The work of care: tensions, contradictions and promising practices

This special issue of Labour & Industry is a collection of articles based on papers presented at the 31st Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) Conference hosted by the School of Business at UNSW Canberra. The focus of the conference was ‘Reconsidering Gender and Industrial Relations’. Gender equality, diversity and inclusion issues have increasingly featured at AIRAANZ conferences, consistent with the feminisation of the discipline. From once being a male-dominated discipline focused on traditional industrial relations (IR) issues such as collective bargaining, unions and wages, the field of IR has expanded over the years to focus on gender equality issues. Work and family, flexible working arrangements, pay equity, gender and collectivism, equal employment opportunity and women working in male-dominated industries and occupations are now all IR staples.

One of the main streams of the 31st AIRAANZ conference explored care work – an area which is of increasing importance within the IR community. This special issue is a collection of papers presented in that stream. This issue commences with an article from one of the keynote conference presenters – Professor Gill Kirton from Queen Mary University of London.

In her article, Kirton traces the involvement of women in the union movement to increase their representation in union leadership and to progress gender equality issues within union agendas. Kirton identifies pivotal points in feminist activism and academic research to create a more inclusive and gender equitable labour movement and concludes that even though a seismic change has occurred, a significant gender gap remains within union leadership and that ‘the gender democracy project is unfinished business’. At the same time, new forms of resistance have emerged, including social media ‘trolling’ and mainstream media’s continued antipathy and hostility towards women unionists. Kirton concludes that while proportional representation of women in unions is essential, there is a continued need for issues of importance to women to be included in union bargaining agendas.

Following the Kirton article, the special issue contains a selection of articles on the work of care. In the context of late neoliberalism and growing inequity, the work of care is fraught with tensions and contradictions. Despite this, as the authors of this special issue confirm, promising practices co-exist alongside these challenging conditions, particularly in terms of how care work is organised, including a number of worker-centred employment reforms and various forms of resistance from workers themselves (Baines and Armstrong 2015). Scholarship on paid care work has been burgeoning in the last decade, using multiple methods as best suits a complex arena of study. Growing scholarship also involves different levels of analysis from macro level national or cross-national studies (see for example, León and Pavolini 2014); to meso-level analyses of issues faced by particular occupations in sectors including aged care, disability care and childcare (see for example, Meagher et al. 2016), and specific policy initiatives such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia (Cortis et al. 2013; Macdonald and Charlesworth 2016); or similar individual-based, cash-transfer policies in the UK, Canada and the US (Da Roit and Le Bihan 2010); to analyses of practices within individual sectors and workplaces. At a more micro level, there is increasing focus on the care relationship as a mediator of both job and care quality (McBride et al. 2015).

At all levels of analysis, there is growing recognition of the complexity of care relationships, which involves not only tensions between familial and formal care, but often takes place in the ‘liminal’ spaces between them (Daly and Armstrong 2016). As is appropriate to such a complex field of study, care work studies tend to be strongly based in theory, particularly gender, feminist political economy and labour process theory (Baines et al., 2014; Bolton and Boyd 2003; Charlesworth 2010; Peterson 2005; Vosko 2002). This provides a rich ground for deeper understanding, critique and contributions to critical and knowledge-based practice.

This growth in scholarship is occurring often in situations where state funding support for most forms of care work is stagnant or in decline. Shifts in many OECD countries has contributed to a further marketisation of formal care, concomitant with the growth of different forms of employment including: ‘self-employment’; contract employment, zero hour contracts; widespread casualisation of employment; episodic employment via web-venues; and informalised care such as that provided by migrant workers, au pairs and other live-in carers often unprotected by minimum labour standards (Berg 2015; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Shutes and Chiatti 2012). This fragmentation of the employment relationship in care work presents some distinct challenges for workers and recipients of care, as well as for the families who rely on the care. These new relations reflect the renewed interest in migration and paid care work, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, where current and potential employers, such as families, have lobbied for policies that permit the entry of migrant workers to meet the care deficit.

In their article on ‘Re-imagining Decent Work for Home Care Workers in Australia’, Sara Charlesworth and Jenny Malone draw on the International Labour Organization Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (no. 189) (which Australia has not ratified) and argue that, in order to implement minimum labour standards for home care work, the work must be understood as ‘work like all other’ as well as ‘work like no other work’. They further assert that this dual strategy could provide the basis for reimagining Australian employment regulation for all gendered work and thus, all workers. Similarly, recognising the important skills and commitment aged care workers in New Zealand bring to difficult working conditions including violence from service users, Katherine Ravenswood, Julie Douglas and Jarood Haar draw on qualitative interview data to analyse physical abuse and workers’ intentions to leave their employment. Their conclusions suggest that employers need to make significant changes to reduce workplace violence and protect workers (and service users) in order to retain committed and consistent workforces.

The article by Karen Douglas entitled ‘“Our Membership doesn’t reflect the Industry”: The Challenges of Organising Disability Support Workers’, utilises mobilisation theory to better understand union mobilisation. It traces union challenges starting with the 1990s introduction of neoliberal marketisation practices in the disability care work sector and identifies union mobilisation strategies. The author examines unions’ responses to care work in precarious, marketised environments, and poses questions as to how unions should imagine collective solidarity in the future.

In their article entitled ‘Attracting and Retaining Personal Care Assistants in the WA Residential Aged Care sector’, Subas Dhakal, Alan Nankervis, Julia Connell, Scott Fitzgerald and John Burgess focus on a number of challenges associated with attracting and retaining personal care assistants in residential aged care in Western Australia. Drawing on interviews with human resource managers in one large aged care provider, the authors identify a number of key workplace ‘satisfiers’ and ‘dissatisfiers’ associated with the attrition of care workers, and, explore human resource management practices which might assist residential aged care employers better address documented concerns of personal care assistants regarding the quality of their jobs.

Finally, Amitra Gautam and Ray Markey tackle the issue of employee voice within the Australian childcare context in their article entitled ‘Voice without Influence: Small – and Medium-sized Enterprises in Childcare’. They draw on a qualitative study of employees and managers in three small to medium-sized childcare centres to analyse voice definition and perception, types of employee voice, factors affecting voice and outcomes generated in these types of enterprises. Their findings highlight the centrality of informal communication as an expression of employee voice and highlight both the importance of organisational context in the effectiveness of this type of employee voice and the negative consequences of such informality in managers assuming employees are happy with supervisors, managers and the organisation.

Our special issue concludes with three book reviews. Annick Masselot reviews Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific by Marian Baird, Michele Ford and Elizabeth Hill (eds) Routledge, 2017. The second book review, by Jill Rubery examines D. Peetz and G. Murray eds. Women, Labor Segmentation and Regulation Varieties of Gender Gaps 2017 New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lastly, Katherine Ravenswood reviews Duffy, Armenia, & Stacey. (2015). Eds. in Caring on the Clock. The Complexities and Contradictions of Paid Care Work. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna Baines

Donna Baines is Professor and Chair of Social Work and Policy Studies, University of Sydney. 

Sara Charlesworth

Sara Charlesworth is Professor and Deputy Head, School of Research and Innovation, RMIT University.

Tamara Daly

Tamara Daly is Associate Professor, CIHR Chair in Gender, Work and Health, York University, Canada.