Care on the Margins: Centring the experiences of marginalised and/or minoritised working carers and parents across Europe

This thesis examines how working carers across Europe combine paid employment with unpaid care, and why formal work-life balance policies fail to create equal opportunities. Working carers include parents and people caring for elderly, disabled, or dependent individuals. The thesis argues that care is not private or marginal, but central to social reproduction, citizenship, and working life. Using the Capability Approach, it shifts attention from formal rights and labour market outcomes to carers’ real opportunities to organise work and care. It also applies an intersectional perspective to show how income, migration background, racialisation, care intensity, literacy, and local context shape carers’ ability to convert support into usable arrangements. The research question asks how care-related social policies and community contexts shape marginalised and/or minoritised working carers’ capabilities across national settings. The thesis demonstrates that policy support does not automatically improve carers’ lives. Its effectiveness depends on whether carers can access, understand, coordinate, and use services, benefits, leave arrangements, and local support in practice. Chapter 2 examines childcare policy for parents of children with complex care needs in England and the Netherlands. It shows that mainstream childcare indicators are built around typically developing children and obscure parent-carers’ barriers. Although both countries have market-based childcare systems, England more strongly embeds inclusion and anti-discrimination principles, while the Dutch system is fragmented and medicalised. Childcare policy must be judged by availability, accessibility, and affordability, not merely formal provision. Chapter 3 shifts from policy design to policy navigation in the Dutch childcare benefit system. Using LISS panel data, it shows that administrative and digital complexity stratify access. Migrant background measured by country of birth does not strongly predict perceived accessibility, but functional and digital literacy do. Parents with stronger bureaucratic and digital skills find benefits easier to access and manage, while non-Dutch language backgrounds face obstacles. The chapter shows how inequality moves from eligibility rules into the hidden labour of navigating welfare systems. Chapter 4 studies community contexts in the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK. It finds that income affects work-life fit largely through community conversion factors, including local relationships and perceived service access. Rural carers experience weaker work-life fit, revealing that local infrastructures and social relations shape carers’ capabilities. Chapter 5 focuses on racially minoritised working carers in the UK. Based on interviews in London and Leeds, it shows that carers’ choices are shaped by moral obligations, family norms, racialisation, labour market insecurity, and institutional barriers. Many sustain care through relational labour and commitment rather than genuine freedom among supported options. The thesis’s central contribution is its claim that work-care inequalities are not primarily produced by individual preferences, poor coping, or lack of effort. They are socially and institutionally produced through unequal convertibility. Formal policies require carers to absorb burdens of coordination, administration, uncertainty, and fragmented provision. This burden falls most heavily on carers positioned at the margins. The thesis therefore calls for welfare states to treat care as a collective social responsibility and to design accessible, coordinated, inclusive, and genuinely usable support.