ERSTE FoundationFellowship for Social Research

Labour Market and Employment in Central and Eastern Europe

2013–2014

Child minders in Bucharest: a shadowed category between law, employment and social normsIonela B!lu"!Anca Dohotariu

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Child minders in Bucharest: a shadowed category

between law, employment and social norms1

Ionela BĂLUȚĂ, Anca DOHOTARIU

Child minding in Romania seems to be a “recent” practice which developed

after the fall of the communist regime. Before the 90s, parental leave was in fact only

a maternal leave of 3 months (after which mothers had to return to their workplaces)

and the age for retirement was 55 for women and 57 for men2. According to the

former communist ideology childcare had to be undertaken by public institutions (i.e.

the public system of nurseries and kindergartens). Thus, at the end of 1989 there were

840 public nurseries and 12599 public kindergartens (INS). However, the number of

nurseries was insufficient for a population of over 20 million people, even when

compared to other communist countries in the region (Heinen & Wator, 2006).

Without being able to rely on any research in this field, but considering testimonies

collected (Rostás & Văcărescu, 2008) or discussions with various social actors and

stakeholders, one can say that child care was provided by the family structure if

places in nurseries were not available.

Child minding existed mostly in urban areas but it was not really a common

practice. After the 90s, most of the “communist” nurseries were closed, and those

who continued to exist don’t offer acceptable conditions to take care of small children

(the quality of the public nurseries is often very low, while the private nurseries and

kindergartens are very expensive). Especially after 2011 when the parental leave law

changed again, mothers who’s income is above a certain level prefer go back to work

after the first year of the birth of their child. These mothers have four options: to ask

their mothers or extended family’s help; to leave their children in public nurseries (but

there are insufficient places and the conditions are not very good); to leave their

children in private nurseries or to pay child minders to take care of their children at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!This research project was developed within the ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research 2013. 2!Nowadays the age for retirement is 63 for women and 65 for men (see the Law 263/16.12.2010 regarding the Romanian system for pensions: http://www.cdep.ro/pls/legis/legis_pck.htp_act?ida=100655, last consulted on December 12, 2013. !

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home, or a combination of the last two options. With the liberalization of the labour

market child minding has been developed within the growing black market as a

specific service of “care”. Nowadays, various sectors of Romanian society (the

wealthy but also middle class families) use child minder’s services. This has led to

child minding becoming an important part of the black market workforce. Starting

from an exploration of the legislative framework and of the social representations

regarding child minding, our preliminary observation is the following: while at the

micro and mezzo levels child minders seem to be accepted social actors playing an

important role in the process of childcare up to the age of three, at the macro level

child minders are “invisible” within the legislative framework and the public policies

system.

Although there is a social demand for child care services (at least in some

socio-professional categories) child-minders are not seen as a public policy providers

of childcare as there is no legal framework or for this “profession”. Hence, to a

macro-level, our research question is: what exactly within the legal framework, public

policy and gender welfare regime in Romania (gendered and family norms)

contributes to the “invisibility” of this social and professional category? Why is there

still no law concerning work as a child-minder? What is the significance of this

absence? Considering the public and political discourse, what is the exact impact of

this absence of law regarding child minding and how does this affect the lives of the

child minders? Beyond the importance of the legal and political framework, the

analysis of the micro social level is indispensable for understanding social practices,

the needs as well as the strategies developed by social actors. What exactly are the

answers and representations of the social actors? Who are these women who choose

to work as child-minders? How do they describe themselves and the work they do?

Why do they choose to work with or without a contract? What are their whishes

regarding the legal aspects of their work and why would they not want to choose

contractual work?

In the first part of our paper, we propose building a theoretical and analytical

model to capture the complexity of the subject and the specificities of the Romanian

context. Our working hypothesis and research methodology will be discussed further.

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Theoretical and methodological framework

Child minders are a distinct socio-professional category for several specific

reasons: 1) they work at the intersection of the private and public spheres, and their

job is considered a “labour of love”; 2) furthermore, they work at the intersection of

leave policies, family policies, ECEC (childhood education and care services) and

gender equality policies. On the one hand, their job depends on the structure of the

labour market as well as on the social demands that might push this type of childcare

activity from informal unpaid family care to a recognised professional category. On

the other hand, public provisions and infrastructure as well as the social

representations and values play an essential role in shaping childcare options.

Therefore, our theoretical framework brings together all of these dimensions.

Although this option is more difficult, as it requires a multidisciplinary approach, we

believe that it is vital to fully understand the diversity and complexity of the factors

that explain the invisibility and marginalisation of this profession within post

communist Romanian society. Furthermore, this subject is virtually absent within the

Romanian social sciences literature: the only work conducted in this field is the PhD

thesis of Borbála Kovács (her research focuses primarily on a typological study).

The theoretical tools we chose to use in our analysis combine childcare

concepts, leave and family policies analysis as well as the regulation of the position of

child carers in the labour market. At the same time, these tools have to consider the

social representations and values that define parenthood as well as the best interests of

the child. Beyond these dimensions, gender roles are fundamental in the

understanding of the way that families organize childcare. Therefore, child minding is

a category which depends on the social configurations of the society as a whole and

which is crossed by several social dynamics:

„The relationship between employment, care and gender is still contentious,

going to the heart of beliefs about childhood and parenthood, men’s and

women’s roles” (Kamerman & Moss, 2011: 5).

In order to understand the “work” of child minders, first we have to analyse

the idea of “care” (the way it is understood at the societal level). From this we can

analyse the interdependence between care and work. As it has already been

underlined within the existing literature on these topics, care and work are concepts

difficult to define (they have a multidimensional nature). Before 1990, care was often

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understood to be synonymous with unpaid work manly provided by women in the

household. This unpaid work was above all based on the strong emotional relationship

between carers and the cared-for. That is why this work has often been called a

“labour of love”. In other words, care is considered to be a necessary activity based

on “feelings” and “affection”, while social care has been understood to be a public

activity and as a paid work. More precisely,

“The concept of care (…) refers to a wide range of activities, relations and

agencies involved in providing for physical and emotional requirements for

those in need of this and the cultural, normative, economic and social

frameworks within which they are assigned and carried out” (Pfau-Effinger &

Rostgaard, 2011: 2).

Therefore social representations and practices regarding care are deeply linked

to social representations of the maternal role and implicitly linked to gender roles.

Understanding gender arrangements necessitates a conceptual framework which can

be adapted to different social and national contexts. We understand gender

arrangements as a

“specific field of interrelations of cultural factors with institutional, social and

economic factors that frame women’s (and men’s) behaviour and the

structures that this behaviour produces. The cross-national differences in the

organization of childcare and women’s employment can be explained by

differences in the basis of cultural family models and the way in which these

interact with institutional, economic and social factors in different

arrangements of work and family”. (Kamerman & Moss, 2011: 38).

Moreover, childcare relies on public provisions, which exist through

legislation and public policies (family and leave policies):

„Leave policy, more than many other social policies, is at the intersection of

the economic (since it bears on labour force participation and labour market

regulation), the social (since it bears on children, families and gender equality)

and the demographic (since it bears on fertility)” (Kamerman & Moss, 2011:

9).

Parental leave policies are connected to other types of public policies,

especially those of ‘childhood education and care services’ (ECEC). In a context

where it is considered that young children should be cared for at home by parents

(usually by the mother), parental leave should be longer and the policies of ‘childhood

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education and care services’ (ECEC) should consequently be re-examined. Otherwise,

if it is considered that gender equality is compromised by this solution and that young

children should benefit from ECEC policies, parental leave should be shorter and the

ECEC policies should be further developed.

How can we integrate this interdependence between social structures,

legislative framework and social representations and practices within our analysis?

How can we construct an approach sensitive to the dynamics of the social change?

The concepts of "institutions" and "tensions" (Saxonberg, 2011) seem very useful in

this regard. We understand institutions as patterns of social regulation that are framing

behaviour in that they are empowering and restricting agency (North, 1990):

„Institutions offer a moral and cognitive pattern of interpretation and action

and they also influence the identity, self-images and preferences of the actors.

Historical institutionalism also emphasizes the role of actors for institutional

development. It conceptualizes groups as main basis of change.” (Pfau-

Effinger & Rostgaard, 2011: 5).

As institutions are part of a larger socio-political and cultural context and the

practices and strategies of social actors can sometimes be in contradiction with the

social institutions, the concept of “tension” is useful for understanding these social

interactions, especially regarding the analyse of “care”. As defined by Pfau-Effinger

and Rostgaard “tensions” are a contradiction between institutions and/or ideas as well

as conflicts between social groups. In European welfare states, tensions related to

care and care work can occur at several levels: a) contradictions within the cultural

system; b) contradiction within the institutional system; c) contradictions between the

cultural and institutional systems; d) social cleavages in the social system; e) conflict

between social actors with regard to their cultural values or their economic interests.

(Pfau-Effinger & Rostgaard, 2011: f). Besides the concept of institution, we believe

that the concept of tension has heuristic value for our research as it allows the

development of a relational perspective in the analysis of social and political

processes concerning child minding in Bucharest nowadays. Basically, this concept

leads us to a better understanding of social changes in Romania from a chronological

perspective and also of Romanian specificities concerning social care within the

European context.

This theoretical framework allows us to design the following research

questions: for a better understanding of childminding we shall contextualise the

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Romanian situation both in time and space (we need to understand what has happened

with child minders in Romania starting with the communist regime, within the

European context). Communist regimes developed a unique type of hybrid family

policies that combined good infrastructure for childcare with a structure of parental

leave promoting the male breadwinner model. According to the communist ideology

based on Engel’s beliefs, women could be emancipated by the collectivization of

household tasks and also through their participation in the labour market. However,

gender equality within the family was not equally distributed, as men were not

expected to share the household work and childcare responsibilities, creating the

situation of a “double work burden” (in the absence of help neither from the state, nor

from the husband, women had to assume all responsibilities concerning childcare).

The communist systems were not able to solve the tension between their wish to

emancipate women (by pushing them to work) and their traditional ideology of

gender. One of the major tensions developed by this ideological contradiction of the

communist regime is linked to the idea according to which all women should work,

but only women are capable of doing household tasks and taking care of children.

Two other tensions, inherited from the communist period, are amplified in the

post communist context: the first, between the negative representation of the nursery

schools and the new ideology regarding parenting and the second one, between the

cultural values according to which it is „natural” for mothers to stay home and raise

children until the age of three, which is challenged by a mother’s need or desire to

have a professional life.

Considering both this theoretical framework and the research context

discussed at the beginning of this paper, we propose the following hypothesis.

Making child minders become an officially recognised socio-professional category

with a clear legal status within the labour market faces at least three major obstacles:

the absence of a specific legal framework; the educational level and the financial

situation of the women performing this work; the social representations eulogising

mother’s role in childcare. More precisely: a) the absence of a specific legal status

doesn’t allow the development of a favourable tax framework and above all doesn’t

allow child minding to become a valid profession in the context of public childcare

provisions; b) the educational level and the financial situation of those who chose to

work as child minders (mostly women) often leads them to choose black market

labour, instead of looking for an institutional/contractual framework for carrying out

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their work; c) seen through the lens of the dominant cultural values and

representations, the institution of the family and the mother's role in raising children

are central within the post communist Romanian society, which explains why child

minding is endowed with an important emotional and psychological weight. Raising

children at home, and making use of a child minder’s services, someone who is often

seen as “a part of the family”, and who consequently is able to give love in addition to

care (a sort of a mother’s substitute) may ease some women’s choice in going back to

work without feeling “guilty” and without neglecting the child’s best interest. At the

same time, being deeply marked by the ideology of the “very best interest of the

child” (from which derives the emphasis on the psycho-emotional development of the

child and thus in some cases the decision to “integrate” the child minder as “part of

the family”), the current socio-political context produces some paradoxical and

perverse effects. First, although child minding as an occupation is not highly socially

valued, yet it becomes “legitimate” for all social actors (for both nannies and families)

through the prism of childcare (it is not a “big thing” to be a child minder, yet it is a

“huge responsibility” to take care of a child). Second, instead of speeding up the

legislative regulation of this profession, on the contrary, the ideological context of the

"best interests of the child" slows down the contractualisation of this job.

Our research aims interrogating both the macro and micro social levels, as

well as the duel relationship between the political and legislative framework and the

cultural norms and individual practices. Therefore, our research design is structured as

following: 1) providing a general overview of the Romanian post communist context,

based on statistical data, leave and family policies analysis as well as public and

political discourse on child care; 2) reconstituting the legislative framework related to

the legal status of the caregivers; 3) interrogating the micro social level by studying

social actors’ practices and strategies, namely child minder’s experience as carers.

Our methodological choices are designed according to the three axes

presented above. We use documentary analysis, qualitative inquiry, as well as content

analysis (Bryman, 2004: 181-199) to examine documents and transcriptions of in-

depth individual interviews.

The macro-level will be studied primarily through the documentary analysis

that will allow us to contextualise our research object. More precisely, the

documentary method is essential in order to investigate, categorise and interpret the

political, legislative and social stakes underpinning child-minder’s personal and

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professional lives. The documentary analysis is based on different types of sources

that are relevant for the political as well as social interpretations and uses of care

services in post-communist Romania. These sources are the following:

a) the statistics available (regarding women as a labour force in Romania after

the 90s and also regarding the number of the nursery schools and kindergartens during

the post communist period);

b) the legislative framework in force concerning the work of child minding

within the labour market, as well as leave policies and family policies through the

prism of the legislation regarding the childcare of 0-3 years old;

c) the political discourse regarding childcare, especially the political

arguments used within legislative proposals concerning child minder’s work (e.g. Pl-x

no. 755/07.11.2007; Pl-x no. 640/09.07.2010; Pl-x no. 13/01.02.2011; Pl-x no/ 02.03.2011;

Pl-x no.124/20.06.2011; Pl-x no. 755/07.11.2007).

d) In order to retrace a general overview of the context in which our research

object belongs one objective will be to analyse the most recent projects created by the

public sector or by different Romanian NGOs in the last 3 years (2010-13), with

European financial support (POSDRU). These projects have offered free training

courses for babysitters. It is interesting to underline that POSDRU is a programme

which was implemented in Romania in 2008 and which has focused on women as a

vulnerable ‘target group’, along with the unemployed, victims of domestic violence,

etc. This means that a man who has already got a job is not accepted in this type of

training courses for babysitters.

The micro-level will be interrogated through qualitative research that consists

of individual in-depth interviews conducted with child minders working in Bucharest,

as well as with experts whose work is linked to the regulation of child minding.

Interviews are to be analysed using the content analysis method.

Childcare in post communist Romania: the mother’s burden?

"There is an obvious devaluation of marriage and of the idea of family. The number of

marriages decresed drastically, the averege age for marriage increased visibly, the average age

of the spouses is currently 31 years old for men and 28 years old for women, the number of

divorces increased significantly, which means that the family, as an institution, is going

through a serious crisis.” declares Popa Olimpia, adding that "in Tulcea, the lowest number of

births was registered in 2011, and in 2012 the number of births is 186 less than in 2010.

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Giving birth to a child became a sort of an obstacle to women's professional activity",

Adevarul, March 20th, 2013 (member of the Association of the Romanian Families).

This declaration is paradigmatic for shared general opinions and social

representations regarding the family institution and the maternal “role”. Without

aiming to provide an exhaustive analysis of public discourse, monitoring every day

Romanian media (including “Press Review on Gender Dimension”3) along with other

research that treats issues related to gender roles in post communist Romanian society

(Baluta, 2012, 2013; Pasti 2003) allow us to give several significant observations (at

least partially) for gender arrangements.

The overwhelming majority of political, social and cultural norms and

representations celebrates the “essential” place of the family within the healthy

functioning of the society as a whole. Moreover, the family institution is understood

and defined in a traditional manner/way, being closely associated to marriage and to

heterosexuality (Dohotariu, 2013). At the same time, social representations about

gender are also placed within a traditionalist approach: women have family

responsabilities – especially raising up children (this fact is also confirmed by all

avaliable statistics about the division of the domestic tasks). Moreover, the

importance of the nationalist ideology in post-communist Romania enables the

familialist and maternalist ideals in defining gender roles (Youval-Davis, 1997).

Differentialist arguments belonging to the essentialist approach are dominant

both in the public discourse and within the social actors’ representations (women as

well as men) (I. Baluță, 2013) as well as in number of academic studies (O. Baluță,

Dragolea, Iancu, 2008; O. Baluță, 2006). According to these arguments men and

women are different by nature, hence their feelings and needs are different. Therefore,

they are supposed to play different roles: “How should Romanians fully handle the

current financial crisis? Same as they did in the times of the primitive society. The

man brings ressources, and the woman prepares food.”4 Further more, the claims of

equality between women and men are generally devalued or even vehemently !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 „Press Review on Gender Dimension” represents a weekly monitoring on-line review of key media channels that brings together all the articles related to women in the political, social and cultural field. Started in 2010 by FILIA, the project is currently continued by the association FRONT. It constitues a very rich archive on gender representations, especially on the place and role of women/mothers. 4 This declaration belongs to the Minister of Economy, A. Videanu: Realitatea TV, 2010, August 21st, http://www.realitatea.net/videanu-trimite-femeia-la-cratita-daca-nu-sunt-bani-stai-cu-mana-intinsa-la-stat-video_733607.html

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criticized, being associated with the neo-communist or Marxist ideology (I. Baluță,

2013). In the current context where the familialist ideology phrasing the maternal role

and where the social value of gender equality is almost absent, childcare is, by

definition, mothers’ care, which is also reflected in leave and family policies. After

1990, in addition to maternity leave of 122 days, parental leave (available for fathers

too since 2005) has been regulated. Since 1990 there have been 6 legislative

modifications concerning the duration and the calculation method of the monthly

allowence paid during parental leave. Although fathers’ right to make use of parental

leave has been regulated through the EU accession process, in the every day life

mothers are the ones who take this leave.

In the absence of real interest for the development of the infrastructure of

public institutions for children aged between 0-3 years old, or for creating other tools

or resources to ensure suitable childcare (i.e. child minders), one can say that

childcare for children under the age of 3 is almost exclusevly the mother’s

responsibility (from the point of view of both public policies and social

representations). Furthermore, the lack of concern for providing public provisions and

infrastucture for children over 18 years old is even more important if we consider that

childcare is an instrument whereby EU countries seek to ensure “social equality” as

well as “gender equality” as fundamental rights (Gauthier, 2002).

Women’s participation in the labour market imposed by the communist

regime still remains quite high even after 1990, despite the fears of some feminist

authors. This is especially true taking into account the difficulties inherent in the

transition to a market economy, culminating with the recent global economic crisis.

According to INS statistics (National Institute of Statistics), from 1996 until 2012

women have remained at a fairly constant percentage in terms of employment: in

1996 the employed population was 10.673.035, of which 4.842.674 were women5. It

is also important to consider the employment distribution by level of education: in

1996, there were 2.040.040 women out of 3.940.459 with a low level of education;

2.427.771 women out of 5.876.206 with a medium education, and 374.864 women

out of 856.369 who were highly educated. In 2012 the category “low educational

level” decreased to 2.108.927 (among which 1.041.696 were women); within the

“medium educated level” there were 5.494.026 people (among which 2.249.149

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5!We would like to thank Mr. Catalin Raiu for his support in collecting INS data.

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women) and, finally, within the “highly educated” level there were 1.659.855 people

registered (among which 845.779 women). Overall, we find that the largest decrease

is recorded in the case of population with low levels of education, the other two

categories remaining fairly constant. Within three categories, women represent

51.77% (1996) and 49.39% (2012) out of the “low educated” people; 41.32% (1996)

and 40.93% (2012) out of the “medium educated” people and 43.77% (1996),

respectively 50.95% (2012) out of the “highly educated” people. Considering these

percentages of women in the labour market and given the fact that parental leave can

be taken until the baby reaches the age of two (although different public mechanisms

encourage parents to take leave only for the first year), child care provisions for 2-3

year old children require solutions beyond the legal framework in force and the

inadequate public policies.

The situation of public provision of nurseries and kindergartens is also

discouraging. The already low number of public nurseries decreases form 840 in 1990

to 286 in 2011 (in 2011 there were only 11 private nurseries at national level); in rural

areas nurseries were almost non-existent. The number of children enrolled in public

nurseries decreases too, from 47.239 in 1990 to 15.150 in 2005 (probably being

driven by the decreasing demographic curve of child-births); however, it slowly

increases to 17.214 in 2011.

In absolute numbers, if we compare the number of enrolled children within

nurseries with the number of available nursery places and with the number of women

in the labour market it is obvious that other solutions are found by women to meet

their childcare needs.

While in rural areas it is likely that the traditional system of childcare provided

in the extended family (grandparents) is still commonly used, our hypothesis is that in

urban areas, especially in the case of socio-professional categories above “average

status” (the percentage of “highly educated” women in the labour market recorded the

highest increase) the solution of private nurseries, kindergartens or private child

minders is quite prevalent. In addition, if we take into consideration the social

representations presented above, we can advance the hypothesis that using the

services of child minders is congruent to the idea that it is in the best interests of the

child to be raised and educated by the mother or by another member of the family

rather than by childcare institutions (especially concerning babies). Child minders

also embody these representations and values in their every day working life – this

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hypothesis is going to be tested through our qualitative field research. At the same

time, our qualitative inquiry will allow us to analyse socio-demographical and

economical characteristics of women working as child minders and to observe to what

extent they can be correlated with statistics on employment.

The legislative framework: no place for child-minders

In Romania nowadays there is no legislative framework to protect the rights

and obligations either of those offering such care services (mostly if not entirely

women) or of those making use of them. Although in the last two years there have

been changes in the official recognition of this work (within in the classification of

occupations in Romania – COR), both the Labour Code as well as the specific

legislation for childcare make no reference to this profession, the draft laws

concerning child minders were rejected, as we will show further. However, we have

to underline the recent addition within COR of the following occupations related to

childcare: “children carer” (n° 531101) and “governess and babysitter” (n° 531102

and n° 531103). All three "occupations" require at least a “medium level of

education” (secondary education). It is possible that these changes are (at least

partially) the result of EU funded projects (see below). However, considering the fact

that the job description (“fisa postului”) is written by the employer accordingly to the

Labour Code in which none of the three occupations are regulated, we believe that

stipulating these occupations within COR doesn’t provide a clear legal status for the

socio-professional category of child minders. Moreover, while the occupation of

“babysitter” involves a limited work schedule, the name of “governess” is used often

within hotels (where the governess is usually the maid), and the occupation of

“children carer” (“îngrijitor de copii”) is often used within the public system of

nurseries and kindergartens to denote the staff (not the educators however). Without

going into the details of job descriptions for these occupations6, we have to underline

the ambiguity of their definitions which explains, along with the absence of any

specific legal framework, why they are not transformed in socio-professional

categories with a legal status.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6See for instance the models offered by some sites that offer legal advices (http://www.rubinian.com/produse_fise_de_post_cor.php?id=PRUFP0122) or the models offered within POSDRU projects (http://www.proiectitd.ro/Modele%20Fise%20de%20post/baby-sitter.pdf).

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Thus, within the current legislation the only way to conclude an employment

contract of care for children is the provisions of the “PFA” (i.e. an “authorised

person” or self-employed) that regulates all services provided by private persons (this

category includes for example translation services, accountancy services, etc.).

Without going into legal details, it is important to emphasize that PFA status is

acquired exclusively through a complicated process during which the person herself

has to deliver a number of official documents that strengthen the “proof” that he or

she is qualified to exercise that profession. This whole process requires different

resources (e.g. the future PFA must provide a deed of the centre where his/her activity

takes place, as well as a full list of documents and legalised diplomas plus taxes for

the Trade Register). More precisely, besides the need to be familiar with the taxation

law and the huge amount of the time required, the costs required to become a “PFA”

can reach up to 100 EUR (a large sum for someone with a low socioeconomic status).

Moreover, PFA activities involve achieving complicated accounting records, as well

as fulfilling of annual “tax declarations”. Therefore it is very complicated (if not

impossible) for people with a low level of education and with a modest financial

situation to become a “PFA”.

Recently there have been two draft laws seeking to regulate child minders, and

in both instances the legislative process stalled, either when the member withdrew the

proposal (as was the case with Pl-x nr. 13/2011) or when the Chamber of Deputies

overwhelmingly rejected the law (Pl-x nr 415/2010). We will analyse further the

motivations expressed within these legislative proposals. First, the 415/2010 draft law

stipulates the following reasons for regulating child minding: the demographic decline

and the increasing migration, as well as “the absence of family policies supporting

preschool children’s growth” (especially for children between 1 and 3 years old)7.

Therefore, the “solutions” depend entirely on families who seek help or services

provided by relatives, babysitters or private institutions (authorised or not, but

definitively expensive) and other “alternatives that may irreparably jeopardise the

physical and mental health of children". This draft law aims to provide only direct

help (through financial aid) for “parents who chose a legal alternative of childcare

based on a legal child minding contract or on a legal institutional framework”8. The

Government rejected this draft law, the main reason being the additional costs this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7!http://www.cdep.ro/proiecte/2010/400/10/5/em415.pdf 8 Ibidem.

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low would involve (if accepted, the project proposal doesn’t specify exactly where the

money mould come from)9. More precisely, the draft law was presented within the

Permanent Bureau of the Chamber of Deputies on the 1st of February 2010, and after

going through all legislative stages, it was rejected by a vote of the Chamber of

Deputies on the 22nd of March 201110.!The second draft law (Pl-x no. 13/2011) starts by evoking the principles of the

Council of Europe and the European Commission, which believes that raising and

caring for children is an important element that ensures equal opportunities between

women and men11. Besides mentioning the international conventions and the national

legislation that justify the basis of this draft law, the project’s motivation was

expressed statistically including the number of nursery places available compared to

the number of children who need places, in order to emphasize that the existing public

infrastructure is “totally insufficient”. Although much better documented and argued

than the previous draft law, the Legislative Council’s reaction was not too enthusiastic

(several revisions were suggested). The initiator withdrew the project and thus its

legislative process ended.!These two initiatives show, on the one hand, that the problems surrounding of

socio-professional status of child minders has been placed within the logic of family

policies (the first initiative) or in terms of equal opportunities between women and

men and measures of work-life-balance (the second initiative). However, none of the

two draft laws take into consideration the child minder’s perspective on their socio-

professional status. Whether it is a "tool" of public policies in the field of childcare, or

simply a socio-professional category that has been maintained so far on the black

market, we can conclude that, for the moment, there is no place for child minders

within the Romanian legislative framework.!

EU funded projects: a "window of opportunity" for child minder’s regulation?12

Following EU accession in 2007, several projects including specific activities

addressing nannies or baby sitters were developed, most of which having received

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!9 http://www.cdep.ro/proiecte/2010/400/10/5/pvg415.pdf 10 http://www.cdep.ro/pls/proiecte/upl_pck.proiect?idp=10746 11 http://www.cdep.ro/proiecte/2011/000/10/3/em13.pdf!12 We would like to thank Cristina Fometescu, PhD candidate within the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest and member of CPES for her support in writing this part of our work.

! 15!

considerable funding under the SOPHRD (Sectoral Operational Programme for the

Development of Human Resources). Following a desk review analysis, available data

from the managing authority of the programme showed that most of these initiatives

were developed within public –private partnerships, consisting of 2 to 7 partners and

integrating local and/or transnational expertise.

Most of the project proposals that we have identified as targeting women to

become nannies/baby sitters were aiming to respond to one of the major goals of the

programme, mainly promoting social inclusion through active employment and equal

opportunities. It is to be mentioned that most of these projects were addressing

unemployment among vulnerable groups, with women (as an overall group) being

included within the target groups as key areas of intervention.

Generally supporting an integrated package of actions designed to help

women integrate into on the labour market (such as information, vocational or

professional counselling, professional training programs for baby sitters or training

and support for getting a job), we could conclude that most of these projects promoted

a unitary model of intervention, lacking the potential for innovation or sustainability.

As the programme did not include mandatory follow-up evaluations, it’s actually

quite difficult to assess the impact of the training and coaching programs targeting

baby sitters and nannies. The task of having a comprehensive evaluation is even more

difficult, considering that the monitoring process was organized only around

quantitative indicators (such as the number of apprentices, percentage of women

getting a job or having entrepreneurial initiatives), failing to address issues related to

quality standards in training or counselling activities.

Collecting available data for a total number of 7 identified projects addressing

baby sitters, we could estimate that the total number of women who received a

certification for this occupation is around 2000 women, as no men registered for these

courses13. We could therefore conclude that the unilateral focus on women for this

type of program comes to reinforce the occupational division of labour based on

gender, a specificity of most European states, where the percentage of women

performing childcare and domestic labour reaches 90%. The issue brings up an old

dilemma, as one could question the possibility to “(…) provide recognition and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!13 As previously mentioned, within the SOPHRD, women as an overall group were considered as target groups; this was not the case for men (according to the program requirements, only men listed in vulnerable situations, students or representatives of various institutions) could have benefited from free services or various allowances.

! 16!

valorisation of care work without locking women further into a private caring role,

which helps to exclude them from the power and influence that can derive from

participation in the public sphere of the economy and polis” (Lister, 2006). Within

these types of projects, the core part of the activities developed for women trained as

baby sitters was represented by training programmes, as the number of trained women

was taken as the primary reference indicator to be considered for the project

evaluation process. In this case, the Romanian training system (regulated at national

level) foresees that a total number of 360 hours (comprising 120 hours of theory and

240 hours of practice) must be undertaken in order for a person to receive the formal

authorization to become a baby sitter. But besides the length of the program, the

current legislation does not foresee unitary quality standards regulating the

professional training for this occupation, making it practically impossible to properly

monitor and evaluate.

Considering what we could estimate as an inflation of training programs free

of charge developed under SOPHRD (although Romania sits quite low in the

European ranking of states according the number of people taking part in training, it is

expected that at the end of this first program, 1.3 million people will have received

training) most of the projects offered conditional financial stimulus for the

participants of the program. The relevance of this type of mechanism must be

correlated with the persistence of a predominantly informal working system, in which

women with no formal qualification in the field of early education or childcare were

recruited through informal networks and employed without a contract. Considering

therefore the social norms regulating this system as well as the invisibility

surrounding this so called ‘love labour’, we might conclude that the information and

training activities carried out for the benefit of these women enabled them to have a

better understanding of the specific rights and regulations they should consider, the

potential risks associated with informal work, as well as better employment

opportunities following a formal certification of their skills and competencies in the

field.

Child minders in Bucharest: a qualitative inquiry

! 17!

Our qualitative field research consists of in-depth individual interviews with

child-minders working in Bucharest (regardless the district where the child-minder

lives and works) that have been conducted through the method of qualitative

“homogenous through saturation” sampling and the snowball technique. Discourse

analysis and Grounded Theory method have been used to interpret the topics of the

transcribed interviews. These interviws were designed in a manner that allowed us to

understand the different life histories and professional histories of adult Romanian

women who choose to work as child-minders, with or without a contract.

Before analyzing the interviews, some of the difficulties encountered in the

field should be mentioned. Like any other category of social actors, the child-minders

display an "official" image of their job/occupation. More specifically, it can often be

observed that they say what they think they should say (according to the social

representation of a "good child-minder") rather than what they could say from their

own experiences, in an attempt to avoid any criticism of the services they provide.

Although often pre-built, still their discourse is not as developed as that of other social

categories (as the discourse of the women politicians, for example). On the contrary,

many child-minders give incomplete or monosyllabic answers, which can hardly

constitute the object of a discourse analysis. Moreover, more than 40% of the child-

minders, identified through those who participated in our study, refused to be

interviewed. Working or not on a contract, the child-minders were reluctant in giving

an interview, fearing that their opinions might be disclosed to their employers, despite

our effort to reassure them that their identity would remain anonymus. This aspect is

yet another argument that strengthens the hypothesis of the lack of legitimacy of the

sociological survey in the Romanian post-communist social space, where the social

representations related to research/social science is limited to the existence of

statistics and surveys. The interview method and using recorders is generally

associated with the journalistic investigation. Or, in the current social context, in

which the Romanian mass-media insists mainly on the existence of extreme cases of

physical and symbolic violence (either abusive child-minders or abusive employers),

the qualitative survey causes anxiety among potential interviewees.!Despite the difficulties, between February-December 2013 we conducted 31

interviews with child-minders working in Bucharest, regardless of the district they

work in, in order to enlarge the area of our field research (our goal was to interview

child minders working for “wealthy” families, as well as for “ordinary” families). We

! 18!

also conducted 6 interviews with experts whose work is linked to the regulation of

child-minding (March-June 2013).

Interviewed child minders are aged between 24 and 65 years old, more than a

half are born in rural areas, and have a low or middle level of education (only one

attended university). The interviews were conducted either in the park, or in a coffee

house, or in the house of the families the child-minders where working for. Except the

ones employed at Little Red Riding Hood, most of the interviewees prefer to give

interviews during the "working" hours in order to spare their free time, which is "to

little" anyway. To perform the analysis, all interviews were conducted using an

interview guide structured around the following themes: professional training and

individual work experience on the labor market; family situation; the experience as

child-minder in general; the experience as child-minder at the time of the interview

(practices and views regarding the work under a labor contract); the relationship with

the employer/with the parents who provide remuneration for the activities performed;

the relationship with the child / children taken care of by the interviewed. !

Our research aims to analyze, on the one hand, the way in which the

interviewees relate to the activities as child-minders, in order to establish how this

socio-professional “category” is constructed in post-communist Romania. On the

other hand, we analyzed the practices, representations and values of the child-minders

in relation to the employers / parents who pay them, as well as in relation to the

children, they often become emotionally attached to. Last but not least, our field

research shows that, unlike in other EU countries, the services provided by the child-

minders are performed mainly (if not always) in the homes of the parents who pay for

these services. Not being regulated in terms of legislation, in Bucharest, the

“profession” of child-minder involves care services for the child/children of one

family, in this family’s home (our qualitative field research doesn’t include any

situation in which the child-minder takes care of several children of different families,

at her home). Since there are no previous studies that could provide a reference for

this analysis, our research is based on an inductive approach, that involves gathering

empirical data, in order to further analyze and sketch an explanatory/epistemological

framework.!

! 19!

This study aims to answer to the following questions: to what extent are the

“child-minder” services considered to be a “profession”? How the degree of

professionalism, inherent in this remunerated activity (including its marketization

(Kovács, 2012) – building a “know how” in the sale of services), intertwine with the

degree of emotional involvement in raising and caring for children, activities

performed in a mostly familial space? In order to answer to these questions, this

analysis is structured in two parts. We will analyse on the one hand the interviews

with the child-minders working with a labor contract, on the other hand the interviews

with the child-minders working without a labor contract, in order to compare the two

situations and to highlight the specific factors in post-communist Romania, where the

occupation of child-minder is related rather to the black market. !

The occupation of child-minder, between contractual and emotional involvment:

the case of the child-minders working on a real employment contract

The field research outlines the existence of two major categories of child-

minders working under an employment contract: a) the child-minders emplyed at the

Little Red Riding Hood, the only ones from the entire sample in whose contracts the

real income and taxes are stipulated; b) the child-minders with labor contract, that

allows the display of a socio-proffesional situation in accordance with the current

legislation, but in which the real occupation, the remuneration and the real working

time are not stipulated.

According to the interview with the project manager from the Little Red

Riding Hood (March, 28th 2013), this NGO is the only institution in Bucharest that

employs child-minders. Created in 2011 by the Romanian Red Cross, Little Red

Riding Hood has offered free training courses for child-minders in several series

(professional training courses of 360 hours, certified by CNFPA – The National

Council of Professional Training for Adults). Following these courses, 10 child-

minders were employed, of which only 5 were still working there in March-April

2013. Also according to the interview with the project manager from the Little Red

Riding Hood (March, 28th 2013), the demand for child care services is higher than the

offer this NGO can provide for the families who request such services. The

interviewed manager also highlights that most of the “girls” who attend the training

courses are rather motivated by getting a diploma certified by the Red Cross, and after

! 20!

they get it, they prefer either to go back to work on the black market, for financial

reasons, or to go to work abroad, where the diploma is considered to be an advantage

in employment.

Thanks to the project manager, all 5 child-minders who were working in

March-April 2013 at the Little Red Riding Hood agreed to be interviewed for our

research. They are aged between 36 and 52 years, and in terms of education 2 child-

minders attended secondary education (until the 10th grade) and vocational school,

while the other 3 either have passed the baccalaureate, either they graduated a form of

post-secondary education; none of them have university qualification. 2 of the 5 child-

minders employed at the Little Red Riding Hood are born in Bucharest, while the

other 3 are born in the province and moved to Bucharest after they completed their

studies, moment that coincided, in general, with marriage and birth of the first child.

Two interviews are relevant in this respect.

Given her age - 36 years old - Stefana’s accounts are suggestive for the way in

which, in post-communist Romania, some inherited social practices, according to

which the beginning of adult life coincides with the starting of a family, still persist.

But unlike the other interviewees, Stefana is the only one who decided to continue her

studies after becoming a mother, at the age of 23.“After I finished highschool, I was

accepted at a public university, but without a scholarship. And because I didn’t get

the scholarship, it was very hard for me to support myself, so I left university and

started to work. At first I worket in a factory, I was packing, then I left elsewhere. At

first I actually worked as a laborer, then I became head of department… not head of

department, shift manager, head of department is something different. After that, I

moved to another factory, also specialized on packing… people were coming to us,

also the head of department, and after that I met my husband there. We got married

and had a baby, actually the child came in the same time as the marriage (...) and

after that I was in maternity leave (…). Then I returned for a while at the factory, and

then I went to college. I went to college, not to the university, because it was the short

form of education (...)” (Stefena, 36).

The child-minders whose professional life began before the fall of the

communist regime talk about the fact that, before the Revolution, they graduated a

vocational school, designed to provide them a “safe and stable” job, where they could

work as “footwear-makers”, “stocking-makers”, “management distributor”, “laborer

and then head of department in a packing factory”, “accountant in a state’s

! 21!

enterprise”. But, after the fall of communism, the safety of the job disappeared (many

factories were closed, sold or went bankrupt, and the employees entered into technical

unemployment, etc). Therefore, on their own, the interviewees experience different

jobs, often alternating them with periods of unemployment. For example, the

interview with Adriana is representative for the strategies of re-professionalization,

which are specific for the transition period. ”I, for example, was used to an 8 hours

program, because I worked in a state’s company. It was good, I worked 20 years

there (...) I was accountant (...) I finished highschool and had a qualification. (...) And

after 20 years of working for the same companyas an accountant, I became

unemployed. But the unemployment came after two years of technical unemployment,

in which period we received our wages once every 3-4 months. And because it was a

salary from the state, it was only 3 millions, in hand, so you already couldn’t stay

there anymore. And in the first series when they established who should become

unemployed, I asked to leave. I attended hairdressing, insurance consultant and

babysitter courses, and the babysitter course happened to be the only one with results

(...).” (Adriana, 52).

With one exception, the interviewees from the Little Red Riding Hood haven’t

worked as child-minders before attending the training course certified by the Red

Cross. Their professional trajectories are relatively similar in this respect: they

decided to attend a re-professionalization course after a period of unemployment;

being a child-minder was not an objective in itself, but rather a way to avoid

worklessness. For example, one interviewee reported that, as a student at the College

of Horticulture, she went abroad, where she worked for several years, without a labor

contract, but earning "tremendous amounts" of money compared to the incomes in

Romania. When she returned, she was unable to find a job, which is why she decided

to attend the free child-minding course organized by the Red Cross. This is the only

one from the interviewed child-minders who intended initially to become a "zonal

child-minder"(to care for several children at her home), but her husband was against

turning the family’s home into a professional space. Moreover, she is also the only

interviewee who intended to work “on her own” and actually made all the formalities

in order to become PFA. But between the stability of a job, which implies a steady

income, and the “very difficult” situation of being self-employed, she preffered to

become an employee, even though, unlike many other child-minders, she has the

necessary skills for the complicated paperwork that self-employment entails. „I don’t

! 22!

think that it would be very profitable with PFA, because you would have to pay some

taxes, income tax and so on… that means you should pay exactly what the agency

pays for you, so it would be the same…” (Stefana, 36).

The only interviewee from the Little Red Riding Hood who worked as a child-

minder before attending the training course organized by the Red Cross has a

relatively similar career path as the ones of her other colleagues. She worked as a

footwear-maker until the factory was closed, and then she worked “on her own”,

taking care of a child since he had a few months until he went to kindergarten. Ionica,

51, is one of the many interviewees who use different websites specialized in

recruitment for employment, and this was how she learned about the training courses

organized by the Red Cross.

When asked what are the main advantages of working with a labor contract,

the interviewees from the Little Red Riding Hood offer similar responses. For family

reasons, none of the 5 is tempted to leave the country in order to work abroad.

Although, except the additional work hours, their salary is, financially, little

motivating (about 200 €/month), the interviewees invoke the utility of the contract,

which provides them with both work continuity (so that in the future they could retire)

and health insurance, of which they wouldn’t benefit if they would work illegally.

Moreover, given the fact that their work is rather devalued by their families (many

interviewees state that their family doesn’t have a "very good" opinion about their

occupation), invoking the Red Cross and emphasizing the membership in a

professional group under its auspices is another important motivation for their choice.

“Let me tell you why I work here for 9 millions. I already have over 30 years of work

experience. I worked since I was 19, and I wouldn’t go now to work on the black

market for the next 2-3 years, that’s how long I have to wait until I can retire (…)I

received offers … and it’s better paid indeed… because it’s the black market. But I

think it’s much safer, for me and my family, with a contract. If the family knows that

we are from the Red Cross, I think that those parents can confidently leave home. (…)

I really want to retire and to be a retired grandmother, to be able to go further and

help my children. I mean, if I am healthy now, that doesn’t mean I should give all up

in order to enjoy a sum of money I would get…” (Adriana, 52). In addition, the

training course they attended before working as child-minders represents a certificate

of qualification/professional skills, which can’t be acquired by simply having care

experience.

! 23!

As employees, the interviewees from the Little Red Riding Hood don’t risk

losing their job if the family decides they don’t need their services anymore, unlike

those working on the black market. The employing institution is responsible for

managing the relationship between the child-minder and the family she works for,

both contracting "parties" being protected (the child-minder can always be redirected

to another family, while the family can receive at any time another child-minder).

This way, the relationship between the child-minder and the family she works for

becomes much more contractual. „It depends on the child-minder. I can never feel as

within my family; I mean, my family is my family. I know how I feel in my family, and

I don’t think I could ever feel somewhere else as within my family. This is me. Maybe

there are people who can feel like that, I don’t know… Why? Because it’s a job, not a

family. A family is different, and that is a job.” (Stefena, 36). „It’s a special job,

because (…) it’s extremely difficult to have a high quality routine with the same child,

every day. So, it is very hard. It is very difficult because you are put to the test all the

time, you must have a lot of imagination, you can’t do the same things every day, the

child has to always learn something, and this is very hard. If I would go every day to

another family, for me it would be perfect, it would be easier. (…) It’s more difficult,

although there are also benefits… you know the child, you know his/her habits, you

know what to expect when the relationship lasts longer. But, as time passes, it’s

becoming increasingly difficult, you have to put an increasingly higher effort. This

is… my opinion.” (Stefana, 36).

The contractualization of the relationship between the family (who pays for

rising and care services) and the child-minder (who offers rising and care services) is

easy, in the context of a formal relationship often based also on the differences in

social status: „I think that the other family had a higher rank… they looked down on

you. They used to say ‚’you’ll do this and this and this and this for the child’. But now

the parents see me more as a grandmother, and they also trust my advices.” (Natasa,

45). But although the interviews with the child-minders from the Little Red Riding

Hood differ from the other interviews in the way they focus on the formal character

and the contractual nature of their occupation (for example, they bring their own food,

although they have the family fridge at their disposal, however they don’t perform

any other task except those strictly related to the child – they don’t do housework,

cooking or grocery shopping, as the child-minders working on the black market often

do), the emotional attachment to the children plays a very important role in the way

! 24!

the interviewees relate to the occupation of child-minder, and in the way they

construct this “profession”: „We are a ’mother to loan’. While under our supervision,

the concerns are the same ones … I behave with the child like a mother ...” (Ionica,

51). This confirms our hypothesis, according to which the dominant ideology of the

"best interest" of the child solidifies the emotional nature of the relationship between

the child-minders and the children in their care, rather than accelerate the

contractualization process of the occupation of child-minder. „I don’t disregard

myself in any way because I work as a child-minder, everybody knows what he did

and what he succeded to do in life. I consider I’m doing something very important for

them, taking care of their child. And in the end I do more than just staying with the

child, I also educate him, and I give them the opportunity to leave in peace to work. I

am just a bit exaggerated… if they would misbehave or I wouldn’t be able to work …

I wouldn’t stay…” (Adriana, 52).

In this respect, it’s important to note that the many hours, as well as the

repetitive nature of this occupation (taking care of the same child from morning to

evening, every day) helps building an emotional attachment between the child-minder

and the child, irrespective of the degree of contractualization of the relationship

between the child-minder and the child’s parents. The same interviewee who states

that she always found it very „difficult” to manage the relationship with the children’s

parents, becomes very affectionate when talking about the child: „I takehim in my

arms and I kiss him (…)We laugh together, he is very funny! Veru funny!And he is

smiling all the time, we have a lot of fun together. And he is very smart! I like him”.

(Stefana, 36). Another good example of dominant familialist representations in the

current Romanian society, produced and reproduced at both political and legislative

level, and at the level of the social actors’ discourse, is the following: „I took the

mother role very seriously. I married when I was 20 and I raised my children alone. I

took 3 years of maternity leave… in order to stay home with them. I was very

demanding with my husband regarding the cildren. I hardly accepted the help of some

aunts and of a friend, to help me with the children. You need at some point people to

help you solve the problem, the problem being the child, because you have to leave

him with someone if you have to go for a while, to solve something. (...) I really had

great courage to go into someone’s house, to take care of a child, because I find it

very difficult… It's very hard for the parent to accept someone, to leave the child

alone in the house all day with someone. It’s very difficult for me too”.!(Adriana 52)

! 25!

She highlights the personal involvement, as a mother, in raising and caring for her

own children and, in the light of this involvement, the "difficulty" of a mother to

delegate someone else (another woman) to take care of her child.

Child-minders working on a “bogus” contract: having a written

employment contract and working out of it

!Although they are not very many in our research sample (less than 20%),

some child-minders work under a valid labor contract, in accordance with the current

legislation, but their activities, program and salary do not correspond with the ones

stipulated in the contract. Three cases are representative for the child-minders who

fall into this subcategory.! The first case is that of a 48 years old child-minder, high-school graduate, who

used to work for about 10 years in an institute for electronic research, after which she

retired due to illness, although she didn’t actually have any health problems. The

interviewee is a representative example for the local maternalism: raising the children

and the domestic responsibilities are duties of the wife, and, unlike in the case of the

husband, they become more important than her professional activity: “They told me to

read her stories.Maybe I didn’t have time for my own children, being a mother and

also taking care of the house and everything. I took the book and, small as she was, I

stood beside her and I read to her”. When her children became adults, the

interviewee considered it legitimate to find a paid occupation outside the family.

Therefore, she continues to do what she does best - caring for children by becoming a

child-minder, and working in various families’ homes. First time, she took care of the

neighbors’ child, while founding her last job through advertisement (newspaper ad),

which confirms the “official” character of the child-minder occupation. At the time of

the interview, the child-minder looks after a nearly 4 years old child, of which she

takes care of since he was 3 months old, and she works under a long-term contract

(she is required to look after this child at least until he will go to school, “maybe also

after”). The interviewee said that she worked initially more than 10 hours a day, until

the child was 3 and began to attend kindergarten. Since then, the child-minder works

part-time (she cooks daily for the child, she cleans his room, she washes and irons his

! 26!

clothes and linens, she takes him from the kindergarten, she takes him to the ballet,

gymnastics and in the park, and at the end of the day they play together and she reads

him stories) for the attractive amount of 1000 lei/month. Although, in principle, the

work program is set, in fact it is flexible, according to the needs of the parents.

Housekeeping is the responsibility of another lady, who comes twice a week. ! The child-minder is entrusted with the keys of the family’s home, but the

appellations (forms of address in the second person, plural) maintain a certain

distance between the employer (the parents) and the employee (the child-minder). The

interviewee describes the income earned for the care services as an “extra” income,

from which it is not profitable for her to pay taxes and contributions to the state. On

the one hand, the child-minder chooses to work on the black market, benefiting from

a monthly income, whose taxation is not financially profitable, and on the other hand,

in order to qualify for health insurance, she is fictitiously listed as working under a

contract at the private company of her husband. The idea of a contract is a subject

intentionally left out in the discussions between the child-minder and the child’s

parents. Therefore, this is one of the many cases in which people are working on the

black market because of the difficult tax system, perceived as unfavorable for the

employees. The parents and the child-minder manage to maintain a long-term

employment relationship, the benefits of applying the law being insignificant

compared to the benefits both the parents and the interviewee get at the time of the

interview. Like all the other child-minders, the interviewee receives paid days off

when the family is on vacation. The legal issues inherent in the provision of child care

are avoided through the deep emotional attachment created between the child-minder

and the child. In this respect, the interviewee states repeatedly: “I raised her since she

was 3 and a half months old… so I dn’t feel the difference between her and my

children”; “I love her very much! I told you and I’m telling you again: I love her as if

she was my own child!”. The child-minder also underlines the fact that, because they

spent so much time together, the child is more emotionally attached to her than to her

own grandmothers. In the same time though, the interviewee reproduces the

maternalist discourse, characteristic for the Romanian post-communist society, when

talking about the child’s mother: “The child feels. She feels that mommy spends little

time with her, but considering that this is her job… (…) I wouldn’t have left my

children so much time. But she considers that it is ok this way, and she trusts me, she

saw who I am and relies on me. I don’t know what to tell you. I appreciate her for

! 27!

what she does, I could’n have done what she does. (…) She is very tired! Even last

night, and also the past week, I told her ‘get some rest, you don’t seem well, you are

tired!’ They would like to have another child. Good bless them and good luck!. But

because of her program … she doesn’t want another child that much …she spends

very little time with the child. But it’s their choice.”

The second case is special because of the number of children the interviewee

looks after: 3 brothers, of 4, 6 and 10 years old. The child-minder is only 36, she used

to work for 3 years in the bakery industry (she names this job “her first love”,

considering cookery as being a “feminine vocation”), and now, for 6 years, she works

8 hours a day for “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor”, family for which she moved to Bucharest

(one night a week she sleeps in the family’s home because the parents are out of

Bucharest). The interviewee attends in the morning university courses, while in the

evening she is dealing exclusively with the children: “The parents spend very little

time around the children, and that has consequences in their behavior. For example

the father takes them to school on Monday morning, then he leaves Bucharest, and

comes back on Wednesday night. The mother is quite busy, she started a PhD now,

she has two surgerys and is also a junior lecturer; it’s not easy to deal with all that

and, in addition, to be a mother and a wife, I think it’s too much… I don’t know. She

doesn’t have enough time for the children, and you can feel that in the children’s

behavior. (…) They are a kind of weekend-parents, and that affects the children, in my

opinion”. According to the interviewee, the same extremely busy parents, completely

dedicated to their professional careers, provide for their children private lessons of

German, piano and guitar at home, Cambridge classes, and they pay for cooking and

housekeeping services. The child-minder receives 2200 Ron/month, and other 2-300

Ron/weekend if she is requested to work overtime. Unlike the previous case, it was

commonly agreed between the parents and the child-minder to establish a fictional

contractual relationship: “I have a labor contract. In the labor contract, the only

disadvantage is that I don’t know what the parents mentioned there… They couldn’t

employ me as a “nurse” since I don’t have any medical studies, so I don’t know what

they wrote there, “cleaning lady” or something like that, I don’t know if it helps or

hinders someone. Anyway, the real salary is not the one mentioned in the employment

record… like everywhere else…”

Also in this case one can observe the same discrepancy between the

contractual nature of the relationship with the parents, and the deep emotional

! 28!

attachment to the children: “I can’t say they made a difference because I’m not as

educated as they are, they told me many times ‘We know nothing about the children’s

education, really nothing’. (…) We discuss many things, but nothing about our

personal lives. Each has his/her own life. That’s what I like about them, they are not

intrusive: ‘Who called you? Where are you going? What are you doing?’… Not once!

(…) Everybody needs his/her own time … when someone is a strager in the house,

he/she is an intruder, regardless of the relationship he/she has… that person doesn’t

belong to that family. Therefore, each with his/her own life.” But while the

interviewee doesn’t consider herself as part of the family she works for, she states the

opposite when talking about the children: „I don’t know, I often wish they were my

children. I am very attached to them. They are very sweet… Whenever I thought I

would give it up, I realized I would really miss them. When I come back from

vacations I miss them so much, sometimes also on the week-ends… Somethimes I look

through the door eye, I see them coming down, I hear them… they are very sweet!”.

The third case, presenting a situation specific for the child-minders working

on a „bogus contract”, is based in fact on the only interview we have with an

„internal” child-minder, who moved to Bucharest to live in the home of the family she

works for. She lookes after the family’s only child since she was a few weeks old (at

the time of the interview the child is one and a half years old), accompanying the

family everywhere, including in vacations, and she only gets one free weekend once

in a few weeks (2-3). The interviewee, 54, worked for over 20 years in the dairy

industry, as dairy technician, and lost her job when the company she worked for went

bankrupt. She continued to provide technical consulting to different audit firms and,

in addition, over a period of almost three years, without being paid a fixed salary, and

mostly because she enjoyed it, she helped a friend to raise her little girls. The

interviewee divorced when her only child was one year old, and raised her child, who

at the time of the interview is 30, alone: „I raised my child alone (…) since he was

very little. Since he was almost 1. He was not yet 1. Since then I struggled alone, I

thought this was my path in life: the job and the child, the job and the child, and

nothing else. Of course, first was the child, and then the struggle for existence. I

didn’t think I would end up this way, if the company wouldn’t have been dissolved...”

The need (the lack of a job and, implicitly, the financial aspect of everyday life) drove

her to work as a child-minder, and she met the grandmother of the child she now

looks after daily through her priest: „I never thought I will do this. I never thought my

! 29!

job will be disbanded and I will get to do this (...) I kept hoping I will fiind another

job, but I didn’t, I tried, but where? Everything was dissolved, everything was

demolished after 89, they were all shattered.” The interviewee is part of that category

of child-minders who develop a family relationship with the child's parents: „What

can I say, I got emootionally attached to her, as if she were my own child, my own

granddaughter. I respect the parents and I consider here to be my home. They are my

children and she ism y little granddaughter… it’s as he is my son, this i show I

consider them… I almost burst into tears… they are special young people, are

sensitive, have confidence, have faith in God, they are respectful… and I think I offer

them the same thing, because this is how I was raised and this is how I try to raise the

little girl… I’m too motherly kind, too loving…”. She sleeps in the same bed with the

girl, she repeatedly tells her „I love you”, and the girl calls her „mother”, although the

parents try to convince her to call the child-minder „granny”. In addition, the

interviewee does all the domestic work: she cooks separately for the child and for the

adults, she irons, she does the housework: “I do everything, I do pretty much, but I’m

strong, I’m used to”. Despite the “family” relationship, the child-minder and the

parents use as form of address the second person, plural. The interviewee refused to

talk to us about the amount of money she receives monthly, as well as about the work

contract she has at the company of the child’s father.

Child-minders working on the black market

The third significant category for our sample is that of the child-minders who

work without a contract (the majority). This category can also be devided in two: the

child-minders who work with no contract at all, and the other ones, retired persons

who take care of children for adding something at their pension pay. Their decision is

based on both individual wealth and level of education: while child minders working

with a contract receive around 200 EUR after tax, child minders working on the black

market can receive up to 70% more.

The social situations of those who work with no contract at all vary a lot from

the point of view of their individual professional life course and of their position

toward their job as child-minders. The interviewee who belong to this category are

between 24 and 52 and have graduated a vocational technical school or a high-school.

Part of them began to work as child-minders after being cleaning ladies for a period

! 30!

of time. For example, Elena, 43 works as a cleaning lady for once a week in the house

of the family who asked her to become a permanent child-minder for their only child,

aged one, in order that the mother could take again her job. On the other hand, Elena

52 worked as a care-giver for old people, before deciding to take care of a child: “I

thought it was nicer to take care of a child than of…old people as you see them…how

to say, I began to like them but when I was seeing them old and sick, I mean it’s that

feeling of being old and lacking strength…I felt like I was losing my strength too (…)

As a job, it wasn’t hard, I coped with them, I could do it all right as I was in my

power. But this feeling…I couldn’t bear seeing them sick and affected. And I thought

that a child is more active, full of life, it’s something else than…” (Elena, 52).

The working program of these child-minders differs a lot from one another:

one of them works three hours a day, her duty being to to take care of two children

(brothers) in the evenings, from the moment they leave the kindergarden/school, until

around 8 pm, when their parents are back home from their jobs. The interviewed

child-minder is a taylor, she worked 23 years in a firm that is now shut down. At the

moment of the interview, she has been working as a child-minder only for 5 months

and she said that she was hired without a contract, for 800 ron (3 hours a day) to

replace a “former” child-minder that was dismissed after being caught yelling at and

hitting one of the two children that she was taking care of. Other child-minders work

around 10 hours a day but they prefer to leave the house of their hiring families and

spend part of the time in their own houses, either with the families permit or not,

telling them every time they do this. More than that, a part of the interviewed child-

minders say they like to watch the TV show “My dear friend”, which is on TV in the

mornings, when they already are “at job”.

When one of the parents becomed unemployed, one of the interviewed women

accepted a pay cut herself, saying that she prefers to keep on working with the family

that she already knows and with whom she “gets along well” rather than having more

money and working with “who knows, some crazy people”. As for the hiring contract,

they say they didn’t even talk about a contract with the families. Nevertheless, she

would like to benefit from the social insurance, especially from the health insurance

(some of them are paying a private insurance).

As well as the child-minders that work with a contract, those without a

contract underline the fact that the parents spend much too little time with their own

children, a key factor of their becoming so deeply emotionally attached with these

! 31!

children is the time spent together. For example, Irina 24 calls herself an “adoptive

mother” for the twin girls that she takes care of at her first job as a child-minder, and

other child-minders say that the children that they take care of call them “granny”, as

like they were their grandmothers: “ We have a very good relationship …we love

each other, we kiss, and she never disobeyed me. The elder one is a little…you know,

she raises the voice a little, she sometimes forgets and raises the voice but, otherwise.

she doesn’t…They are very good children, I really had no problems…” (Elena 45).

Only one interviewed child-minder, aside from the rest of the qualitative

sample, talks about the „affection from a distance” that she has for the child that she is

looking after: „I like the child, he became close to me but…as I was banned from the

beginning, ‚don’t do this, don’t do that’ I normally…kept my distance So, I like him,

yet from a distance. He’s not like my grandson, to hug him, to kiss and to play with

him…no. There is a limit with me: we do this and that and that’s all.” It’s the only

child-minder in the sample that was not allowed to kiss the child or to touch some of

his toys. Moreover, when she raises the issue of employees’ papers, they tell her:

„They told me to go and make myself papers if I wanted, as they don’t have time for

that. If I want to do something I am free to do whatever I want regarding the papers,

they can’t because they can’t…And I can’t afford it, with the pay they give me, to go

and pay for a contract, for health insurance and others…in order to benefit from

them. And if they don’t pay me anymore, where should I get the money from in order

to pay these on? You must have something sure, don’t you?...And if they don’t want

me anymore…what should I do? Imagine me going there and saying: you know, the

people I worked with, illegally…can I have the unemployment allowance? What

should I do? What is the procedure? You realize I have no other choice. And this is

my loss. And I have only 9 years as registered working years. What would I do?You

have to have at least 15, so I heard, I have no idea. To get a poor pension allowance,

who knows if we reach the retirement age, as they cange it all the time.”

In the case of the child-minders who are already retired, the discourse

regarding the contract is radically changed: „It is very clear that it is not correct, but I

had had too many in my lifetime to stay now over a contract. And, usually, if I don’t

like the parents or the person I am talking with….if I have side feelings or I feel

something will go wrong, I definitely say ‚no’, no matter how the profitable it may

be..” (Marioara 60). Or, another interviewed child-minder says: „Working

underground?...it’s highly profitable! If I mock the state, that’s it! The state also

! 32!

mocks me!...so what should I do? That’s it! If I had a decent pension allowance, I

wouldn’t do this, but with 759 lei I have no other choice…” (Flori 58). Having the

certitude of a monthly pension allowance, the retired child-minders have no interest in

paying taxes from their „extra” income as child-minders (some of them don’t even

think that they benefit from an undeclared income). Moreover, they become more

selective before deciding to take a child for care. Some of them even say that, because

of their advanced age, they don’t have the „courage” to take over a very little child.

And only one retired child-minder seems to be less critical with the idea that mothers

spend „too little time” with their children: „ Mothers have always worked more than

their husbands. Always. But it seems to me that nowadays men seem to become more

involved than before. Before it was this mentality…a woman is a woman…with her

cooking pan, she has to do this, not me (…) Mothers spend little time with their

children nowadays but that’s the situation, that’s the way. You have to keep pace,

otherwise you are lost. And if you have a caring husband that involves himself and

helps…he doesn’t have to do what you do, but to help, that’s all right” (Flori, 58).

Working with or without a contract, all interviews reveal the same idea of the

attachment to the child : „I also did house-keeping …But working with a child gives

me satisfaction, you know why? If you give them love, the children instantly answer

back, sincerely and unconditioned. And you enjoy this, of course! You enjoy it as

people rarely give you either consideration or thanks or gratitude … But with a child,

he feels you instantly!” (Maria, 63).

There are different opinions regarding job-recruitment through agencies: on

the one hand, there are child-minders who work with „people they know from people

they know” and who will never put a „public” job call (in a newspaper, for ex.) in

search of a job for caring for children. On the other hand, there are child-minders that

assume themselves the „official” position of child-minder and who use the

recruitment agency as an instrument of intermediating their relationship with the

parents. „That’s why I preferred the agency, because they asked me from the

beginning what my duties are and if I am OK with them and if I am, that’s good, and

if I’m not, that’s also good!” (Flori, 58), or, „It’s better with the agency as they take

over some duties, that means you can renegotiate your salary and talk about this at

the agency. If you don’t fit in a month or two in the family, they have to come with

other offers…” (Maria, 63). However, apart from being an intermediary, these

! 33!

agencies cannot guarantee the future signing of a contract between the child-minders

and the hiring families.

Conclusions

Our qualitative inquiry confirms the findings of the theoretical literature: in

other words, child minders represent a special socio-professional category which

belongs to a field at the intersection between the public and private spheres, and can

be considered a labour of love. In post communist Romania the need to reduce the

black market child minding faces different difficulties, at both macro and micro level.

At macro level, the current tax system doesn’t encourage child minders to

work legally. At the same time, on the labour market the demand for childcare

services as well as the work of child minding depends on several factors: the degree to

which women engage themselves in the labour market (both mothers and child

minders); the existing childcare institutions; the equal opportunities policies,

especially laws which encourage or not women to go back to work after giving birth

to a child; the family policies and the amount of public money designed for family

needs (parental live, family allowances, etc.); the social and cultural representations

concerning gender roles, family and maternity; the social and cultural representations

concerning the public contributions system (the importance of working within a legal

framework). There are different reasons for this situation. First, there is no strong

tradition of workers rights, perhaps due to the ambiguous position of the unions and

due to the legacy of the communist system. Second, the inflexibility and the

bureaucratic nature of the legal and tax system along with the negative representations

of them discourage workers from claiming their rights. Third, especially in the case of

precarious jobs (such as low paid or seasonal jobs) both workers and employers are

not inclined to legalise the working contract resulting in the situation of “take it or

leave it”.

At micro level, unlike other professions, it is very difficult to legally regulate

the work of child minders especially because of the emotional attachment between the

child minder and the child or the whole family. This emotional attachment makes

very difficult the rationalization/quantification of this type of service. Therefore, the

transformation of child minders into a formal socio-professional category with a clear

! 34!

legal status in the labour market faces several major obstacles. In the case of child

minders preferring to work on black market, their decision is based on both individual

wealth and level of education, preferring to have a larger income and facing the risks

of not being legally protected within an institutional framework. Second, in the case

of child minders being already retired, they receive a pension, possibly supplemented

by their husbands/family income. Hence, they lack the “motivation” to work on a

contract (they describe their salary as a child minder as a “supplementary” income).

Last but not least, sometimes child minders prefer to circumvent the tax and benefit

system. On the one hand, they have an existing bogus labour contract designed to

minimise the burden of taxation, while on the other hand guaranteeing them access to

the social and health security system: this would be at risk if they signed a new work

contract.

Our research reveals that child minders who do not receive a pension

(generally that is the case of 40 or 45 year olds women), and who for different reasons

don’t have the ability or motivation to work abroad, they are tempted to work on the

black market financial reasons (the contract working can pay as little as half) as well

as for social and educational reasons. These women often don’t have the necessary

skills for the complicated papers work that self-employment entails. Furthermore,

sometimes these women lack the culture of paying contributions to the Government

and the society as a whole. Therefore, unretired child minders working without a

contract are in a very precarious position because their obligations and rights are not

legally protected. More precisely, working without having a contract means they

don’t pay taxes, so they don’t benefit from any social security – retirement, health,

paid leaves, etc. At the same time, they can be fired at any moment, and their holidays

depend entirely on the decisions of the family who hired them. Moreover, in most

cases, the volume of work provided remains proportional to the amount received per

month (for a higher amount child minders agree to do other activities not related to

raising and educating children - housekeeping, shopping, etc.).

In post communist Romania the social and cultural representations concerning

“care” determine families to choose a certain type of childcare, but also child minders

to take care of children in a certain way. Child minders embody these representations

and values in their every day working life. In a country as Romania it is considered

that it is in the very best interest of the child to be raise and educated by the mother or

by the other family members rather than by child care institutions (especially when it

! 35!

is about babies). Therefore the legal regulation of child minding is hindered by the

fact that not only families but also child minders consider themselves as being a part

of the family ("in the absence of the mother, I am mother", “I feel home at their

place”, etc.). In other words, child minders develop an affective dimension, which

doesn’t exist within other types of care services.

Considerations on improving the legal framework regarding the status of

child minders

As we have already underlined so far, it is essential to take into account at

least three elements in order to find a legal solution allowing the development of

public policies providing child-minders a legal socio-professional status:

1. The levels of education and the socioeconomic status of the social actors

who do this job (entirely women within our sample).

First, the legal status should be easier to access; as shown, attaining self-employed

status (PFA) requires legal and economic knowledge, which often our interviewees do

not have. Second, the Romanian tax system should incentivise those not working

under a legal contract to chose regulated work by decreasing the tax burden for the

low paid.

Based on this research, these are some recommendations:

- An information campaign on the benefits of the working under legal

contract for child-minders: medical insurance, pension contributions,

holiday entitlement, protection guaranteed by the Labour Code, such as

weekly maximum working time;

- The conversion of this profession into a public instrument of childcare

provision and work-life balance: granting financial aid to parents who

make use of the services of a child-minder under a legal contract (means

tested as in France);

- Developing and integrating both child care policies and work-life balance

policies: a coherent long term plan for future child care policies for

working parents. This necessitates a fundamental review of parental leave

policies, equal opportunities policies in the labour market, governmental

funding of public nursery, encouraging child-care alternatives.

! 36!

2. The fact that child-minding belong to a special category, often described

as a “labour of love”;

Policy makers should always take into account the cultural meanings related to

family and parental roles (especially mother’s) whenever drafting new legislation

regarding child minder’s work. Overemphasising the importance of the family

environment (especially the need for the mother to be the prime care giver), ongoing

negative public perceptions of state nurseries, costs relatively equivalent between

private nurseries and child-minders’ services, all these factors encourage parents to

opt for a child-minder’s services.

Entering this profession into the COR (The Register of Professions) should

also include some set competencies that all child minders must hold and should be the

minimum standard for any child-minder training institution. European funds can be a

generous and useful financial resource if proposed projects include objectives and

indicators which are defined by policy makers who take into account integrated public

policies regarding child care, WLB and gender equality.

3. The profession of child-minders depends on both family childcare needs

and public provisions of childcare.

This research reveals that families who make use of child-minders services

usually have a high level of education (university degree or beyond), an active

professional status (both partners have time demanding jobs) as well as a high

economic status (they can afford to pay the salary of a child minder).

Statistical analysis at national level should be carried out to determine the

number of families who make use of various forms of child-care. Also, policy makers

should be more coherent in their approach regarding childcare. Any policy/action that

encourages children to be looked after at home (which is usually done by the mother)

should also be balanced with a push towards greater gender equality within the labour

market. Furthermore, any expansion and development of public provision would

encourage both mothers and fathers to participate in the labour market. This would

definitively contribute to the conversion of the work of child-minders as a profession

into a public instrument of childcare.

! 37!

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