They are calling a three-day strike to denounce the “alarming precariousness” in a service that the City Council has outsourced
We have decided that enough is enough. It cannot be that we are getting worse, with more precariousness, and precisely when there is so much talk about care and the feminization of poverty.” A worker from Barcelona’s home care service, made up of 4,000 workers (mostly women), who cares for the most vulnerable people and which the City Council has outsourced to private companies, is speaking. A point, the latter, which has generated controversy in the last two awards: in 2016, two commercial companies linked to Sacyr and ACS (Valoriza and Clece) they ousted the NGO Associació Benestar i Desarrollo (ABD) and kept the service in two of the four zones into which Barcelona is divided. And in 2020, these two companies were ousted by Servisar, a subsidiary of the Domusvi group, whose majority shareholder is the Intermediate Capital Group (ICG) fund, with subsidiaries on the island of Jersey . This generated discomfort because the City Council has approved since 2016 that contractors should not have an economic or financial relationship with countries considered tax havens. But Jersey, which has traditionally been considered a haven, is not included in the EU’s list of non-cooperative territories for tax purposes. And the award went ahead and reopened the debate between social entities about the convenience of”leaving care out of market logic” .
