full article
In order to better support migrant workers – both those from Zimbabwe living and working abroad and those from other countries living and working in Zimbabwe – the government of Zimbabwe launched its inaugural National Labour Migration Policy (NLMP) in June this [...]Read the full article
The pandemic has highlighted the crucial social role played by migrant domestic workers in Italy, yet the state continues to discriminate against them and to deprive them of adequate protection. The plight of those working without papers – the majority – is even [...]Read the full article
The land-locked country of Paraguay, located in the geographic heart of South America, has the continent’s lowest Covid vaccination rate and one of its worst health systems. Fed up, Paraguayans have taken to the streets in numbers rarely seen over the last [...]Read the full article
Elderly dependants have been hard hit by recent blows to the Lebanese economy. They feel abandoned by the state and are having to turn to charity to survive. Even before the recent crises, the country’s public health and social services were hugely lacking and care for the elderly was almost [...]Read the full article
Nicolás Sartorius:This health, economic and social pandemic has shown the need for strengthened welfare states, and the political risks associated with weakening them, as well the need to build welfare states where they do not exist in order to avoid permanent conflicts and the crisis of dislocated [...]Read the full article
The worst dictatorship in the world could never even dream of having a mechanism that would allow it to get into people’s subconscious, and what’s worse is that it’s in the hands of private companies that sell their services.Read the full article