ILPC 2026

Precarious employment has been shown to undermine but not prevent resistance (Lewchuck and Dassinger, 2016). How resistance is gendered and racialized is also important (Baines, 2016). For instance, with respect to care work, Baines and Daly (2015: 145) observe that female-associated forms of resistance may look significantly different from “large scale militant mobilizations often thought to be the pinnacle of resistance strategies”.

There is little doubt that the temporal dimension of care work is important, but it has received less concentrated attention than its affective one. Nonetheless, several authors have contributed to our understanding. Twigg (2006) notes that bodies are unpredictable in their demands, and thus perfect scheduling of this labour is quite difficult because people cannot wait to have their bodily needs addressed.  Cohen (2011) argues that “co-presence” is an essential component when the object of the work is the physical manipulation of bodies, and that despite efforts to “lean” health care workforces, there are rigidities in the “ratio of workers to bodies worked-upon” that limit the ability of administrators or governments to cut labour or substitute technology for labour (e.g. adult diapers). Likewise, Davies (1994) argues that caring for people is not linear, continuous nor truly measurable; caring for someone requires a carer to be present when things need to be done, not when time allows.  Care work, Davies argues, involves a tension between two types of time: process time and clock time.   Process time is the discontinuous tempo of caring that occurs when care cannot be easily cordon off into a compartmentalized task -- often signified by doing two things at once. Clock time refers to the commodified time associated with New Public management and lean workplaces, what Valerie Bryson (2007) refers to as the politics of time.

Linking the macro level to front-line care is important for understanding resistance.  Taking time, for example, may be a form of resistance to uncaring systems; workplace subsidization may occur in leaned out environments characterized by too little staff (Baines 2006). In order to complete care work in the time allotted, Lopez (2007) argues that we must focus not only on how workers resist in forms that include “inventing new skills”, breaking “official rules” and enacting “deviant routines”, but also “outside of the labour process to understand the external pressures that impinge upon it” (2007, p. 228). How regulations structure time use at the front-lines in nursing homes differs across different international jurisdictions (Daly, Struthers et. al 2016), signifying the importance of politics.

In this paper, we raise the question of how nursing home care workers resist the politics of time. We draw on the findings of two ethnographic studies of nursing homes, one international (26 sites and 530 interviews) and one regional (7 sites and 203 interviews) to explore examples of the nuances involved in gendered resistance found in care work.  We explore the uneasy tensions that arise from a transaction-based care imagined and articulated within regulatory approaches that espouse New Public Management.