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Drawing on the literature as well as themes emerging from interview data collected as part of a multi-year, three-province (Alberta, Nova Scotia and British Columbia), qualitative study (eighty-three semi-structured interviews) of the restructured social services sector in Canada, this article explores discernible types of caring work delineating seven kinds, only one of which is paid. The social service workers' description of their changing worlds show not only extremely heavy workloads but also that their paid, volunteer, community, and union activist work involve many of the same skills, tasks and mind sets, thus blurring the lines between professional and non-professional identities as well as the lines between work and leisure. Moreover, this work was highly gendered and significantly racialized.
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Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender-neutral violence; gender-specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.
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The article reviews the book, "Training the Excluded for Work: Access and Equity for Women, Immigrants, First Nations, Youth, and People with Low Income," edited by Marjorie Griffin Cohen.
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This report compares work organization and workload at three [Ontario] developmental service agencies in order to identify factors that precipitate and contribute to injuries, stress and health problems in the social services. The restructuring of services in this sector has resulted in reduced funding and therefore workloads and health risks associated with overwork and burnout appear to have increased dramatically in all three sites studied. Restructuring has also exposed workers and clients to higher levels of stress and violence. This study also uncovered serious incidents of workplace bullying and traumatic work cultures. While workplace bullying certainly predates restructuring, some studies show that it is a phenomena that has seen rapid growth within the context of restructured public sector and non profit workplaces. Given the serious under funding of this sector it may appear that there is little that can be done to improve health and safety in the short term. However, this report recommends several measures including an immediate increase in government funding, the incorporation of worker’s knowledge into how work is to be organized and planned, guarantees to part-time workers of enough hours of work to support themselves, an end to the use of split shifts, a cap on overtime and subsequent hiring additional fulltime staff in order to ensure workplace stability and the introduction of immediate, assertive, transparent measures to improve workplace morale and eradicate traumatic workplace cultures. --Executive Summary
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