Care workers: trends and challenges of the long-term care labour market across Europe

This chapter is focused on the most critical aspects of the LTC labour market: labour shortage and the strong pay penalty suffered by care workers. Prior explanations of the labour shortage and relative wages of care occupations have stressed individual, relational, and economic factors. In this contribution, I add a complementary interpretation based on the relevance of the institutional setting to explain also variation across countries. To develop this argument, first I discuss the relevant literature about labour shortage and pay penalty. Then the social and ethnic profile of LTC workers, their professional qualification, entry requirements, wage levels, working hours, and employment security, are reconstructed based on available data and information. Trends and cross-country variations are also investigated. Finally, the conclusions sum up the main results and discuss their implications to capture the main reasons why labour shortage and the pay penalty are so diffuse across the LTC sector.