ON TRUST IN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS - THE CASE OF CHILD-MINDERS

In many employment relationships, the employer and the employee are both vulnerable. The vulnerabilities can be alleviated if both parties agree to trust each other and not to harm each other. Following Mauss and Lindenberg, in the article a framework is developed to analyze trust in employment relationships. It is argued that to gain the trust of the employee, employers make relational signals, and that the employee accepts these signals by showing motivation, commitment, loyalty and endurance in his job. From this framework, hypotheses have been derived about wages and allocation in the informal labour market of child-minders. It is demonstrated that employers with high incomes use monetary rewards to govern the employment relationship, especially with better educated child-minders. Strong indications have been found that employers with low incomes use other means, such as homogeneity and social exchange, to bind their child-minder.