Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 53 
Domestic work is work performed within households to provide services mainly for consumption by 
household members. Domestic workers perform household and personal services  in one or more 
different homes.87 Approximately 9.5 million people  work as domestic workers, 6.3 million declared 
and approximately 3.5 million undeclared. 88 In general these workers suffer from precarious working 
and employment conditions. EU -OSHA described —  based on the opinion of sector experts — the 
biggest deficits regarding technical support for better working conditions as follows:   
• ‘PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) : that covers a large number of conditions encountered 
by PHS (Personal and Household Services) workers and intended to prevent possible 
occupational accidents in the sector; 
• Equipment: that meets ergonomic requirements and increases work efficiency;  
• Products: taking into account medical health (skin disorders, lung problems, etc.), the 
environment and the effectiveness of products’.89 
Care work in private homes can be a mixture of short-term and repeated mobile work at the home of 
clients but also fully residential at the home of the care receiver. Of all care workers , 71% worked in 
residential care and 29% worked in non‐ residential care, that is, they worked at the homes of the care 
receiver; 81% of all care workers are female. The number of care workers grew from 4.7 million in 2009 
to 6.3 m illion in 2019 and made up  3.2% of the entire EU workforce in 2019, ranging from 0.3% in 
Greece to 7.1% in Sweden. 90 Twenty-nine per cent  of these 6.3 m illion care workers do their work at 
the clients’ places, this makes roughly 1.8 million workers.  
Eurofound has analysed the working conditions in long-term care (or LTC), that is, the support and 
care for a long-term or permanent care receiver, not only for some days or weeks to overcome a specific 
short-term emergency.91 They summarise: 
• LTC workers often report that they do not believe they will be able to keep working until the age 
of 60.  
• LTC workers often do shift work, in particular rotating shifts, and feel that they have no say in 
their working arrangements; they are often requested to come to work at short notice. Evening, 
night and weekend work is particularly frequent in residential LTC.  
• Two‐fifths (40%) of LTC workers report lifting or moving people more than three‐quarters of the 
time (compared with 5% of all workers and 23% in healthcare). 
Live-in care is a special form where the carer lives permanently in the house or flat of the care receiver. 
Eurostat data are not available but national estimates are available for some countries; the estimate for 
Italy is 160,000 and for Germany 300,000.92  
Overviews of the quantity of ICT -based mobile work 93 demonstrate that such schemes exist in many 
enterprises and workplaces, particularly for clerical, managerial and professional tasks. For a large 
share of clerical workers, it has become —  latest with the push of  the 2020/2021 pandemic — a usual 
way of working. The highest proportions of workers with arrangements for ICT mobile work are found 
int the following sectors:  information and communication (57% of workers in the sector), followed by 
professional and scientific activities (53%), financial services (43%), real estate (43%) and public 
administration (30%).  
Which working conditions characterise these groups of home workers and mobile workers and different 
types of work from, at and in homes?  
As mentioned before, the principal question for all these types of non -stationary work is: to which 
degree does the OSH level at these workplaces at home or mobile deviate from the OSH level at 
stationary workplaces ? And which of these deviations are unavo idable, and where are better 
OSH solutions possible?  
Main issues are: