Care work is essential work: an intersectional struggle for justice and liberation
Lina Mechbal is Policy and Advocacy Advisor at ENAR working on employment and intersectionality. With a background in political science and sociology, she brings expertise in intersectionality, feminist politics, gender equity, liberation movements, community-organizing and anti-racist advocacy.
Care work is essential work: an intersectional struggle for justice and liberation
Three weeks ago we celebrated another May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a day to center the working class and demand justice. Yet, some of the most essential labour remains invisible, undervalued, and excluded from mainstream labour rights discourses. Care work is a striking example of such oversight. This type of work – which includes both paid and unpaid domestic work, childcare, elder care, and emotional labour – is disproportionately carried out by women, most of them racialised, migrant, and working- class.
Many conversations around care work at EU level mention intersectionality. However, we must stress that understanding care through an intersectional lens – at the crossroads of race, gender, migration status, class and other social constructs – must be more than a theoretical exercise. It’s a political necessity. Intersectionality is a tool that allows us to understand how overlapping systems of oppression (colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy and their byproducts) shape the lives of care workers and why real justice requires dismantling those systems together.
Intersectionality has too often been used as a buzzword in policy when it must be a framework for action to change the lives of people for the better. Civil society, including ENAR, should play a key role in ensuring that policy reflects lived realities rather than reinforcing systemic gaps. In the context of care work, an intersectional approach reminds us that care is not just about empathy and compassion: it is political, it is labour, and it is an essential feminist contribution to society. Care should also be antiracist and should be centered on agency, dignity and justice by and for the women carrying it.
Racialised and gendered labour: the politics of invisibility
Care work reveals the intersecting inequalities embedded in our societies and economies. Essential to our societies, this type of work sustains families, communities and entire economies by enabling us to live and to work. Yet, under capitalist systems, care is systematically undervalued precisely because the dominant economic logic prioritises activities that generate direct profit, bestowing value through a framework shaped by market logic. Care, by contrast, is relational, long-term and often invisible – making it easier to dismiss as non-productive. Undervaluing care work is economically profitable. It allows States to cut social spending by outsourcing care responsibilities to families, and in turn, families to outsource that labour to underpaid workers – most often migrant and racialised women. The less care is recognised, regulated and compensated, the more it subsidises the rest of the economy. Feminist economics have long shown how unpaid and
low-paid care work is the hidden infrastructure of capitalist economies1 – keeping people healthy, children educated and the workforce functioning, all at minimal cost to employers and the State. When patriarchy intersects with colonialism in the context of capitalism, it unveils a system that casts women as more exploitable, as shown by data: racialised and migrant women are overrepresented in domestic and care sectors across Europe. In the EU, women represent 95% of domestic workers and 83% of professional home care providers.2 The links between race, gender and migration in the care sector are especially stark in countries like Italy, where over 80% of registered domestic workers are migrant workers, and France, where 28% of care workers are migrants.3
This is not a coincidence. It is the direct result of a racialised and gendered division of labour rooted in colonial legacies and neoliberal capitalist logics that frame certain bodies as more “naturally” suited for care – and thus more easily exploitable.
Whether through precarious contracts, low pay, lack of social protections, or undocumented status, these workers face structural racism and systemic barriers that push them further into the margins. This exploitation is exacerbated by chronic underinvestment in the care sector: in 2022, the EU’s average public expenditure on early childhood education and care was just 0,71% of GDP, with countries like Ireland investing as little as 0.14%. At the same time, unpaid care work, still overwhelmingly performed by women within households, remains essential to the functioning of societies and economies – yet invisible in GDP calculations and social policy.
As we reflect on the meaning of labour, we must confront a crucial question: whose work is made visible and valued – and whose continues to be erased from recognition, rights, and protections?
Colonial continuities: exploiting racialised labour in today’s Europe
In aging European societies, the demand for care is rising. But instead of focusing on strong, redistributive public care systems, EU policies and Member States’ governments rely on the cheap labour of racialised and/or working-class women from the Global South and Eastern Europe to fill the gaps, outsourcing care under exploitative conditions that echo colonial logics of extraction and servitude.
EU employment and migration policies, which often prioritise profit over human rights, are deeply entangled in these dynamics. By creating selective and restrictive pathways that value migrant workers for their economic utility while denying them rights and protections, the EU reproduces a system in which racialised women are instrumentalised to uphold care.
infrastructures for the whole society without being recognised or safeguarded within them. A clear example is the use of temporary migration schemes or bilateral labour agreements that allow third-country nationals to work in “low-skilled” fields, under highly precarious conditions. Italy’s regularisation processes in 2020 allowed undocumented migrants – primarily women from Easter Europe, Latin America and North Africa – to temporarily legalise their status only if employed in the agri-food or domestic and care sector.4 Such policies offered limited pathways (with complex and rigid criteria) to long-term residence or social protection, effectively tying immigration status to exploitative jobs and reinforcing racialised labour segmentation. These frameworks perpetuate colonial hierarchies through a neoliberal lens – where care work is devalued, racialised bodies are commodified, and profit is prioritised over dignity.
This results in a glaring omission in EU care and gender strategies, which continue to treat care as a policy silo rather than addressing the structural oppressions that shape it. Acknowledging the growing demand for care services, the Care Strategy fails to meaningfully address the legal precarity and exploitation of racialised migrant care workers, particularly those who are undocumented, ultimately lacking any meaningful analysis of how racism, migration policy, and vulnerabilities share care work in Europe. Racialised migrant care workers are left at the margins – seen as essential, yet structurally excluded from the rights, protections, and representation they should be receiving.
Meanwhile, the rise of far-right and anti-migrant rhetoric across Europe threatens to erode the few protections these workers have, starting with the most marginalised. We have already bore witness to this in policies that criminalise solidarity (e.g., Hungary’s 2018 “Stop Soros” law which criminalised organisations and individuals providing legal aid, information or basic support to undocumented migrants and asylum seekers5) and restrict support for migrants and vulnerable communities. Similar policies across the EU have aimed to curb humanitarian support, restrict funding to CSOs, and create a climate of fear around acts of solidarity.
These are not isolated events – they reflect a broader authoritarian and neoliberal shift in European policy, where vulnerability is policed and punished, and care is reframed as a private burden rather than a collective responsibility. This logic is becoming increasingly visible in the EU’ political priorities. As pointed out by ENAR’s Policy and Advocacy Officer on Climate Justice and Economic Justice in her analysis of the then leaked EU Strategic Agenda6, the current trajectory centres security, defence, and competitiveness – while social rights, protection and care for all are being deprioritised or suppressed.
altogether. In this context, the systemic exclusion of care workers is not a flaw or a failure, but a feature: a political choice to suppress justice, dignity and solidarity in the name of neoliberal efficiency.
Toward a Transformative Politics of Care
Recognising care work as political work allows us to center it on our economies and opens the door to rethinking labour, value, and justice altogether. To do this, we must shift from exploitative models that treat care as a commodity to feminist, anti-racist, and redistributive frameworks that centre dignity, equity, and liberation.
ENAR advocates for a radical approach to care work, one that acknowledges care as both an essential need and a fundamental right carried out by the most marginalised. This means pushing for:
- Regularisation of undocumented care workers
- Access to justice and safe complaint mechanisms against exploitation
- State responsibility in investing in priority and regulating quality care systems
- Recognition and remuneration of all forms of care work
- Redistribution of care responsibilities across gender and institutions
Care work should not be a private burden shouldered by women, especially the most marginalised. It should be a public good that is shared, valued, and a protected societal commitment.
Building solidarity through care
On May 1st, and throughout the year, we remember that solidarity is built not just through slogans, but through centering the most invisibilised. Intersectional justice starts with care, with recognising who cares, under what conditions, and at what cost.
Social justice is inseparable from gender and racial justice. We cannot advance one without addressing the others. EU policies cannot claim intersectionality as a concept without acknowledging its roots in Black feminist thought shaped by liberation movements.
Honouring care workers means going beyond symbolic gestures – it means building societies rooted in care, equity, and liberation for all.
building societies rooted in care, equity, and liberation for all.
Footnotes
- See Silvia Federici on the gap in Karl Marx’s understanding of capitalism in “Le Capital et le genre”,
- Le capitalisme patriarcal, La Fabrique, 2019.
- EIGE, Guaranteeing gender equality in the domestic work sector, 2021.
- PACE, Migrant domestic workers: from invisibility to decent work, 2019.
- PICUM, Italy: the 2020 regularisation scheme leaves many behind, Dec. 2021.
- The Guardian, Hungary passes anti-immigrant ‘Stop Soros’ laws, June 2018.
- 6 ENAR, Unpacking the leaked EU Strategic Agenda: Where did the Union of Equality go?, April 2024.
