The pandemic highlighted the centrality of care. COVID-19 heightened awareness of the myriad forms of social connections in care as essential work crucial to the functioning of society. Care work has never been so visible, yet so precarious and vulnerable. Disruptions due to COVID made visible the web of social relationships of care and revealed the vulnerabilities of care recipients and caregivers. Abundant evidence disclosed the disproportionately negative consequences of COVID-19 on women, particularly women of color, migrants, and refugees, both as essential care workers and as recipients of care. The pandemic also revealed the limitations of care systems, exacerbating the care crisis worldwide with a greater impact in vulnerable territories. This project seeks to uncover and understand the fragmented and uncoordinated matrix of care provision, and the resultant overlapping, inconsistent and at times competing polices and regulations. Rebuilding a robust and more resilient care organization requires a comprehensive understanding of the care economy and entails learning from innovative initiatives in different countries. Our transnational team, extending previous comparative research networks, will bring together experts on care studies to analyze countries with differing welfare regimes, level of inequalities, social organization of care, and health systems in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, United Kingdom and United States to explain responses and capacities to cope with the crisis. Comparisons will proceed along four main axes: (i)The impact of the pandemic on needs and modalities of care provision. Axis 1 explores how different types of families deal with the challenges imposed both by the usual care needs and by increasing demands during the pandemic. We will survey alternative methodologies to organize national databases to identify the existing connections between kinship, economic activities, transfers of time dedicated to care and the strategies for hiring paid domestic workers. (ii)Labor conditions and rights in a post pandemic world. Axis 2 carries out a cross-country survey in partnership with collective organizations of paid care workers in the 6 countries. It aims to assess the employment conditions, health, and well-being, pre- and during the pandemic, encompassing the diversity of occupational groups that fall into the definition of care workers. In parallel with the survey, qualitative studies will focus on experiences of different workers in paid care pre- and during the pandemic. (iii)Care as a strategic dimension and pillar for public policies on social infrastructure rebuilding. Axis 3 proposes a strategy for analyzing the infrastructure of care systems and care-related policies and will deepen understanding of state responses to the pandemic, an essential issue for building back better more resilient care systems post-COVID. We will examine two main components required for re-building care in the future: social infrastructure and the policy matrix. Comparison across cities and countries will provide a more precise mapping of distinctly different care systems anchored in a multi-scalar approach. (iv)Caring strategies when the state fails. Axis 4 will focus on different forms of vulnerability and the role of collective action to overcome them, by means of in-depth qualitative studies in vulnerable areas of different metropolises. Since vulnerability doesn´t just stem from poverty, we will also analyze inequalities in access to care that come from stigmatization and discrimination by sexual orientation or cultural/religious background. We will share preliminary findings with care workers and key stakeholders from the co-designed research and promote workshops to collect feedback and prepare policy briefs for each country. Public engagement activities will disseminate results and policy recommendations. Anonymized findings will be presented at national and international conferences and published.

This project pursues themes developed by researchers with extensive experience collaborating in research projects. Through the prism of a circumscribed empirical object in the two national contexts – ride-sharing drivers and delivery workers whose work is intermediated by digital platforms, their working and living conditions and their inscription in the local territory– we question the classical forms of precariousness and informality. We interrogate the regulation of this emerging labour market figure, by mobilising the heuristic approach of grey zones, which refer to alternative regulatory dynamics which are more or less stable, more or less structuring, and whose duration and scope are unknown a priori. This indetermination is at the source of institutionalisation of new norms and explains why it needs to be understood as a complex and uncertain process. Our research focuses on the halo of forms of work, norms and practices regarding this moving empirical object operating in contrasting socio-political contexts. These dynamics shed light on the transformations of work, in their different articulations with social policies and regulatory institutions in relation to workers' practices and struggles. Through this methodological approach, we will reveal the transversal similarities/comparativeness of these processes by looking at working conditions linked to platform work but also to poly-activity for some. To enhance this hypothesis, we will also take into account the living conditions (housing, mobility, etc.) of these workers, without losing sight of the context in which they carry out their activities, but also how this helps to structure the urban circuits they navigate in. Thus, in this broader space, examining the action of stakeholders (institutions, organisations, trade unions, associations, cooperatives, lawyers, experts, academics, etc.), is a central axis of Regreyz&Co insofar as it reflects the dynamics and speed of transformations, especially in the current times of the Covid health crisis. These ramifications of the central object of critical consideration reveal the permanent negotiations around the shifting boundaries of these different categories of action. They are linked by the transformations of representations and work statuses as through practices and struggles. This methodology is based on a socio-historical approach insofar as it sets out the elements of the Brazilian and French contexts and goes further to consider contemporary developments that have a direct impact on work and whose appearance could not be foreseen (in particular, the place that platforms would occupy in the time of Covid-19) at the beginning of 2020. The changing logic of labour legislation in both national contexts were the culmination of trends rooted back to the 1980s - the El Khomri (2016) and urban mobility regulation laws and the Macron ordinances (2017) in France; the labour market reform in Brazil (2017). The consequences on the labour market of these reforms are linked to public decision-makers’ positioning in favour of opening up these new transport sectors in line with the conception of them promoted by the platforms in Brazil and France. The state thereby participates in the production of a grey zone that accelerates the deconstruction of the welfare state, to the point of finding itself, at times, overtaken by the processes underway. The study of the actors of resistance and renewal, around the borders of disputed rights but also in their displacement towards new spaces where the ascendancy of emerging figures is played out, makes it possible to draw a portrait that is both holistic and dynamic of the recodification of work and the grey zones that accompany it. This implies the need to identify new conceptual and comparative typological categories that also highlight the phenomena that escape them which in turn contribute to the constitution of potentially perennial grey zones.