Who Cares?
Hundreds of thousands of workers -- most of them women, and many of them migrants -- provide vital care services to elderly people in their homes. Yet typically they are insecurely employed and low paid, although their work is both skilled and essential.
In the richer countries, home care workers are increasingly hired through agencies or directly by their clients, on highly precarious terms. A worker employed on a zero hours contract, for example, will find herself on permanent standby but paid only when needed.
Significant anecdotal evidence shows too that care workers are held to schedules so tight as to undermine quality of care. Many protect their clients from the impact of this by doing more than they are paid for, acting as “shock absorbers” for failures in the care system.
Our Who Cares? project is looking at the relationships between how the care service is structured, how home care workers are employed, and the quality of care provided. As welfare budgets are cut, and the role of non-state providers increases, devising innovative ways of enabling workers to assert their rights at work so that they are better able to do a good job is crucial for both them and their clients.
The project has two specific objectives, which are linked: to provide an evidence base to promote standards of employment and work organisation that enable better services suited to client need; and to support home care workers themselves in developing a collective voice to influence policy making and increase the recognition and rewards for their essential work.
For more information please email admin@publicworld.org
