The Disadvantaged Home Care Personal Support Worker: Differences in Job Characteristics, Unionization, Pensions, Participation, and Wages by Care Sector in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Personal Support Worker (PSW) supply is struggling to match the rising demand within many countries, particularly in the home and community (HC) sector. Although care demand projections are often sector-specific, our understanding of sector discrepancies on the PSW labour supply side is limited. This paper compares PSW job characteristics by means, proportions, and tests of significance across HC, nursing and long-term care home (LTC), and hospital sectors utilizing a sample of Canadian PSWs (1996-2010). Compared to LTC and hospital sectors, HC PSWs had significantly lower average wages, labour participation levels, permanent positions, job duration, and unionization rates. Relative wage distribution graphs showed how sector wage discrepancies existed across the wage distribution. These distinctions made the comparatively disadvantaged HC PSW position particularly salient, with important labour supply implications by sector. The relative attractiveness of HC sector jobs will become more critical as the rise in HC demand is projected to continue.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".