Reconciliation

Background: Finding a balance between care and personal needs is often challenging for individuals caring for a person with dementia. Objectives: The present study aimed to understand how primary and secondary family carers of people with dementia perceive the reconciliation of informal care and their personal life throughout the course of care. Methods: Narrative interviews with 14 carers (n=10 female, mean age: 48.79) from seven care networks were conducted. The interviews were analysed using the documentary method.

In this contribution, we investigate the relationships between paid and unpaid work in the lifeworlds of employed informal carers against the background of the Austrian long-term care regime. We pursue a twofold argument: On the one hand, we emphasize that combining paid and unpaid work currently poses serious difficulties for employed family carers in their everyday lives and impacts their current and future financial and social security.

Informal caring for adults with disabilities is a source of unacceptable disadvantage in employment, finances, social inclusion, and health; here termed the ‘care penalty’. This penalty can be appropriately tackled through equality law, making care a ground for unlawful discrimination. Carers are not adequately protected from indirectly discriminatory disadvantages by other grounds such as sex and disability. Nor are carers adequately protected by carer-specific provisions such as the UK right to request flexible working.