ILPC 2024, 3rd-5th April 2024, Göttingen

Care Work in Global Context(s)

Theme A: COVID and the Boundaries Around Care Work; Theme B: Fair and Decent Care Work in the Global Economy

Theme A - COVID and the Boundaries Around Care Work

The economic and pandemic crises worldwide require reflection, understanding and analysis of recent transformations in the participation of women in care work. With the effects of the pandemic still reverberating, the blurred boundaries of care work with domestic work have become more evident. Care work, as social reproduction, includes the care of children, older adults, and people living with disability. It can include tasks and functions in formal occupations, such as nurses, housekeepers, and assistant teachers in childcare; or with care activities that are devalued, not recognized in the labor market, carried out mainly by women in the domestic sphere (usually private households). As we continue to work through the pandemic, the purpose of this session is to consider studies that integrate conceptual, philosophical and political debates with empirical research on care work in the global economy.

Some questions to consider are:

• What forms has care work taken on in context of economic-political, covid and post-covid crises?
• What new tasks or care relationships have been created in the economic crisis, including job insecurity and demographic change?
• How has the transnational care circuit been transformed by the pandemic?
• What are state responses to the
• What transformations have occurred in private-public contexts and vice versa?
• How does domestic and care work intersect with gender construction, socioeconomic status, immigration status, ethnicity, age, among others?
• What implications does increases in older adults’ populations have for care work? How does power relationships affect caring? What subjectivities and experiences are constructed during caring?
• How do demographic changes, advances and setbacks in public policies affect this work?
• What implications does increases in older adults’ populations have for care work? How does power relationships affect caring? What subjectivities and experiences are constructed during caring?

Theme B - Fair and Decent Care Work in the Global Economy

Often privatized, contracted-out, downloaded, offloaded and less researched than other forms of work, care work is provided across the public, nonprofit and for-profit sectors with markedly similarly conditions, contradictions, and work organization. In the global context, paid and unpaid care work are assumed to be forms of work that are good and decent for those receiving care, undertaken by good and decent workers. However, fair and decent is rarely reflected in pay or conditions. For example, though care work, particularly nursing and elder care, was deemed essential and gained increased respect during the pandemic, the intense public and media attention on this form of labour has rarely translated into sustained improvements in status, pay or conditions overall. Instead, most gains were short lived and have been rolled back partially or in their entirety.

Indeed as many countries ratchet up austerity policies post-COVID, care workers face job cuts, increased work intensification, and a deepening of standardized, privatized, and managerialised work organization. The difficulties encountered for those seeking to improve care work are thought to lie in part in the association between the female-majority workforce and gendered assumptions that women “naturally” provide unending, uncomplaining care and sacrifice on behalf of others in the home, community and workplace. In addition to being overwhelmingly female, those employed in care work are increasingly racialized, precarious, and recent immigrant or migrant workers with little access to voice or workplace protections in the failing apparatus of the neoliberal state. Fragmented, insecure platform work, the use of labour-extending new technologies, and the endless struggle to have sufficient time to perform care duties typify an increasing portion of the care work labour force.

Despite the difficult conditions in which care work is generally performed, some groups of care workers have advanced individual and collective resistance strategies that made significant advances in de-privatizing, improving pay and conditions at least temporarily, and/or shifting power from employers to workers. This stream invites papers that reflect the challenges of care work, supports for decent and far work in care work globally and locally as well as concepts of resistance against poor conditions and pay.

These could include:

• Promising practices for care work
• Race, and / or gender and class in care work
• Global care chains
• Financialization of care organizations
• Immigrant/migrant care work and workers
• Digital and IT applications in care work
• Indigenous care work
• Organising, resistance, and workplace misbehavior – collective and/or individual
• Unionisation and/or professionalization. licensure strategies
• Privatization
• The shifting lines between paid and unpaid care work
• Time and the work of care
• Platform care work
• Personalisation and individualization

This special stream brings together global scholars from the UK, Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and South America to discuss the intersections of decent and fair care work.