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In this article, we compare current Canadian nursing home workers’ experiences and conditions of care to past work and care conditions to determine changes and similarities over the period from 1970 to the present. Employing a feminist political economy framework and a team-based rapid ethnography approach, our study involved observations of and in-depth interviews with management, health providers, support staff, informal care providers, union officials, and residents between 2012 and 2015. The historical substudy drew on interviews of past and present workers of one large long-term residential care home in Ontario. While improvements have been made in training and in the physical safety of staff and residents in these gendered spaces of work, there has been a persistence, if not intensification, in job precarity; inadequate staffing levels coupled with heavy workloads; routinized, assembly-line types of work; and cost-cutting on supplies.

Publisher: University of Toronto Press