Placing Care Work in the Future of Work Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that the importance of care work and migration is undervalued and undertheorized in current understandings of the future of work. Discussions of the future of work are predominantly technocentric. Focus tends toward speculative predictions and the implications of supposedly inevitable technological advances that will lead to evolving adaptation skills and job loss. This prevailing discourse prioritises economic development and productivity, which is reinforced by institutional support at the global scale, influencing policy and practice. Although the demand for care work continues to grow globally, its meaningful inclusion in the future of work discourse is limited, and arguably effaced. We emphasise that the definition of care work is expansive, is difficult to quantify, and it cannot be easily automated. Similarly, high-income countries increasingly rely on migration flows to meet their care work needs, and in turn middle- and low-income countries rely on remittances to sustain their development and people’s livelihoods. In this paper, we offer a conceptual corrective to better situate the dense context of care work. In doing so, we draw on valuable perspectives on diverse economies, decent work and sustainable livelihoods, global care chains, and glocalisation. Incorporating well established insights from within these foci will lead to more effective discussion and a policy agenda for the future of work that takes socially just care work into consideration.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".