Launched in December 2018, the Advancing Personal and Household Services project (Ad-PHS) was recently the frame of two workshops organized by EFFE, being actively involved into the project: one in Madrid on June 25, the second in Paris on 1st of July.
As a reminder, the main objective of the Ad-PHS project is to create a single point of contact to support, guide and provide advice to European public authorities in the development of their dedicated PHS policies.
At European level, Personal and Household Services (PHS) refer to a wide range of activities that contribute to the well-being of families and individuals in their homes: childcare, long-term care of the elderly and disabled people, housekeeping, tutoring, DIY, gardening, computer assistance, etc.
By bringing together key European stakeholders together, the Ad-PHS project aims first to improve the theoretical and practical understanding of PHS policies, including their diversity, among EU Member States. In a second step, the project will develop common instruments, such as guidelines and a single European platform.
Feed backs on the Spanish Seminar
EFFE together with AESPD, the Spanish association for personal services organized on June 25 in Madrid the national Ad-PHS seminar. Taking place at the Representation of the European Commission in Spain, it gathered numerous Spanish institutional and civil society actors.
Participants thus completed and validated the country fiche while insisting on the specificity of the Spanish sector. The “care” component falls under the scope of the 2006 Dependency Act, which structures both workers and employers’ organizations. The non-care component falls under the 2012 Royal Decree. Participants also discussed two good practices around the round tables on social dialogue and voucher systems.
Feed backs on the French Seminar
The workshop organized in Paris was organized around the study and debate around two best practices identified in the French legal and legislative landscape in PHS: structures dedicated to social dialogue and development of digital platforms accessible to sector stakeholders useful for its consolidation.
Organized in the premises of IPERIA L’Institut, the workshop brought together a panel of experts and specialists, including Julien Jourdan, Director General of the Federation for Personal Services (FEDESAP), Mehdi Tibourtine, Legal Director of the Federation of Private Services (FESP), and Stéphane Fustec, Federal Secretary of the CGT and President of the National Joint Council for Social Dialogue (CNPDS) for the social dialogue component. Adrien Gauthier, Head of Communication and Partnerships at ACOSS, Didier Humbert, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ogust, a personal services management software, and Alexis Deneux, Founder of home care software Top-Webgroup, for their part, discussed the themes of digital platforms in PHS.
The two round tables showed that home employment sector suffers from a lack of attractiveness, notably due to a low salary base, insufficient staff turnover due to its aging, and sometimes complicated social dialogue induced by a lack of sufficient prerogatives for trade unions, particularly in the area of vocational training. The aspects of health and safety at work benefit from substantial progress allowing a better coverage of occupational safety and health and sickness of the workers in the exercise of their professional functions in their employer’s private home but also workplace. The collective agreement for home employment sector remains a strong enough security lever to ensure good negotiations between the social partners in the sector.
As for the digital aspects, the facilitation of work declaration procedures, such as the digitization of the CESU system, has allowed greater security of the employment relationship and simplification of administrative procedures for employers. Such powerful management tools, such as Ogust, ultimately provide margins of efficiency, thus productivity and investment towards more profitability.
However, competition between the various platforms set up by public authorities, particularly local and regional authorities can prove to be a hindrance to their good efficiency.
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A social Europe that works for every home