The Role of Care Paradoxes in Maintaining Precariousness: A Case Study of Australia's Aged Care Work

Abstract

The paper examines why despite many inquiries and government reforms, the working conditions of aged care workers have remained precarious. The study draws on an analysis of Australian workforce survey data, government documents, and hearing transcripts from a recent Royal Commission into the sector's workforce and care practices. The results paint a complex and nuanced picture of how the government and providers rely on older or culturally and linguistically diverse women to carry out high standards of quality care with minimal worker benefits and protection while devaluing their work as unprofessional. The analysis also highlights the coexistence of four types of precariousness in aged care work: precariousness as a social category, a shared experience, a set of work practices, and management. Further, I find that a series of paradoxes rooted in cultural perceptions of care and older and/or diverse women maintain precariousness at work by constructing workers as the problem, entrenching disadvantage borne from intersectionality and shifting the burden of responsibility and part of the cost of caring for older people onto workers. I suggest that little improvement is possible until the systemic and sociocultural issues around care and the workers engaged in the transaction of care are tackled together as a whole.