Valuing Care Work: Comparative Perspectives

Valuing care work: Comparative perspectives by C Benoit and H Hallgrimsdottir (Eds) (2011) University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-1092-7, 304 pagesThe meaning of care work is rarely explored in the literature, and certainly not from a cross-cultural perspective which examines the differing international contexts for welfare policies and their impact on how care is viewed, delivered and valued. In this highly readable book, Valuing Care Work, Benoit and Hallgrimsdotter bring together a diversity of contributors from Canada, Finland and Iceland to examine care work from a range of perspectives, and beyond the narrow field of professional care work. Readers will be drawn to many chapters in this book, regardless of their professional experience, or country of origin or its socio-political structure, because each chapter provides a window into aspects of life that all can relate to, either in their professional life or their personal life, through family and other social relationships.Most contributors to the book draw on a feminist perspective to describe and examine paid and unpaid care work within their chosen context. Each contributor looks at how gendered assumptions are embedded in institutional frameworks through which care is provided. Within this diversity, notions of emotional labour (the direct provision of care to clients) and intimate labour (the provision of care that involves bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity) are explored. Examples of both paid and unpaid care work that are explored here are maternity care, care of the aged and disabled at home, care of children by single parents and grandparents, Aboriginal care work, volunteer work, and the care provided by sex workers. The editors' overarching argument and purpose is to show that 'the more welfare states base their social policies on the principle of caring, the closer they come to championing gender equality in all sectors of society, one where men's involvement in caring work is championed, where there is equal balance between paid and unpaid work for both women and men, with both sharing opportunities and responsibilities'(p. 10).Some chapters provide stronger critical analysis of care work as emotional or intimate labour than others which are more descriptive.In chapter five, the authors undertake a critical reflection on paid care in homes, the impacts of increasing pressure on nurses and allied health workers to be more efficient on their role, and the implications for non-professional staff, clients and families. Through the use of two case studies, they show how challenging and complex the intimate labour of home care is. …

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