Family Supports and Insecure Work: The Politics of Household Service Employment in Conservative Welfare Regimes

In the 2000s Austrian and German lawmakers introduced policies encouraging families to outsource domestic work to support employment of wives and mothers. These departures from a male breadwinner model however, pegged supports to the use of marginal part-time contracts for domestic workers. Thus family support policies positioned domestic laborers in low-wage jobs, rendering them dependent on spouses for livelihoods and social protections. Moreover, family support policies failed to recognize patterns of migrant employment in private households. By creating insecure forms of work, family support policies have deepened inequalities between women on the basis of class and migration status.