Volume 62, Issue 3

By analyzing data from the European Labor Force Survey 2011 (EU LFS), we assess whether care work is always poorly paid or whether this only applies for particular occupations or countries. Our analyses of four different occupational groups in the sections education, child-care, health-care, and nursing across 21 countries show that assistant positions in the social service sector are indeed poorly paid. In contrast, specialist professionals in social services mostly earn higher wages than employees with similar qualification profiles. Cross-country differences in care workers’ relative income have to do with the composition of the care workforce. After controlling for key individual level demographic and work characteristics, we find that country differences in care workers’ relative income – particularly for nonprofessionals and aides – are related to social expenditures, collective bargaining coverage, and the size of the informal sector.

In Germany, the public employment service partially contracts out job placement services to private providers. Do the private provider’s characteristics or the contract design or remuneration influence the job searcher’s probability to be placed into a new job? To answer these questions we analyze unique administrative data of the Federal Employment Agency with cox proportional hazard regressions. Job searchers have a higher propensity to be placed into a new job by a private provider when the provider is a non-profit organization or when the private provider had above-average placement rates in the past. Result-oriented remuneration of providers, such as “no-cure, no pay” and “nocure, less pay” models and contract elements that allow enhancing quality, positively influence the propensity to obtain a job.

Due to demographic change and pluralizing ways of life, many of Germany’;s deceased nowadays do not have next of kin who are willing to bury them. Usually, their burials are carried out by public order offices (POO). Based on an analysis of a random sample (N = 66) of data on POO-burials in German cities with more than 20.000 inhabitants, the first part of the article concludes that POO-burials have increased significantly during the period from 1994 to 2013. The statistical analysis also shows that men are almost two times more likely to be buried by a POO than women. The second part of the article analyses four typical situations that result in a POO-burial. It shows that the burial law’s implicit assumptions about the structure of the social fabric are way too undifferentiated nowadays. This mismatch produces a series of normative difficulties and extremely problematic practices.