Informal care and employment in Upper Austria

FINDINGS

• Prevalence of informal carers: Depending on the data set used, it can be assumed that around 7.5% to 21.3% of the (Upper) Austrian population between the ages of 20 and 64 are informal caregivers. Broken down by employment status, 5.9% to 20.4% of employees, 9.6% to 37.2% of the self-employed and 8.8% to 19.3% of those registered as unemployed are family caregivers. Of the employed informal carers, 61.2% are women and 38.7% are men. Most (61.7%) have a secondary school certificate as their highest educational qualification.

• Difficulties to combine informal cargiving and gainful employment: Between 36% and half of employed carers have difficulties combining caring for relatives and gainful employment. 5.7% of informalcaregivers have already had to interrupt their employment for at least one month due to their care responsibilities. 6.7% of family caregivers have already had to reduce their working hours once for more than a month. In both cases, around two thirds of these are women.

• Informal carers, part-time work and unemployment: 9.4% of part-time employees overall and 11% of part-time employed women in Upper Austria do not work full-time due to caring for relatives. For 2.4% of unemployed persons in Upper Austria (4.2% of women), the end of their last employment relationship was related to caring for relatives. 5.4% of unemployed persons (6.5% of women) are not looking for work due to caring for relatives.

The results of the quantitative part of the study are supplemented and underpinned by the results of the qualitative part of the study:

• Even those informal carers who had already reduced their working hours faced immense challenges to combine care and work, not least due to their dependence on the individual understanding and concessions of employers and superiors.

• The interviewees emphasised that there is a lack of professional care and nursing services, that existing services are not affordable for everyone and that professional services often do not meet the needs of people in need of care or informal carers.

• Existing benefits and services for informal carers (e.g. leave options and financial benefits) can be an important form of support. Yet, there are various barriers to accessing benefits and services. Services and benefits are often based on too narrowly defined eligibility criteria or are not sufficiently generous in their scope (e.g. length of leave and amount of income replacement) to facilitate caring for relatives and the combination with gainful employment to a relevant extent.

• Furthermore, information on existing benefits and services is difficult to access, informal carers experience bureaucratic hurdles and defensive authorities when applying for services and benefits.

These results and good practice examples from Germany, Ireland and the UK served to propose a number of recommendations for policy and practice to enable informal carers to combine informal caregiving with employment. Results will be used by the Chamber of Labour for Upper Austria to develop future strategies and support mechanisms for informal carers in employment.