The electronic monitoring of care work—The redefinition of paid working time

This chapter explores the electronic monitoring (EM) of homecare in the context of the local authority commissioning process as defined by public sector budget cuts. It focusses upon the perceived function of the technology from the perspective of the supplier and commissioners and the experience of monitoring from the perspective of care providers and homecare workers themselves. This account embeds EM in the employment relationship. It considers the way that EM facilitates the commissioning of homecare work on the basis of ‘contact time’ only, reconfiguring paid and unpaid working time and redefining homecare workers’ labour in both quantitative and qualitative terms

Paid care work, gendered labor law and the vulnerability of community

This chapter suggests that the vulnerability of "community" is impacted by the gendering of labor law. It deals with homecare workers in England, women who are employed to provide essential support to older and disabled people living in their own homes. Instead of conceiving of paid care work as the product of an individuated interaction, we can recognize the labor of state-funded paid care workers as a potentially progressive expression of community. Yet Sophie's narrative also opens our eyes to ways in which the physical and existential qualities of state-funded care have been undermined by contractual processes of privatization and service transfer. The state has actively crafted its privatization agenda in pursuit of large reductions in labor costs and appears ambivalent about the labor standards entitlements of homecare workers. Homecare workers give personal care to older and disabled people, visiting them in their own homes to provide assistance with washing, dressing, continence/incontinence and basic nursing care

Stories of Care: A Labour of Law. Gender and Class at Work

Stories of Care: A Labour of Law is an interdisciplinary study of the interactions of law and labour that shape paid care work. Based on the experiences of homecare workers, this highly topical text unpicks doctrinal assumptions about class and gender to interrogate contemporary labour law. It demonstrates how the UK’s crisis in social care is connected to the gendered inadequacy of labour law and argues for transformative change to law at work

Care and Control: Are the National Minimum Wage Entitlements of Homecare Workers at Risk under the Care Act 2014?

Homecare is a major source of women’s low-wage employment in the UK. Practices of unpaid working time are widespread and many workers are not paid in accordance with their existing national minimum wage entitlements. On 1 April 2015, a new duty of well-being in social care came into force and local authorities are required to promote the control of care by service-users. As a consequence, homecare workers will increasingly be engaged in complex multi-lateral work relations and subject to multi-party control. This article examines how the national minimum wage entitlements of homecare workers have been legally interpreted and questions if their entitlements might be adversely affected under provisions of the Care Act 2014. There is a legacy of judicial decision-making in which care-giving is not recognised as ‘work’ for the purposes of the national minimum wage. Yet recent decisions have produced a more satisfactory entitlement framework by establishing that employer control over working time determines ‘work’. However, it seems this framework is put at risk by the statutory promotion of service-user control. As work relations are re-cast, contractual relationships in which care-giving falls outside the protection of national minimum wage law will appear increasingly attractive because they may both enhance service-user control and facilitate very low cost labour. Without innovation in legal treatments of multi-party control and sustained attention to the worth of care-giving as employment, the rights of homecare workers are at risk under the Care Act 2014