Shining the light on Family Carers

Programme: COFACE Seminar on Reconciling Work and Care responsibilities: a challenge for family carers in Europe

We organised this event at the European Parliament on 26th June to highlight the work of ordinary people who are selflessly performing extraordinary tasks behind closed doors, often risking their own health and their own happiness. We want to trigger a holistic policy response, urge Member States to stop cutting funds which is detrimental to the quality of care, and instead invest in structures and services that would enable a real freedom of choice for reconciling care and working life. 80 % of care hours are provided by informal (family) carers free of charge. But these hours spent caring for family members is also time away from paid jobs, social inclusion and pension rights.

The event was co-organised by COFACE and EUROCARERS. Frank Goodwin, Secretary of Eurocarers raised some very important key issues during the second panel of the conference.

As MEP Marian Harkin put it very well in her introductory speech opening our conference, "what we were talking about during the event is people’s lives”. She also told the audience, that carers form the glue that holds societies together, and they are an invisible force that works behind the closed doors of their homes. Even though our society couldn’t function without carers, there are no real public policies addressing the issue and the situation of carers and this is why we need events such as the one we organised jointly, to achieve a shift in the collective thinking and address the issues of isolation, of health risks, of lack of social security and pensions.

Annemie Drieskens, President of COFACE highlighted, that "even in countries where traditional conceptions about the role of women as carers and the men as breadwinners are no longer common we often see that women still spend more time than men in caring for others”. As the conference was especially looking at reconciling the care responsibilities with work commitments, the spotlight was especially directed at women.

We gathered fantastic speakers from very different backgrounds for the conference.

We heard from the European Commission, represented by Patricia Pedelabat, who focused her presentation mostly on the Commission’s staff working document on household services.

The President of COFACE Disability Chantal Bruno gave a very powerful presentation conveying the everyday challenges and suffering of family carers. Her presentation was followed by Céline Simonin, who presented the Grundtvig Partnership: "Self-assessment of their needs by Family Carers: The pathway to support”. She especially highlighted the recommendations to the EU level policy makers. This presentation was followed by an official handover of the recommendations to MEP Marian Harkin, who is the President of the Carers interest group in the European Parliament.



We also heard from Valentina Caimi of the Social Platform and Maciej Kucharczyk of AGE Platform, expanding the current policy context, the main challenges and also what is needed from both the EU level and member States.

Nicholas Crook, member of the EESC, as well as working for UNISON, the biggest Union in Britain and the EU for people working in the public and especially health service highlighted the many challenges of the professional care sector, which has direct implications for the informal and family carers. One of the main issues is that the care profession is so undervalued and underpaid, that even the professionals lack recognition, it makes achieving recognition for the family carers even harder.

Robert Anderson of Eurofound gave some very useful, pragmatic examples of how some companies are enabling their employees to balance their care responsibilities. He also stressed a very important fact, that there will be more and more people needing care, and less and less people able to provide the care.

This means, that in current trends, already many countries are unable to fill the skills gap with their own national workforce, highlighted Antje Gerstein, of the German BDA, and these countries will need to rely on immigrant workforce to provide the care services needed.

In conclusion the outlook is quite grim, unless we are able to find reconciliation measures both on individual levels between the employers and their employees, as well as starting a larger scale structural discussion on how to adapt the existing systems to the challenges of the ageing population and declining birth rates, longer life expectancies and declining economies.