IG24 – Representing migrant live-in caregivers in Austria
To alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 policies, many initiatives have been developed by civil society organisations – NGOs, local governments, or citizens. A team of national researchers from the RESISTIRÉ project has collected and highlighted a set of particularly relevant initiatives in 27 European countries and in Iceland, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These Better Stories cover eight specific domains: gender-based violence, the labour market, the economy, gender-pay and pension gaps, gender care gaps, decision-making and politics, environmental justice, human and fundamental rights.
This Better Story was collected by Elisabeth Anna Guenther and Annika Martin.
What is IG24?
The Interessengemeinschaft der 24-Stunden-Betreuer_innen (IG24) is a self-organised, non-partisan association which aims to represent the interests of migrant live-in caregivers in Austria.
The initiative is born out of the collaboration of Iniciativa24, the association of Slovakian carers, and DREPT, the association of Romanian carers. As an umbrella organisation, it supports bottom up, self-organised initiatives of caregivers.
A wide range of activities
IG24 offers legal counselling for carers in their mother tongue and engages in community building, networking activities and lobbying.
This interest group lobbies for live-in caregivers as a professional group. As they are considered self-employed, migrant carers often lack autonomy and are dependent on agencies, which act as an intermediate between care recipients in Austria and caregivers.
The group recently filed a legal case to fight bogus self-employment; it remains to be seen if the court will indeed take on it and open a case.
Currently, IG24 has two specific projects running:
- one project establishing digital counselling and information videos in the language spoken by many migrant live0in carers
- the second one in collaboration with LEFO-IBF titled ‘care4care’; this project focusses on how to improve the working situation for live-in caregivers and their working rights.
Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash