Health professionals, support workers and the precariat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following a neo-Weberian theoretical perspective, with reference to neo-Marxist analyses, this chapter considers the position of health support workers in the market in neo-liberal societies – with a particular focus empirically on a cross-country comparison between the United Kingdom and Canada. It discusses the role of health support workers holistically in the context of the wider range of health professionals with whom they work. Health professions themselves have been claimed in recent years to have been deprofessionalised or proletarianised. However, it is argued here that such trends are overstated and there is still typically a large gulf between the working conditions of this group of health professional occupations and those of health support workers. The latter are critically considered in terms of the recent interest in depicting such groups as the new precariat. It is argued that there is little doubt that in the United Kingdom and Canada most health support workers can be described as operating in precarious conditions. Nonetheless, doubts are raised as to whether this group will become the self-conscious and cohesive class as envisaged in neo-Marxist theory. The conclusion to the chapter highlights the policy implications of the analysis in light of current debates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".