‘Off My Own Back’: Precarity on the Frontlines of Care Work

Abstract

Hailed by some as representing the ‘most profound change in Australian disability history’, care work in the disability sector under the new National Disability Insurance Scheme is described by one frontline worker as ‘a massive swing towards a casual workforce and a massive cultural shock’. This firsthand account draws on 13 pages of unsolicited hand-written notes from a long-time, frontline care worker and his wife, as well as an in-depth interview and subsequent telephone and email conversations. The article gives voice to the experience of the frontline as disability workers grapple with almost complete casualization of their work, as the state retreats from its role in regulating employment and protecting workers in favour of the marketization of services and the advancing of the human rights of people with disabilities.

‘It’s My Passion and Not Really Like Work’: Balancing Precarity with the Work–Life of a Volunteer Team Leader in the Conservation Sector

“…The OECD (2019) reinforce this, showing Australia has a particularly high proportion of short part-time jobs, with a quarter of Australian workers subject to casual contracts, half without guaranteed hours. Baines et al (2019) suggest that such workplace insecurity is becoming normalised in some sectors, such as care work, and Sally’s account illustrates a level and acceptance of such normality in her work. Subject to a zero-hours contract, her work hours and income varied weekly, with unpredictability being more precarious than low pay alone.…”

“…Employees have many different experiences of workplace precarity, despite some shared elements. In Baines et al (2019), Paul’s care work experience displays similarities to Sally’s uncertain hours and unpaid additional work, though his narrative represents an experienced employee facing changing working conditions as precarity increases, while Sally was starting a career within this reality. Sally, in her first job, was therefore more likely to rationalise such extra work as normal, especially coming from a volunteer tradition.…”

The End of Meaningful Work in the Not-for-Profit Sector? A Case Study of Ethics in Employee Relations Under the New Business-Like Operation Regime

“…We sought to test meaningful work by nature and by line manager support. Both of which were considered to have a motivational effect in a business setting on employee outcomes in the charitable sector which has increasingly embraced the norms of business-like over the last twenty years (Baines 2019;Cunningham, 2016;Cooper et al, 2020).…”

Job stress and employee outcomes: employment practices in a charity

“…The greater uncertainty of employment has resulted in job stress, in some cases, employment contracts are being renewed on a weekly basis (Baluch, 2017). The contractual nature of the funding environment has made redundancies increased at an ever-rising rate thus adding to the overall sense of job insecurity (Clark and Wilding, 2011).Furthermore, employment practices have become more cost-sensitive leading to low basic pay made worse through unpaid time (such as traveling to clients' homes) (Baines et al, 2019;Cunningham 2016) and understaffing. The generally stressful working environment dealing with service users with social and behavioural problems (Baines and Cunningham, 2011) coupled with job insecurity and workload increases have resulted in job exhaustion (Baines et al, 2014;Charlesworth et al 2015;Salami, 2010).…”