Coverage of care workers in national labor laws and policies: a comparative legal study of 10 countries
This comparative legal study of 10 countries reveals that while many national laws recognize protections for care workers, most fail to fully cover them, with only the United Kingdom meeting all four key indicators of access to protective equipment, anti-discrimination safeguards, unemployment insurance, and union rights.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Every day, millions of people perform the essential work of caring for others. They help the elderly bathe, assist children with their daily needs, and support patients recovering from illness in hospitals and private homes. This labor, whether paid or unpaid, forms the backbone of our health systems and the broader economy. Yet, despite being so vital, the people who do this work often lack the basic legal safety nets that protect other workers. While international agreements exist that promise safe working conditions, freedom from discrimination, and the right to join a union, these promises frequently fail to reach the very people who need them most. A major reason for this gap is that the law often does not even know who a "care worker" is. There is no single, agreed-upon definition in international or national law that clearly identifies this group, leaving them in a legal gray area where protections are assumed but rarely applied.
To understand how well the law actually protects these workers, a team of researchers from Georgetown University and the World Health Organization conducted a detailed legal investigation. They examined the national laws and policies of ten different countries, chosen to represent every major region of the world. The researchers did not look at how well the laws worked in practice or whether workers felt safe; instead, they read the actual text of the laws to see if they explicitly included care workers and if those laws met four specific standards. These standards were drawn from a global framework known as the Global Health and Care Worker Compact, which outlines what decent work should look like. The four standards were: guaranteed access to protective equipment like masks and gloves, protection against discrimination based on race, gender, or other factors, access to unemployment insurance if a worker loses their job, and the right to join an independent union to bargain for better conditions.
The researchers analyzed forty-three different laws and policies across these ten nations. They found that while many countries have laws that sound good on paper, a significant portion of them fail to cover care workers at all. In total, only 56 percent of the laws they reviewed fully or partially met the criteria for protecting care workers. The most striking finding was that the United Kingdom was the only country among the ten where the national laws met all four standards for care workers. In the other nine countries, the laws were often incomplete or excluded care workers entirely. For instance, some countries had strong laws against workplace discrimination, but those laws only applied to formal employees in specific sectors, leaving domestic helpers and home-based caregivers outside the protection. Similarly, several nations had unemployment insurance systems, but these were restricted to formal sector workers, meaning a care worker who lost their job in a private home would receive no support.
A critical discovery in the study was that the specific term "care worker" did not appear in the text of any binding national law in the ten countries examined. This absence is not a minor detail; it is a root cause of the problem. Because the law does not name them, care workers are often left out when rights are granted. The researchers found that even when a country had a law that technically met a standard, such as providing safety equipment, that law frequently excluded care workers from its scope. In some cases, laws explicitly mentioned domestic workers or informal workers, which the researchers interpreted as covering care workers, but in many other instances, the laws were silent on the issue. This silence effectively erases these workers from the legal system, denying them the safety and security that other professions enjoy.
The study also highlighted that the lack of protection is not limited to one type of economy or region. The researchers found gaps in laws across all income levels and geographic areas. While at least one country in each region had laws that covered care workers for at least one of the four standards, no other country besides the United Kingdom achieved full coverage across all areas. The findings suggest that while many governments have the legal frameworks to protect workers in principle, they have not extended those frameworks to the care economy. The researchers noted that their analysis was limited to the text of the laws available in English or translated into English, and they did not measure how well these laws are enforced on the ground. However, the clear pattern they identified is that without a specific legal definition and explicit inclusion, care workers remain vulnerable. The study concludes that to fix this, governments must move beyond general worker protections and create clear, inclusive laws that explicitly recognize care workers and guarantee them the same rights as everyone else.
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