Abstract
In France, over the last thirty years, governments have implemented policies to respond to the demand for domestic work and home-based care services. These actions have been accompanied by the development of collective agreements covering domestic workers and carers, who are mainly women, often migrants and often in precarious employment. Generous subsidies to support the declaration of these workers have encouraged the formalisation of their status, in parallel to the development and extension of national collective agreements negotiated by trade unions and employers’ representatives. Some of the regulations that apply to these workers still differ from general employment law. This chapter shows how the institutional context in France has contributed to make this social dialogue inclusive and to encourage social partners to engage in collective negotiations, even if many domestic workers and carers remain in precarious situations.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the French National Research Agency (CNRS Research Project PROFAM, ANR-17-CE26-0019) and the PHS-Quality European Research Project (VS/2018/0041) for their support which made our research possible. We would also like to thank Johanna Kantola and Anna Elomäki for their advice and suggestions on the draft version of this chapter.
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Ledoux, C., Krupka, R. (2022). Negotiating in a Highly Feminised Sector: The French Domestic Work and Home-Based Care Sector. In: Elomäki, A., Kantola, J., Koskinen Sandberg, P. (eds) Social Partners and Gender Equality. Gender and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81178-5_4
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