The book draws on the research funded by T-AP. It presents and reflects on qualitative data collected in 2022-2023 on the experiences of paid carers in four different national contexts: England, South Africa, Canada, and Finland during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chapter 1 delineates four cross-cutting issues: i) the social and economic vulnerabilities of paid carers; ii) how intersectionalised inequalities reflect and affect those vulnerabilities, including attention to how classed, racialised, gendered, sexualised and ageist inequalities and expectations affect carers’ lives; iii) how the organisation of paid care is shaped through time and across space; and iv) paid carers’ agency in responding to their working situations.
Paying attention to the different economic situations, population characteristics and types of policy for the provision of paid care in each country, and considering these cross-cutting issues, the following Chapters examine:
- in England, how paid care workers are ‘socially valued’;
- in South Africa, how gender and migration intersect to shape the inequalities faced by domestic workers;
- in Canada, why some care workers remain in a low paid, low status and exhausting job long-term;
- in Finland, how the vulnerabilities of LGBT and migrant care workers affect their working experiences.
In the final Chapter we leverage the insights from these studies to suggest how to improve the working lives of care workers and enhance policy thinking and decisions.