Live-In Care After the Pandemic in Germany: Business as Usual after a Focusing Event

Senior care in Germany relies heavily on live-in care work provided by transnationally mobile workers in private households. The resulting transnational labour market (TLM) depends on private market intermediation companies (‘agencies’) placing workers from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in households in Germany. Most of these agencies circumvent regulations regarding working hours and wages, resulting in workers experiencing abnormally long hours, almost permanent (non-remunerated) on-call duty, short rest periods, and low wages. The Covid-19 pandemic was a ‘focusing event’ that had the potential to prompt German authorities to regulate this TLM. Despite pre-existing problems and increased media attention, policy reform did not occur. The paper investigates factors driving policy inaction affecting this TLM. Based on McCall and ’T Hart’s four-fold typology of drivers of policy inaction and analyses of the balance of power in welfare markets initiated by Jane Gingrich (Gingrich, 2011; Ledoux et al., 2021), we identify government- and network-driven factors of policy inaction. We encapsulate these factors using the innovative concept of 'market-driven formalisation', describing the way market actors embed previously informal practices into formal norms, rules, and institutions without additional regulation from the state. The formalised TLM becomes an indispensable pillar of a country’s ‘system-relevant’ infrastructure (here the German care regime), de facto providing essential goods or services similarly to the way welfare markets provide social services, but without the accompanying regulation, support and organisation by the state.