Ten hours: This is the average working time of childminders working for private employers, observed by sociologists Geneviève Cresson, François-Xavier Devetter and Julie Lazès. This means that half of them exceed this duration every day. At 8 a.m., 77% of private employer childminders are at work, compared to 51% of all French employees. At 6:15 p.m., the majority of them (54%) are still hard at work, compared to a quarter of all workers.

In 2019, the weekly working hours of childminders was 41 hours 45, while the average working hours of workers was 32 hours 25. Even if their working hours seem colossal, they are only the emerging part of the “iceberg”. While these 390,000 professionals who care for children under 3 (97% women) enable parents to better balance their work and private lives, they cannot claim to do so.

In her contribution to the scientific communication project “What do we know about work?” by Interdisciplinary laboratory for public policy assessment (Liepp), distributed in collaboration with Presses de Sciences Po on the Jobs channel The side Lemonde.frThe three researchers from the Lille Center for Sociological and Economic Studies and Research (Clersé) show that their work regularly extends beyond official opening hours.

This is due to the job-specific status: 80% of the unskilled workers are employed by private individuals. They say they tinker with their schedule every day as demands pile up: the fluctuating needs of children, the schedules demanded by families and compliance with labor laws as they remain employed. However, the law in this regard remains flexible, so that the maximum 48 hours per week can be exceeded with the written consent of the assistant.

Hard working conditions

In addition to the calculated working hours, there are four “free”, invisible and barely recognized forms of overtime that the unskilled workers still have to do. Firstly, the renewal of contracts (which regularly end when the child goes back to school) and the permanent flexibility of timetables depending on families’ decisions. In addition, the latter do not always respect the times at which they drop off or pick up their children.

In addition to these constraints, there is also the maintenance of the apartment as a workplace for the childminders and administrative activities such as managing one’s own payroll. “It’s a job where you never stop”describes one of the employees interviewed by sociologists.

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