The Covid crisis placed a pronounced spotlight on the care sector, as throughout the world elderly care home residents were disproportionately affected by the virus. With societies aging the care sector is likely to be increasingly important, and research from Rotman explores what lessons the sector has learned from the pandemic and how it might evolve in the years ahead.
The pandemic broadly exposed problems in the care sector, including poor pay and conditions in care homes. The report explores some of the key issues for care in the post-Covid society and aims to provide some clear direction for both further research and policy alike.
“It [Covid] has exposed how care work is essential labor on which the economy depends,” the authors say. “It has also shown that care work is devalued, disproportionately falling upon women, people of color, and immigrants, and that risks are absorbed by vulnerable and precarious care workers.”
Post-Covid care
The researchers convened a roundtable featuring various stakeholders in the Canadian care sector, with around 60 researchers and practitioners presenting evidence and research to help drive the agenda and discuss the policy implications of their work.
There is a clear need for the care sector to be given much greater priority status, both politically and indeed within the research community. For instance, the report reveals that a key challenge in terms of effective policymaking is a lack of meaningful data. As a result, the authors urge data to be collected to allow for the true nature and complexity of the care economy to be understood. This could be especially valuable in terms of identifying previously neglected care activities.
For instance, this data could cover things like the importance of unpaid care or some of the less direct forms of care work that are nonetheless crucial. It would also uncover the key role of temporary or migrant care workers, and indeed their transitions into and out of care work.
Tech support
This data collection forms part of a wider exploration of the role technology could play in care in the post-Covid world. Might we, for instance, see greater involvement of things like robotics, as is increasingly the case in Japan?
“Yet, technology cannot be a catchall solution for gaps in the care economy,” the authors explain. “Researchers have argued that care work is not “replaceable” by technologies because it is highly relational.”
It’s also evident that mental health and overall wellbeing will need to see a renewed emphasis in the months and years ahead, not least through the provision of high-quality working conditions with clear labor protections. These should be produced with clear input from workers in the sector so that they are given more of a voice.
“During the pandemic, researchers and advocates have brought forward many policy and research implications for care work in the recovery economy,” the authors conclude. “At the same time, many questions remain for how care can achieve both quality and scale—and these connect to questions of whose caring labour is valued and considered.”
They hope that by bringing together all of the various stakeholders involved in the sector, that a better care industry will emerge from the extreme hardship caused by the pandemic.
