The duty invites you once again to the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, we are interested in a job that is often invisible and fragile, but crucial in health.
The work of the care consists of taking care of others, in a broader sense than that linked to simple medical care. It has different aspects and includes activities that vary depending on the person who benefits from the careCaring for a child or caring for a person with limitations due to age or disability involves performing very specific tasks in each case.
The different actors who bring this relationship to life determine the interaction that is established in the work of the care. These are relationships traversed by social asymmetries based on gender, age, social class and ethnicity, which partially overlap. These interactions involve the exercise of power, while requiring particular skills, such as the emotional skills necessary for understanding, evaluating and managing one’s own emotions and those of others in the performance of work.
Moreover, it is not always what we feel that can or should be expressed. On the other hand, very often, emotions that are not truly experienced must be expressed. Moreover, the emotional demand in the work of the care has intensified with the pandemic.
Most of the time, the work of the care is little recognized, little valued, poorly paid, most often carried out by women and frequently invisible. This erasure is articulated at different levels. Initially rooted in the family sphere, the care will demonstrate both its “invisibility” and its “standards” of quality and recognition: the good work of the care is the one that is carried out as if it were being carried out for a member of one’s own family. We also speak of the invisibility of the skills (physical, cognitive, emotional, etc.) essential to the quality of the care and also the invisibility of violence in care work.
According to the Commission des normes, de l’équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail, in Quebec, in 2022, more than three-quarters of injuries attributable to physical violence occurred in the sectors of health care and social assistance (54.4%, or 5.4 percentage points less than in 2019) and education (22.5%, or 4.6 percentage points more than in 2019), two paradigmatic areas of work in the care who have seen a surge in violence with the pandemic.
In the work of the carewe identify three forms of invisibilization. First, there is denial, that is, we do not recognize either the work or the qualifications needed to accomplish it. Then comes euphemization, which minimizes the importance and the qualifications needed for the work of the care by “naturalizing” them as so-called feminine qualities. Finally, we find spectacularization, or a blinding visibility, where we emphasize some aspects of the work (especially errors) and individualize questions that are of the collective order, eclipsing the organization of work, management methods, working conditions, social divisions, as well as work techniques.
The pandemic has highlighted the importance of the work of care. Overnight, it was recognized as “essential” to our survival. Workers in the care were applauded and suddenly became our “guardian angels”. However, they probably feel less like this, because they have working conditions that are getting worse and worse and that make reconciling work with family and friends difficult. care paid and care unpaid work that is particularly difficult.
The pandemic has shown us the real work being done by workers in the care. We have observed the shortage of labor, poor working conditions as well as the precariousness and overload of work which, incidentally, already existed before the pandemic and which are the result of poor management practices focused on the ideology of lean management aiming to always achieve more and better with less, which causes physical wear and tear (musculoskeletal disorders) and mental wear and tear (exhaustion and depression, even thoughts of suicide).
While the pandemic taught us a lot about vaccine production and infection prevention and control, it also marked a time when the organization of work and the management system would have to be rethought so that the work of the care becomes the basis for lasting metamorphoses.
This is not, however, the path taken by the Quebec government, which insists on deploying the ideology of lean managementfocused on old management methods, in a constant search for flexibility that leads to incessant processes of change and precariousness that further dehumanize and weaken the work of the care.
We need to radically rethink the management of work care by maintaining a dialogue between the different actors – politicians, managers, unions, community teams and other groups representing workers in the care. And develop strategies aimed at bringing about a structural transformation of the system care, in order to make it more resilient and to be able to face possible other health crises.