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Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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Separating out hands-on care from the caring infrastructures necessary to enable it, including more indirect but interlinked sustaining practices, Bunting does not expand on the forms of community building, or radical municipalism, which are essential for repairing care. It explains why there are massive staff shortages, and the suicide rate of care workers is now twice the national average. Her presence is felt throughout her reports, observing interactions not from a distance but—mirroring her theme—as a caring insider. This book gives you an insight into just how grim the situation is on the frontline of caring roles in the UK - although reading it I suspected that no matter how bad I think it is, the reality is probably worse. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers.

However I was particularly struck with the experiences of carers - both professional carers and people who've cared for loved ones - and the rewards they find in it. Bunting does focus on these issues but she also delves into broader issues such as the very nature of care, how it is a challenge to capitalist values, and how doctors and others deliver care. It has left more people finally wondering why care itself has been for so long undervalued—paid or unpaid—despite being one of the most valuable of all forms of human labour.In this remarkable and compassionate book, Madeleine Bunting speaks to those on the front line of the care crisis, struggling to hold together a crumbling infrastructure. In one chapter, Bunting arrives at the offices of a voluntary-sector organization which supports families with a disabled child. As we face a second wave of Covid-19, there are more proposals for reinvestment in the care economy, for the redesign of welfare, for collective solutions that might revalue jobs in care. Feminism won a new role for women in the world of work, but the workplace is organised around the imperatives of productivity and efficiency, while parenting requires patience and the acceptance of distractions and interruptions. While understandably not within the scope of this book, it would be interesting to read more about how those health systems – which are a mix of public and private provision – balance market forces, tight government budgets and the humane, intangible side of care.

See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down. Nearly a third of day care centres have closed and “care deserts” have opened up in other parts of the country.However, apart from the briefest mention, disappointingly Bunting has little to say about the ambivalence and conflicts of caring, a topic many feminists have tackled well. A further dimension of the health and social care crisis Bunting explores in her book relates to its commercialisation. At times I had to put it down to wipe away tears, at times as I was angry and again reflective and thoughtful. Even spousal care is deeply imperfect, so the odds of recruiting a really excellent workforce of carers in the numbers required, even after assuming a more liberal migration policy and better pay, feel very long indeed.

She thereby traduces the transformative politics of second wave feminism, with all its commitment to shared childcare, nurseries, community building, and the promotion of democratised caring infrastructures for wellbeing overall. She has received a number of awards and prizes including an honorary fellowship from Cardiff University in 2013, the Portico Prize for The Plot in 2010, a Lambeth MA degree in 2006, The Race in the Media award in 2005 and the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002. Bunting argues that this culture of consumerism within public services was ushered in by the New Labour governments of the 2000s and subsequently, care has been increasingly redefined in business terms, as a matter of financial prudence.With everybody now working long hours in paid work, caring has been increasingly outsourced and privatised, while a new managerial vernacular now dominates caring professions. After trying her best to cope, a frankly disillusioned graduate, felt obliterated by her job in high-end homes. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING Long before the pandemic, care work has been underpaid and its values disregarded. Care, traditionally, was the work of women because ‘caring is engrained in the definition of what it is to be a woman, a wife, a mother, sister and daughter’ (16). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

She finds remarkable stories, in GP surgeries, in work undertaken by parents for their disabled children and in end-of-life teams, that conjure a different way of imagining our society and the connections between us. Helena Fraser Rowe is a PPE graduate from Goldsmiths University of London, specialising in the position of disabled women in contemporary Britain. Hence the importance of Bunting's interviews in the heartlands of care, which often capture the elusive blend of attentive kindness that we know, intuitively, should be the essence of care. For centuries the caring labours of women have been taken for granted, but with more women now in work, with increasing numbers of elderly and with austerity dismantling the welfare state, care is under pressure as never before. Bunting argues that ‘care is the feminist issue’ (3) because its burdens fall unevenly on (some) women.Paid or unpaid, the quality of care in our lives is nothing less than sociality itself: it is an index of how we survive as a society and a species. While women’s employment rates within Britain are at a record peak of 78 per cent (our cheap and flexible labour welcomed by employers), investment in care remains meagre. The idea that the UK is in the midst of a ‘ care crisis’ is both a commonplace of British politics and seemingly impervious to solution. The alarm clock gives us a reason to get up in the morning, the expectations of colleagues or clients give us a reason to do our jobs well, the misery in developing countries .

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