Welcome to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcasts.

In this podcast, we'll talk about care work and see what the EU could do to boost this important, yet often undervalued sector. Stay with us.

Care concerns us all. We and our loved ones will either need or provide care at some point in our lives.

And I'm not only talking about medical care. It's also about childcare and long-term care.

Everyone agrees that care workers are essential to meet society's increasing care needs.

But their work, whether paid or unpaid,

is systematically undervalued by society

and not always recognised as work.

And the bulk of it is provided by women.

Yes, it is.

According to the European Parliamentary Research Service,

nine in ten care workers are women,

which means that 11 out of the

12 million paid care workers in the EU are women. And about a quarter of them are migrants.

A more worrying fact, however, is that over half of care workers in home settings are undeclared.

We spoke to Christoph Bandage, senior labour mobility officer at the European

Labour Authority. In 2022, the European Labour Authority published a report on tackling

undeclared work in the personal and household services sector. The report showed that there

are millions of undeclared workers in the sector in the European Union.

This clearly illustrates the magnitude of the challenge.

The problem is bigger in home settings than in institutional ones,

but the risks for these workers are the same,

...