Digitalisation and Older Family Home Care Workers in Belgium and Hungary: When Ethical Debates Erase Age at Work
摘要
The aim of this chapter is to compare the use of digitalisation among older workers in the home care sector in French-speaking Belgium and Hungary. The care sector tends to have an over-representation of lower-skilled women, with a high proportion of older workers among care workers. Digitalisation can bring benefits to the workplace, such as the possibility of reducing workload or enabling more effective consultation, but it can also pose challenges for older workers. The chapter seeks to understand how digitalisation impacts and challenges everyday working practices of caregiving, especially for older workers, in two different countries and organisational contexts. What are the digital requirements that the work environment places on workers, and to what extent are institutional rules used to accommodate digital technologies? From the data collected using qualitative methods, we illustrate that beyond age-related technological implementation, ethical debates are emerging around the regulation of the sector in both Belgium and Hungary.