Home care service providers in Brussels: time adjustments during COVID-19 and the consequences for frontline home care workers

Abstract

Home care service providers have been considerably affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Since the beginning of the pandemic, their internal organisation has undergone important changes, including in terms of time schedules, to adapt to the needs of the older population and those of workers. In most cases, they had to reduce the provision of services, either because care workers – the majority of whom are women – were no longer available to cover the shifts, or because families had cancelled the services. In other cases, they had to meet increased demand. The most dramatic consequences were borne by female care workers, who had to combine working time adjustments with family obligations. Drawing from the material collected before and after the impact of the pandemic in Belgium, which includes interviews with public and private home care providers, this article explores the consequences that time adjustments had on frontline care workers and on the organisations themselves.