Places of paid work and unpaid work: Caregiving and work‐from‐home during COVID‐19

Abstract

The home during COVID-19 has become a blended place, occupied by activities of care provision, paid work, and personal life.• This integrated landscape presents benefits to working carers such as increased flexibility, alongside challenges such as a lack of external carer supports. • These landscapes may continue in a post-COVID world, as organizations contemplate continuation of digital/hybridized workplaces and long-term care homes fall out of favour.Eldercare and places of eldercare have been radicalized with the advent of COVID-19. Growing concerns about the safety of long-term care homes, coupled with the continuation of stay-at-home orders, mean that carers are reconstructing new meanings and places of care provision. Increasingly for many Canadians, the home is rapidly becoming the nexus of one's domestic, work, and caregiving world. By interviewing working carers (n = 5) living throughout Canada, this study investigates the changing meanings of home as a place for care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon lived experiences of informal carers engaged in the workforce, we observe a blurring of spatial and temporal boundaries between places of work and places of care. Specifically, we note that the integration of carescapes and workscapes into a single domain presents both benefits and tensions to carers, such as increased schedule flexibility and disruptions at work, respectively. Parallel to this, we also explore how previous places of safety and respite, such as independent senior residences and long-term care homes, are perceived as sites of danger and anxiety due to the vulnerability of seniors to COVID-19. This dynamic is likely to continue well into the future, as long-term care homes fall out of favour and carers adopt a more integrated approach to caregiving within their daily lives.

Cost Implications from an Employer Perspective of a Workplace Intervention for Carer-Employees during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…As a result, we anticipate that while reported presenteeism during working hours was high, this may not directly represent lost work. An earlier qualitative paper from this same workplace found that CEs were re-contracting their work hours outside of traditional working times, as remote working provides carers greater agency to negotiate their home, care and work responsibilities using a schedule that is most beneficial to them [ 31 ]. In this regard, we speculate that employees are still accomplishing the majority of their work tasks, albeit outside the usual 9–5 schedule due to work disruptions at home.…”

The Significance of Pets for Vulnerable Older Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Explorative Qualitative Study

“…On the other hand, caregivers may also have spent more time on caregiving tasks and, due to pandemic countermeasures, less formal caregiving may have been carried out. This may have had a negative effect on the caregiver burden [ 35 ].…”

A Workplace Environmental Scan of Employed Carers During COVID-19

“…Participants were also invited to review transcripts and modify their responses after transcription. The full description of the process of thematic analysis is described in a prior publication (Ding &Williams, 2022 ). Pseudonyms are used herein to protect the anonymity of participants.…”

“…This burden known to be both dynamic and bi-directional, with paid work impacting on caregiving and vice versa. From previous research, it was observed that when carer and worker roles conflict, paid work responsibilities often take priority over caregiving, regardless of carer-employees’ own preferences (Ding & Williams., 2022 ). This type of conflict, known generally as work-family conflict, is associated with decreased job satisfaction and increased job turnover, role stress, and burnout (Boles et al, 2001 ; Marks, 1998 ).…”