Enormous reductions in public sector spending produce unemployment. And unemployment makes for poverty, misery, hopelessness, illness and anomie. Some of the cuts to public sector spending will remove work from society: Forgemasters’ employees will join the queues outside Sheffield job centres, looking for jobs that don’t exist, living on the benefit breadline, sinking into depression, needing care.

Other public sector cuts will not remove work, but transfer it from public sphere to private sphere, from commodity form to non-commodity form. Children, the infirm elderly and the sick will carry on needing care (and social care isn’t part of the NHS ringfencing). Someone will have to step in when budget cuts mean fewer care assistants or fewer public nursery spaces. This might sound like Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action: neighbours helping because the fat state is ought to slim down. But care that is contingently gifted like that leaves the recipient at risk, even assuming that the needy are known and noticed (which might not be the case if layers of administration are removed). And it leaves the caregiver exhausted by the double burden of paid work and care.

It is often the case that unpaid care is done by women (see the Women’s Budget Group analysis), and, though the ideological conservatism that drives the desire for a small state is not quite the same conservatism that essentialises gender divisions and wants women to be placed in the home, married and looking after children, the coincidence might be felt to be fortuitous by some. At nowaytoamakealiving, we are always angered by the failures of imagination and empathy that generate policies intended to increase inequality and worsen lives.

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.