Abstract

Legally qualified as self-employed, home educational childcare providers (HECPs) in Quebec operate in a hybrid zone between wage employment and selfemployment. While the majority of the elements of their work organisation is determined from the outside, they are one of the few groups of self-employed workers with access to social protection. This exists under a special sectorbased regime of collective bargaining between trade unions and the State. To grasp the complexities of their work and employment conditions, the paper evaluates HECPs through the lens of social labour relation. SLR is defined as the relation between workers and any entity likely to control their conditions of work and employment. The article analyses the socio-historical construction of successive patterns of SLR for HECPs, showing that they operate not only in a hybrid zone between wage employment and self-employment, but also in a «grey» zone of recomposition of norms, under the pressure of multiple interacting actors The first aspect concerns the blurring of the identity of employer through the multiplicity of entities whose action controls and structures various dimensions of the SLR. The second aspect derives from the hybrid nature of the legal framework of collective bargaining, which offers real potential for improving HECPs’ conditions of work and employment, along with important limitations and ambiguities.