Janice Turner: women as cheap "unskilled" labour (aka carers)

[Lamahaha]

This is a topic dear to my heart. I'm glad it's close to Janice's too.

www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/how-dare-they-call-care-workers-unskilled-b83mzbch9

Does anyone have a share token?
The first job I had after I left school (early 70s, dropped out as was fashionable, thought I knew it all) was in a care home. It did me more good than years of education.

What a fantastic article. I don't have anything particularly to add to the discussion but she's really summed up my thoughts on the matter.

Janice Turner has been on fire recently. She deserves a medal or maybe a crown.

My aunt died recently. She had advanced dementia, so the sadness at her death was mixed with relief that her suffering was over. Her chief carer was at the funeral, and my cousin gave that carer special thanks in his eulogy.

That carer was east European and I'm sure she earns less than the threshold for "skilled" labour, so I don't know if she would be allowed to stay in the UK under current rules. Our priorities are so incredibly skewed.

Sharetoken link.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-dare-they-call-care-workers-unskilled-b83mzbch9?shareToken=888c9c6ca7c93078dcf9c7a432219f78

Goodness, that article brought a lump to my throat...

Whose job is it to do these exhausting, challenging jobs?

As individual women we are taught to refuse. To do instead the work that commands a reward in terms of money or self-actualisation. But we are just passing the problem down the line.

It's not just us women doing that though is it?

Thanks for the sharetoken. V good article, no surprise.

It's not just women who are care workers, but they are the majority. Unpaid care work for elderly or sick family members is mostly but not exclusively done by women. And life expectancy means that women are more likely to need care.

So although these issues affect both men and women, they tend to affect women more. I guess that makes care work a feminist issue?

It's not just women who are care workers, but they are the majority. Unpaid care work for elderly or sick family members is mostly but not exclusively done by women. And life expectancy means that women are more likely to need care.

I cared for my husband at home for six years as he slowly slipped into dementia and his mobility worsened. In the end he was like a big baby, double incontinent and practically incoherent. We were in the UK at the time. I have to say, the NHS were fantastic, even though we were both not UK citizens (both EU). The day he could no longer stand on his legs, they immediately transferred him to a care home. It wasn't free; our finances were always assessed and we had to pay a contribution for home care but it was refunded from his insurance from his home country.
However that no longer was the case with a care home so I had to take him back home, where home care was mostly covered. There, the main carer in the nursing home was male and he was excellent.

At the same time my mother had entered her nineties far across the ocean. She was intellectually alert and very sharp, but physically grew weaker and weaker.

She too had a male carer. He was a young man she had known all her life and she adored him and trusted him absolutely. He was fantastic. She lived alone and he would come early every morning and look after her every need; a mother could not have done better!

It was an impossible situation for me though, being responsible for someone needing care on two continents (I am an only child). I had to stay with my husband but my son moved country and moved in with his grandma just for her to have a family member nearby. Her carer was with her till the end. He would carry her about the place in his arms, upstairs and downstairs.

He was actually with her when she died. I'll always be grateful to him we are still in contact and when I finally get money from the sale of her house he will be getting a pretty sum. He came from a very poor and disadvantaged background and I believe he is even illiterate. But such a good fellow.

But those are the exceptions. Usually it's women doing the hard work.

In my experience any job traditionally done by women is undervalued and underpaid.

When my daughter was a child I had to get an Irish dancing costume made for her. I was a SAHM mother at the time so did the embroidery. It took me four months of fulltime dedication to the job, but I could have paid a woman the equivalent of one week's wages to produce a much better job than I did in a month.

I suppose I was thinking of it from a feminist viewpoint.

I would generally be held to be a 'better' feminist if I abandoned caring tasks to focus on my career. Or could feminism mean doing the caring yourself?

Why does work only have an economic value if someone is doing it without a loving relationship being involved?

If we're talking about carers specifically then women are undoubtedly overepresented. However, if we're including general unskilled labour like factory work and manual labour then I'm not so sure.

I agree with everything she wrote.

Care work is absolutely, 100% a feminist issue, it's just we need to spell out that a big reason for this is that men don't anything like a representative amount of it and we don't expect them to. In any context. It is made women's problem.

It's a feminist issue that women make up the majority of care workers and that it's underpaid, it's a feminist issue that we think differently about paid and unpaid care. It's also a feminist issue that it is seen as our responsibility not men's, however it is organised. And Janice does touch on this in the article when she mentioned males asking why she doesn't 'just' look after her mother herself. When we talk about how we, ie women, are passing the job down the line, we have internalised that sexist expectation.

However, if we're including general unskilled labour

But the carers aren't 'unskilled' , more that they have skills (eg how to care for people near the end of their lives) which aren't the result of formal training.

Maybedoctor asksminteresting question

To me at an individual level the feminsit position women should be able to make the choice to care for someone. They should not feel pressured or guilty about that choice. They should be aware of the societal expectations around their choice. Just like fashion or household management.

Then we need a society that recognised the value of the caring work. Women should not lose out financially as a result of caring. Women should not end up devoting their whole life 24(7 to that caring. That really means breaking down the capitalist patriarchal society brick by tedious brick. Because a such a society can never value the frail, those with no current or future financial contribution to make to someone else. Moving away from gdp would help

Thanks very much for the share token, Errol. Excellent - and very much a feminist issue.

There is also the point that even if we do accept care work as unskilled labour, there isn't the same expectation that men are morally responsible for the unskilled labour where they traditionally dominate. There isn't a direct male equivalent of the way in which lots of people think Janice Turner should stop working and care for her mother herself.

Wonderful article by Janice. Worth my subscription to the times for her alone.

Many years ago I used to work in the admin office of an adult social care provider. I couldn't have done the work the care sorkers did, although I was paid more than many of them and considering I wasn't on much higher than national minimum wage that's pretty shocking.

It is absolutely a very highly skilled role as demonstrated by the amount of people who sometimes take that role and are piss poor at it, and sadly I've sat in enough disciplinary meeting to know there are plenty of them.

I don't think Social care is given nearly as much consideration as it should be in UK and I think we're seeing the fall out not just in the NHS but also in the increase in crime and homelessness.

We need to treat Social Care seriously, it needs proper funding and care workers should be properly paid to reflect their training and experience.

After the government’s immigration plans were announced, the Lib Dem’s former leader in the European parliament, Caroline Voaden, tweeted in entitled despair: “Who’ll wash the hospital bedpans? Who’ll clean our offices at night? Who’ll feed, bathe and care for our most vulnerable?” She sounded like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey bemoaning that these days “you can’t get the staff”. How will we cope without cheap EU migrants doing dirty* work for less than most native workers would bear?

I agree with this absolutely, Another great article from Janice Turner, thanks for the share token.

Yes, the funding is the key point here. Nothing is going to improve without us as a society accepting that social care is going to cost more, whether we fund that through greater taxation in some capacity or requiring more people to use their assets to fund their care: at the moment it's only quite a small segment of care recipients that have to do it.

Unfortunately though that's evidently not the plan.

Very good article.

I would generally be held to be a 'better' feminist if I abandoned caring tasks to focus on my career. Or could feminism mean doing the caring yourself?

Just going back to this a moment, this feminism board (non coincidentally being on a parenting site) tends to avoid those generalisations.

I'd have thought that - considering the common situation of two adults with up to 4 parents between them who may need care, feminism means sharing the responsibility in terms of cost and effort between the two regardless of their sex, and if paying for care makes most sense then paying a decent salary to the carers. The same as for childcare, really. And beyond that it may mean pushing for more societal responsibility and also planning for your own future care - funds (it might be good if there were insurance options) so that you could be cared for by people on decent wages.

I don't think there's a cheap feminist solution - though overall it surely can't make any economic sense for a woman whose skills are of the traditionally more valued types becoming 'economically inactive' while trying to do a job that another person would be more capable of.