Live-in care on trial: The failed promise of solidarity in European care governance

Although public debate casts the European care crisis as a demographic challenge and a labour shortage, its deeper causes lie in the erosion of solidaristic commitments within welfare regimes. While international human rights law and EU human rights frameworks proclaim commitments to dignity, equality and decent work, the rights of migrant live-in care workers remain largely symbolic, undermined by fragmented regulation, weak enforcement and institutionalized ambiguity. This paper advances the human rights perspective on care grounded in solidarity, one that could reconfigure EU governance of care beyond the precarious commodification of migrant labour. It approaches the care crisis as a governance crisis and analyses how solidarity operates both as a legitimizing discourse and as a hollowed-out principle within European welfare regimes. Through the socio-legal analysis of the 2021 German Federal Labour Court judgment in the case of Ms Dobrina Alekseva, a Bulgarian live-in caregiver whose claim for unpaid wages exposed the limits of legal recognition, the paper traces how human rights are enacted and contested across legal, policy and intimate domains of care. The discussed case illustrates that current regimes can sustain a form of de-solidarization in which rights remain largely symbolic, and in care relations, care workers bear the greatest risks.