Employment and social dialogue in welfare services in the Netherlands

Characteristics of the labour market in the Netherlands are in a nutshell: high employment rates, low unemployment, fast increasing levels of education, fast demographical ageing in the workforce, and high persistent gender inequality in employment participation and (many small) part-time jobs among women. The Dutch ‘part-time economy’ is extremely visible in the care sectors.
The sector of ‘Health and social work’ is the sector with the highest growth of employment in the last two decades in the Netherlands. Together with the sector of trade, it is nowadays the sector with the highest number of workers (1.5 million). The vast majority of the care-workers are female, and therefore part-time jobs are widespread in the care sectors, with an average of just 24 hours a week. Since 2011, the category of ‘Professionals’ has become the largest occupational group, and educational levels have increased in the care sectors.
This report focuses on two care sectors: the childcare sector and the long-term care sector. The childcare sector (ECEC) is a private and commercial sector in the Netherlands, subsidized by public money (for disadvantaged families and through co-financing parents’ contributions) and regulated by statutory quality frameworks. The sector’s governance, funding, and provision of services are very fragmented (chapter 2). In the case of ECEC in the Netherlands, we see more clearly the negative effects of privatization since 2005 in the labour market and quality of work in the sector. Childcare centers face a qualitative mismatch in the labour market: they need more educators, but there is a lack of career and training opportunities in the sector for these workers. ECEC employers also have a bad public image due to low job security, low wages and social unrest in the sector (chapter 3, 4). The organisation of employers and collective bargaining in the ECEC sector are fragmentised and ‘yellow unions’ have penetrated the sector.
The long-term care sector (LTC) is a not-for profit sector, increasingly governed by principles of cost control and efficiency. Since 2007, homecare provision is regulated by instruments of public procurement at the level of municipalities. In 2015, a broader LTC-reform pushed further to decentralisation to municipalities, individual responsibility, more focus on non-residential care, and expenditure cuts (chapter 2). Since 2019, the government seems to have become more aware of the longer-standing disappointing performance of the earlier introduced market mechanisms in the Social Support Act with regard to the quality of services as well as the quality of jobs and working conditions in the homecare sector. Nevertheless, this system is not structurally changed. In the recent years the relations between the social partners in the LTC sectors have recovered from an impasse, leading to some improvements in collective agreements regarding wages and regulating working hours flexibility in the sector of nursing homes and homecare. Social partners in LTC cooperate together in combatting low wages, high workloads and labour scarcity.