Changing Care Networks in the United Kingdom

It is a truism to point out that the COVID-19 pandemic (and the United Kingdom government’s response to it) has brought major disruption to everyday life. It has also, however, exposed and intensified existing fault-lines in society. The relationship between paid and unpaid labor, and the need to better recognize and reimburse the latter, long a key concern of feminist theorists and activists especially in relation to work within the household, has been one key issue of focus in our research. As parents with children have had to add childcare and home schooling to their work portfolios, there are reports of women in both middle-class and poorer households doing the lion’s share. Meanwhile, as low-paid workers in the National Health Service (NHS), ‘care’ sector, and essential/key workers – often hailing from communities of recent or not-so-recent immigrants – have had to continue to work, other, higher-paid workers (not deemed to be ‘key’) have been able to stay safe by working at home; pre-existing inequalities between classes have been laid bare in ever-starker fashion. Pre-Covid, even after a decade of austerity, certain aspects of care for families in the lowpaid category were undertaken by a ‘mixed economy’ of welfare.2 This combined state welfare facilities, often provided at local level, with services rendered by charities staffed both by volunteers and salaried officers, while welfare payments known as ‘universal credit’ were delivered centrally by the Department of Welfare and Pensions. Now, in the time of coronavirus, these services have been thinned out, while lockdown has truncated informal sources of support in social relationships, making them difficult to draw on in times of need. This has caused anger and distress, and in some cases trauma. Whether people feel that the lockdown has been necessary or not, many of those in the low-paid sectors feel as though their situation – and suffering – is invisible to the government. Multiple forms of disadvantage emerge from this threat to the ties that bind people to each other.