Being dependent and an employer: private elderly employers in France
Résumé
This chapter focuses on elderly individual employers in France who need assistance to stay in their homes and employ caregivers, directly or through a proxy. This segment of the home-based care market appears problematic: how can one be dependent and employer at the same time? Is the growing labour regulation designed to organize this market, sufficient to provide a service and work condition of quality? Based on interviews with elderly individual employers in two French cities, this study interrogates the ways these employers appropriate their ‘freedom of choice’. Depending on their social status, their level of dependency and isolation, and the way they cope with administrative tasks, different types of accommodation between the caring logic of welfare and the liberal logic of markets emerge.