State Policies Encouraging the Outsourcing of Personal and Household Labour in Germany: Familialism and Women’s Employment in Conservative Welfare States

Abstract

Since 1990, three sets of policy reforms have aimed to encourage households in Germany to employ domestic help or to purchase private household services. The motivations behind these policies, however, have only very recently been tied to supporting women’s employment or expanding market-based services for households. Until the 2000s, family policies in Germany assumed the availability of wives and mothers for unpaid domestic work, and tax credits for employing or purchasing household services were at first limited to well-off families with young children, and then to regularizing black-market labour in private households. The most recent set of reforms, passed between 2006 and 2008, mark a turning point in their focus on supporting the care needs of families and work-family balance. Nonetheless, the policies exhibit continuities in the traditional gendered division of labour in Germany, and have failed, so far, to regularize the supply of personal and household services, most of which, in domestic cleaning and eldercare work, remains informal. By analysing parliamentary debates and documents around each of the three major attempts to expand the demand and supply of personal and household services since the 1990s, we demonstrate the quite different political positions around the creation of tax credits and vouchers for personal and household services. Moreover, we show how each of the three waves of reform involved quite different conceptions of employment relations in personal and household services.