On 18 June 2026, at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam, the Netherlands marked a founding moment for its domestic work sector: the official launch of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers, the country’s first association representing employers of domestic workers. The event, titled “Time for responsibility: employers of domestic work, let’s organise!“, brought together household employers, domestic workers, researchers, trade unions and policymakers to discuss how a fair and sustainable domestic work sector can be built in the Netherlands.
For a sector that has long been characterised by informality and an absence of representative structures, the creation of this association is a milestone. It provides, for the first time, an organised employer voice able to engage in dialogue with workers’ organisations and public authorities, and to contribute to a system of rights and responsibilities that reflects the realities faced by households, workers and policymakers alike.
More than one million households in the Netherlands employ someone to clean, care or help at home. The sector comprises an estimated 150,000 domestic workers, together with 80,000 “alfahelpers” — home helpers operating under a simplified, semi-formal status — and 50,000 workers remunerated through the persoonsgebonden budget (PGB), a personal care budget enabling dependent individuals to directly employ and pay their own carers. Altogether, the sector is estimated to represent €2.5 billion a year, with demand expected to rise further as a result of population ageing and the growth of dual-income households.
This scale, however, stands in contrast with the limited regulatory framework governing the sector. Domestic employment in the Netherlands is governed by the Regeling Dienstverlening aan Huis, a scheme originally designed to encourage declared employment by exempting household employers from most obligations applicable to standard employers. Under this scheme, an employer is not required to register a worker employed for fewer than four days a week — meaning that regular, including cash-based, payment can take place without a formal contract.
In practice, responsibility for declaring the employment relationship falls on the worker rather than the employer, and formal declaration remains the exception: only 3.2% of household employers fully comply with applicable rules, and just 5% report understanding those rules well enough to comply, despite more than half stating that they wish to do so. Even where employment is fully declared, worker protection remains limited, with no unemployment insurance, no employer-funded pension, and only six weeks of sick pay compared to two years in other sectors.
This regulatory gap also has a migration dimension. For undocumented migrant workers excluded from the formal labour market, domestic work remains one of the few sources of income available to them, even though it offers no pathway to legal residence. It is within this context that the Netherlands has, to date, not ratified ILO Convention 189 on decent work for domestic workers, an advisory committee having concluded that instances of abuse were limited in the country while acknowledging that the current framework does not guarantee domestic workers equal treatment with other employees. These are questions that concern labour law as much as migration policy, and ones that, until now, have been debated largely without organised employer representation.
The evening was structured to move progressively from context to comparison to action. It opened with Tesseltje de Lange, professor of European migration law at Radboud University and herself a household employer, who introduced the practical questions many employers face without adequate guidance: how to draw up a proper contract, how to manage payment during a worker’s holiday, or what to do in the event of a workplace accident.
Leontine Bijleveld, legal expert on the position of domestic workers in the Netherlands, and Freek Janmaat, of the European Commission, then set out the legal and historical context: the position of domestic work under Dutch law, the reasons behind the non-ratification of ILO Convention 189, and the broader urgency of the sector within the European care agenda.
The core of the evening was dedicated to international experience. Representatives of FEPEM (France), Assindatcolf/FIDALDO (Italy) and Grupo SSI (Spain) presented how employer representation had been built in their respective countries.
The evening then turned to the official presentation of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers, introduced by its founding team: Tesseltje de Lange, Marijke Bijl, an advocate with long-standing engagement in support of undocumented migrant workers, Elena Mataix Caballero, sociologist and researcher specialising in organising and migration, and Myrthe van der Staay, anthropologist and documentary-maker, the latter two both with backgrounds in migrant domestic worker collectives.
The final segment addressed the next steps for social dialogue in the sector. Malu Villanueva, of FNV’s Migrant Domestic Workers Union, presented the challenges faced by domestic workers under current legislation and the union’s expectations of an organised employers’ association. EFFE’s Aude Boisseuil responded, after which speakers — including a representative of the Municipality of Amsterdam — discussed how workers, employers and public authorities could build a lasting partnership going forward.
The launch of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers takes place against the backdrop of the 2026 PHS Employment Monitor, published earlier this year by the European social partners in Personal and Household Services — EFFAT, EFFE, EFSI and UNI Europa. Conducted across 36 European and neighbouring countries and gathering more than 10,700 responses from workers, users, user-employers and provider organisations, the Monitor provides the most extensive comparative evidence base on the sector to date.
Its findings speak directly to the situation observed in the Netherlands. Affordability and administrative complexity remain the two principal drivers of undeclared work: eight in ten household employers report that the cost of PHS is at least a minor concern, and close to a third of those who consider undeclared work sometimes justified cite the complexity of declaring it as a key reason. At the same time, the Monitor finds that only 27.9% of respondents are represented by an employers’ organisation engaged in social dialogue, while a further three in ten believe such representation could be beneficial — pointing to substantial, largely untapped potential for employer organisation across the continent.
Perhaps most significantly, institutional recognition of the sector emerges as the clearest and most consistent demand across all stakeholder groups surveyed — workers, employers, users and user-employers alike. Respondents in the Netherlands and beyond describe a sector whose social and economic value remains insufficiently reflected in public policy, social protection and public investment. These findings were further discussed at the launch of the Monitor in Brussels on 15 June 2026, where policymakers, social partners and researchers examined how the report’s conclusions can feed into the ongoing development of a European Care Deal.
The launch of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers should therefore be read not as an isolated national development, but as a direct and concrete response to a structural gap identified across Europe: the absence, in most countries, of organised employer representation capable of engaging on equal footing with trade unions and public authorities.
EFFE — the European Federation for Family Employment & Home Care — co-organised the 18 June event as part of BUILD, a project co-funded by the European Union. BUILD aims to strengthen social dialogue and collective bargaining in labour-intensive sectors — including personal services, social care, personal and household services, and private security — by building the organisational capacity of both employers and trade unions, with a particular focus on countries where industrial relations remain weak or fragmented. Through national capacity-building events, sectoral observatories and transnational exchange, the project supports the development of sustainable structures for dialogue and contributes to the implementation of the European Pillar of Social Rights.
Social dialogue functions only where both sides of the employment relationship are organised and present. At EU level, this principle underpins the work of the European Sectoral Social Dialogue in Personal and Household Services, which EFFE has been helping to establish since 2022. Yet across Europe, the sector remains one of the least structured in terms of collective bargaining: despite employing an estimated 4% of the European workforce, the PHS sector has produced only two collective bargaining agreements across the whole of Europe. This scarcity reflects, above all, the absence of representative structures on both the employer and the worker side in most Member States.
Frameworks negotiated without employer input tend to protect one side of the employment relationship while leaving the other exposed, confused, or unintentionally non-compliant — a dynamic clearly illustrated by the compliance figures observed in the Netherlands. Conversely, as the experience of FEPEM, FIDALDO and Grupo SSI demonstrates, organised employer representation has, over time, enabled the negotiation of supplementary social protections, professional training frameworks and occupational health provisions that benefit workers directly. The Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers now becomes a further national building block in this European effort, strengthening the sector’s collective capacity to engage in social dialogue at both national and EU level.
The creation of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers marks the beginning, not the conclusion, of a process. EFFE will continue to support the association as it builds its organisational structure, expands its membership, and establishes a lasting dialogue with FNV, the Municipality of Amsterdam, and national authorities. More information on the association and its work is available on its website.
EFFE also intends to draw on this experience to encourage the emergence of similar employer organisations in other European countries where, today, no such representation exists. Strengthening representative structures for household employers across the continent is a necessary condition for protecting both employers and workers, improving working conditions and access to affordable services, and securing greater recognition of the sector at national and European level.
EFFE thanks Tesseltje de Lange and the founding team of the Vereniging Huishoudelijk Werkgevers for their work in bringing this initiative to fruition; our member organisations across Europe for generously sharing their experience and expertise on that evening; Malu Villanueva and FNV for their constructive engagement; Leontine Bijleveld and Freek Janmaat for setting out the legal and European context; and the household employers who attended the event and expressed their willingness to organise.