When you become a carer (and if you haven’t already, the chances are you will for a time at least – there are 2.3 million new carers each year), you’ll work hard. You’ll strain your back lifting; you’ll be tired from waking at night to give medicine. You’ll learn how to manage complex treatment schedules. You’ll try not to scream at the individuals representing the institutions of the state who are supposed to help, but who ask you to fill in another form; who cancel your appointment at the last minute so you didn’t need to have a morning off work. Caring will make you cry. It will give you ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2009), make you resent (once, sometimes, often) the person you care for and will cause your other relationships to suffer. You will gain new capacities, but at some cost. You will need praise, but you won’t get it from your boss. Life will be something to be coped with as well as something to enjoy.

Carer, by Kai Hendry

And yes, as a form of work it is complicated. It is unpaid, occurring in the private sphere, dominated by discourses of love and duty (Lyon, 2010), and carers are casually treated by welfare policy as being neither working nor unemployed. For example, carers allowance is awarded to those caring for 35+ hours per week. Once a carer starts claiming their pension, the allowance is removed even as the care duties remain, and so it isn’t a substitute for earned income. At best, it seems to be a symbolic payment, a rather miserly donation for being nice. Many carers combine care with paid work (60% of women, 74% of men of working age who care do this, according to Yeandle, 2008), and part of their care tasks may be to manage paid caregivers and service providers. Caring is not simple.

Glucksmann (2005) argues it’s not the location of an activity in the public sphere that means it should be called work, but the social relations that make it up. This means different configurations between state, market, family and voluntary sector give rise to different modes of organising care, and different interactions between paid and unpaid care (Lyon, 2010). Unpaid care work is not separate from market or state provision, rather the need for it is contingent on what sorts of other provision is possible or available in a country.

However, the formal organisation of care work is buttressed by discourses around who should care. Love and duty are in complement (and may be in tension) within a socio-cultural context that says that to be a good parent/wife/son/whatever is to take on the responsibility and activity of care; in the UK this impulse is enhanced by how alternative forms of caregiving are limited. And perhaps this is right: the quality of life of the person being cared for may be greater like this (although Nelson and England (2002) raise the question of whether paid-for care might well be morally right). It worth noting that this is not an inevitable, uncontestable moral position, but one that is regularly reproduced in media, government policy, by carers and those cared for as something which ought to be. The naturalisation of unpaid care as the way of showing love tends to override the difficulties of being a carer, and may be used to produce ‘fictive’ family ties when paid care is brought into the home.

Recognising care as work helps to understand the complexity of what care is, even though some carers would resist the label work, seeing caring as a gift of love. Thinking about care as work may help sort out the mess over benefits: it’s work, it needs support, and respite. And it may offer status to carers by acknowledging that there’s more to caring than loving. And that might offer carers a recognition that what they do has status; it’s not a natural gift and it doesn’t come for free.

References

1. Carers UK (2009) Facts About Carers.
2. Glucksmann, M. (2005) ‘Shifting Boundaries and Interconnections: Extending the ‘Total Social Organisation of Labour’’. In Pettinger, L., Parry, J. Taylor, R. F. and Glucksmann, M. (eds) (2005) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
3. Lyon, Dawn (forthcoming, 2010) ‘Intersections and Boundaries of Work and Non-work: The Case of Elder Care in Comparative European Perspective’ European Societies 12(1): 1–23.
4. Nelson, J. A. and England, P. (2002) ‘Feminist Philosophies of Love and Work’. Hypatia. Vol. 17, no 2 (spring) 1–18.
5. Ngai, S. (2005) Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass. and London.
6. Yeandle, S. (2008) Transforming Lives: Time for a New Social Contract for Care. Paper presented at Carers UK conference on Carers in Communities: The local transformation agenda.

In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, (Sillitoe, 1960 [1958]), Arthur is proud of work, his speed, his skill on the capstan lathe, the secret of his extra fat pay packet, and so he think he’s cock of the pub come Saturday night, where he can down the pints, fall down the stairs and still go home with his married lover Brenda.

He knows Saturday night shouldn’t feel like Monday morning. And he knows that Saturday night demands the pay back of Sunday morning. Sunday morning is no redemption though, it’s hangover and a sprint out the door before her husband comes home, and then perhaps fishing trip, these are the counterbalance to the routine of work and pub.

You may be familiar with the idea that the standard 9 to 5, Monday to Friday working week is less common than once it was. Shift work, part time work and the need for workers to facilitate the consumption activities of those who have a weekend holiday from work are all evidence of detraditionalisation and flexibilisation, although there are those who think the level of change is overstated (Bradley et al, 2000: 51–70). But obviously people work on Saturdays.

I hate working on Saturdays. I used to, my first job was in a lean-to makeshift garage, where I checked for flaws in new clothes. I was 13. Later, I worked Saturdays in a car showroom as the meet and greet girl, and then in a bar. And I liked it sometimes, but I can’t work Saturdays now. Sundays are different. A bit of marking, some reading, I don’t mind. Sundays are dull anyway. But the mythology of the Good Saturday that I like to live with doesn’t permit for this day to let me work. The Good Saturday, however, cannot simply be understood as leisure time, defined as freedom from work (Parker, 1983). Saturday is festival time. Gadamer describes the festival as autonomous time, time which has its own rhythm, which exists not to be spent but to be experienced. Festival time is not unpredictable, or freefloating, only different to the temporality of other days. My manifesto for a Good Saturday does not mean ignoring the norms of work (routine and obligation), but playing with them to make saturday feel like festival time.

My manifesto: the paper, always the same. Breakfast that takes time (this is work). Spontaneity — though spontaneity needn’t mean an absence of order. Putting things in order (this is work). Being surprised. Seeing what happens. A trip out. A pint too early in the day. Noting and remarking on the absence of work. Letting things take longer than they need. These make for an ordinary sort of Saturday festival. The festival, says Gadamer is a community experience (this is why all football matches should start at 3pm on Saturday), but not everyone can share my good Saturday, they have to be willing to let time stretch without apparent end. Who’s free this weekend?

References

Bradley, H. Erickson, M. Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2002) Myths at Work. Polity: Cambridge.
1. Gadamer, H. G. (1986) The Relevance of the Beautiful and other essays. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Parker, S. (1983) Leisure and Work. London : Allen & Unwin.
3. Sillitoe, A. (1960) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Pan Books, Ltd, London.