They are alongside a grandmother at the end of her life. They give their time for a disabled brother, a sick sister. Caregivers, caregivers would be between 8 and 11 million in France. And the month of carers has just been launched this week to highlight them, but also to better inform them of their rights. How can we restore a fair place to the elderly in our society and to the people who help them? The reflection of Jean Viard, sociologist and research director at the CNRS.
Between eight and 11 million caregivers in France and 60% of them have a job. Employees who most of the time, say the studies, do not dare to tell their boss.
franceinfo: Why is this subject so taboo in our society?
John Viard: I don’t really know if it’s taboo, but I think helping old parents feels like the most normal thing in the world. We do not say that we are helping when we take care of our children. Afterwards, it’s a little different with disabled children, because it’s very demanding. I think people are afraid that their boss will say to themselves: “this one is not going to invest in his job, so I’m not keeping”. I think basically that’s it.
But what is true is that life has lengthened by 20 years since the last war, of course, young retirees, they generally still have parents. This is the first time in the history of France that this has happened. Before, at 65, we had lost our parents 15 or 20 years ago. We lose our parents on average at 63 years old. It’s the first time we’ve been in this situation.
The pandemic has put the old back at the center of society. Because deep down, why did we fight for two years? But to save the old, the fat and the sick, if I put quotation marks around these words. So it’s an extremely humanist period: we put the elderly back in the center, and I think that’s going to mark societies.
The paradox is that these caregivers often feel very alone, abandoned in particular by the public authorities. So, what remains of the Covid crisis?
The Covid crisis will change our lives for a long time. So, immediately like that, there remains the electric car, the 15% tax on large companies, teleworking which has changed the lives of almost 30% of French people. There are still a lot of things and in particular telework, it makes it possible to reconstitute families in the geographical sense of the term.
The dominant word of the pandemic is the word close. We got closer to relatives, and we got closer in space. I think we need a policy to precisely promote generational solidarity, we need to reconstitute the family in the territory to promote solidarity, but easy solidarity. If you have your old parents in the same building as you, you spend 10 minutes every day, you bring the bread, the newspaper, three jokes, you change the broken bulb. He We really need to reconstitute a society of social ties around the family.
Since the war, social housing has been removed, the HBMs, before the HLMs, which were low-rent, cheap. At the time, a room was planned for the elderly parents. And little by little, in the 1950s and 1960s, we moved out of HBMs, moved out into farms. It was the state that financed the relocation on the farms, because otherwise the young women no longer wanted to stay in agriculture, if in fact their real job was to be a full-time helper, often two old couples. That was the reality!
I think with the great pandemic, it’s time we put a family back together. We are not all going to live together, but that geographical proximity in the near – being able to go and see each other during the day on foot – becomes a criterion for the development of society and therefore of solidarity.