And then She Said “I Must Not Forget It’s a Job”

The communication will present the results of our research on home care support workers (HCSWs) experience hired through Chèque Emploi Service (CES), a “cash-for-care” direct funding system in the province of Quebec (Canada). Based on 14 semi-structured interviews conducted with HCSWs in Montreal’s greater metropolitan area, our inquiry aimed to understand how the reconfiguration of the Welfare State and of its depth and scale of action shapes employment conditions under the CES program. Adopting an inductive approach, our study revealed that struggles faced by HCSWs to categorize and describe their labour “as a job” has substantial effects on the way they engage in “around the clock availability” and free labour while dealing with indeterminate/infinite task descriptions. Said otherwise, we will expose how subjective representations of work shapes the conditions of their precarity.

By providing home care users with “cash” rather than “services,” direct funding involves a shift in the traditional role of home care users as they become both employers and beneficiaries of care. However, the scarcity of resources allocated through CES ultimately manifests itself as a framework structuring a transfer of responsibility for uncompensated care and services toward HCSWs. Faced with individuals’ vulnerabilities, HCSWs involvement to compensate for breaches of services becomes a “personal” responsibility that draws on “natural” affectation of women to care - a situation crystallized by the fact that the workplace is in private homes. Drawing on HCWs’ discourses – and looking at hesitations, reflexive thoughts and “surface contradictions” in speeches –, our communication will analyze and confront different narratives associated with “solidarity,” “care,” “services,” “employment,” “labour” and “exploitation,” raising the need to rethink boundaries between caregiving as free and genuine, and care work as waged and impersonal. Extended excerpts of verbatim will be used through the presentation, giving sensitivity and complexity to our conclusions.