Confronting the low road in the care sector: Local strategies for addressing the care trilemma in Hungary and Slovakia

Despite its social importance, the care sector, particularly early childhood education and care (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC), faces a persistent ‘care trilemma’: balancing decent working conditions, public expenditure constraints, and broad service coverage. This paper examines strategies to address this trilemma in Hungary and Slovakia, where care provision follows a ‘low-road’ trajectory marked by underinvestment, poor job quality, and workforce shortages. The paper argues that institutional constraints, weak national coordination, and actor fragmentation limit systematic solutions. Instead, in the absence of cohesive national care policies, mitigation strategies emerge primarily at the local level. These initiatives often operate outside established bargaining structures and are driven by a fragmented actor landscape, including the emergence of new actors beyond formal industrial relations. These localised efforts provide important insights into potential pathways for reform. By highlighting the role of local actor interactions, the paper’s contribution lies in demonstrating how solutions may emerge in contexts where coordinated policies and bargaining failed to improve wages and working conditions in care.