On the Move and Working Alone: Policy Implications of the Experiences of Unionised Newfoundland and Labrador Homecare Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homecare work is female-dominated, generally precarious, and takes place in transient and, sometimes, multiple workplaces. Homecare workers can engage in relatively complex employment-related geographical mobility to, from, and often between work locations that can change frequently and are remote from the location of their employer. Like other precarious workers, homecare workers may be more likely to experience work-related health and safety injuries and illnesses than non-precarious workers. Their complex patterns of employment-related geographical mobility may contribute to the risk of injury and illness. This paper explores patterns of employment-related geographical mobility and ways they influence the risk of injury and illness among unionised homecare workers living and working in two regions of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, on Canada’s east coast. It uses Quinlan & Bohle’s ‘pressure, disorganisation, and regulatory failure’ model to help make sense of the vulnerability of these workers to occupational safety and health risks. The study uses a qualitative, multi-methods approach consisting of semi-structured interviews and a review of government and homecare agency policies, as well as 20 Newfoundland and Labrador homecare collective agreements. It addresses two main questions: What are the work-related health and safety experiences of interviewed unionised homecare workers in Newfoundland and Labrador?; How do policies (government and homecare agency) and collective agreements interact with employment-related geographical mobility to mitigate or exacerbate the occupational safety and health challenges confronting these workers? Findings show that these workers experience numerous work-related health and safety issues, many of which relate to working in remote, transient and multiple workplaces. While collective agreements mitigate some health and safety issues, they do not fully address particular occupational safety and health risks associated with working alone, working remotely from employers, and working in transient workplaces, or the risks associated with commuting between workplaces. More active union engagement with these issues could be a mechanism to improve the health and safety of these and other homecare workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".