If caring begins at home, who cares for the carers? Introducing the Global Care Policy Index

Abstract

Despite attempts to bring the plight of domestic care providers to the attention of policymakers, there continues to be inadequate regulatory protections for unpaid family caregivers and paid domestic workers. This article introduces the Global Care Policy Index (GCPI), an original scoring system for care-policy comparisons. The GCPI aims to achieve two objectives: first, to systematically assess how states' domestic-care provider protections match up to International Labour Organization policy benchmarks, and second, to incentivise states to improve their policy protections for care providers in the domestic sphere by harnessing their competitive instincts to improve their GCPI score. This article outlines the design and methodology behind the index's construction and reports the findings from the pilot phase of the project where 29 countries' care-provider policy protections were scored. The pilot highlighted key gaps in policy protections for both unpaid family caregivers and paid domestic workers and outlined areas where carework scholars and activists can focus their efforts. In this manner, the GCPI offers a quantitative assessment of a country's care-provider protections, allowing for fast and direct care-policy comparisons between countries in the same region or with the same developmental status.