The Més que cures association is the winner of the latest edition of Camino de la Solidez, a Barcelona Activa program that wants to accompany and strengthen Social and Solidarity Economy organizations, either managed and led by women, or who want to bet to train workers in positions of responsibility. Més que cures provide a home care and home work service of proximity and quality to the elderly and children, through the dignity of the care and home work sector. We interview Julie Marquiset, project companion.
In what context and why did the Més que cures project emerge?
We are a project that is structured thanks to the support of the Cooperasec Association: the Cooperasec network was born in 2011 as a working group that emerged from people linked to the Poble Sec neighborhood assembly and with the aim of promoting change towards the solidarity economy and cooperativism, at the local and community level.
Més que cures we respond to the needs identified on the occasion of the 2016 neighborhood diagnosis, which was promoted with the intention of strengthening the network of existing proposals and helping to promote social entrepreneurship actions.
As a result of this community work, the creation of instruments of the Social and Solidarity Economy that puts care at the center of the community, which promotes the central recognition of care, has been identified as an axis to prioritize in the coming years: creating instruments that favor the symbolic valuation of care with a guarantee of universal access to quality care from the singularity for all and with the provision that a dignified cure is not carried out at the expense of the rights of any other person.
Més que cures we are one of these instruments: an association that groups together domestic workers or caregivers and people who consume services, who are associated to give and receive a quality service through decent employment contracts.
How many people are part of the project today? What is the main profile?
We are currently 11 women involved in the project as working partners. The majority profile are migrant women who have been able to dignify their work as domestic workers and caregivers. Some have also been able to regularize their administrative situation thanks to a hiring of Més que cures. A group of 5 of us is involved in the management of economic activity and the community aspect and is growing professionally developing tasks such as labor, administrative and economic management.
What kind of services do you offer?
Més que cures we are an association approved by the Generalitat de Catalunya. We are women experts in the care and well-being of fragile and dependent people. We offer services to facilitate conciliation and guarantee quality care for people who need it: care and support for the elderly and dependents; babysitting and childcare spaces for events to facilitate family participation; cleaning houses, farms, shops and offices.
We also start community projects, such as the Care Corner or the Mapping of the care network of the Poble Sec neighborhood: we want to offer spaces for recognition, training and networking of women caregivers in Poble Sec.
How do you understand care work?
We fight for dignified care, respectful of people and the environment, recognized and central. We put people at the center, the person always cared for with respect to their wills and abilities, promoting their autonomy; the family that needs to take care of a new situation of dependency and needs support; the hard-working person, because their well-being also counts: as it is a self-managed project, the working members of Més que cures have a voice in all the strategic and operational decisions of the association. We also take care of those we care for: we guarantee our social and labor rights, we take over and become entangled as partners in our project.
One of its objectives is to offer decent working and economic conditions to its workers.
What differences in coverage and rights do you find within your project that are impossible in the conventional job market?
The sector is highly precarious and there is a situation of institutionalized discrimination, through Royal Decree 1620/2011. This specific labor regulation creates a special social security regime that makes equality of labor and social rights impossible and allows lower wages than those established in the Home Care Labor Agreement. People hired with this special scheme (which really allows the costs to be lowered for families who need home services, where we would highlight above all the absence of public resources to help them) do not have the right to unemployment, they face disadvantages in the system retirement, they have no protection against unfair dismissal, among others.
It turns out to be a job with high emotional exhaustion, which represents an occupational risk and an unmet need for accompaniment and supervision, aggravated by social isolation.
Our project wants to break this chain, allowing the work of the home and care to be a decent, qualified and recognized job: we make contracts with the general social security regime, we ensure the right to unemployment, to a dignified retirement, the right to vacations and substitutions, and improvements in remuneration following the labor agreement of the sector.
Why do you think the care sector is so precarious? What social and economic factors influence?
Household workers and professional caregivers, of elderly and dependent people and also of children are essentially migrant women who choose this sector to survive in a racist, heteropatriarchal and capitalist society, which puts productivity at the center and ignores its reproductive base . The precarious situation of migrant women in their migration process facilitates their exploitation by the so-called host society and is related to specific problems of the status of migrant person and the effects of the Aliens Act 4/2000. In this sense, we consider that in the field of domestic work and care, it is important to contextualize the migratory fact, given the existence of the phenomenon of global care chains.
In the family sphere it is also mostly women who take care of, those who reduce their working hours or abandon work (and economic autonomy) to take care of their children or their dependent relatives. Historically, it is women who have assumed these invisible and gratuitous tasks that are care, essential tasks and yet devalued by capitalist and heteropatriarchal society.
Do you think this could change after the social and health crisis that we have experienced and that has revealed our fragility?
The recent experience of the Covid19 health crisis reveals the profound crisis that the current aging model is going through, residences for the elderly and care for dependency. Women have suffered a lot and continue to suffer from this crisis: overburdened by care tasks without the possibility of reconciling work and family, on the front line in the face of the pandemic as they are numerous in the social and healthcare sector, unprotected by the aforementioned legislation.
In the dignified care sector, we offer services of human and professional quality, and we contribute on a daily basis to mitigating loneliness, isolation, anguish and stress for caregivers and cared for. The raison d’être of our project is precisely to create an alternative model that provides well-being and quality of life to users, workers and families.