At the Crossroads of the Employment and the Care Crises: Care Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is both a health and an economic crisis—or, in other words, a crisis at the crossroads of employment and care. Measures o contain the spread of the virus aimed at alleviating the pressure on health care systems or at gaining time to expand them were put in place almost universally as the pandemic spread, first around northern and then southern countries. Containment measures, particularly stringent at first, brought economies to a halt, threatening employment and livelihoods.The pandemic made visible and exacerbated a preexisting trade-off— that between paid work and unpaid carework, which, in the absence of redistribution between women and men, only care services help bridge. Indeed, unpaid carers, most of them women, bore the brunt of the collapse of care services. Women who remained in employment juggled work and care, and their greater care obligations sometimes forced them to cut down on paid working hours or to extend total workinghours (paid and unpaid) to unsustainable levels (ILO 2021c). Others lost their jobs as a result.This chapter takes a bird’s-eye view of how the crisis unfolded in the main care sectors, showing the relationship between the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the institutional arrangements that govern care sectors, and the situation of care workers in them. In the second part, this chapter elaborates on a progressive care agenda in which investments in the provision of public care servicetake center stage in the recovery strategy, spurring decent employment, restoring caring capabilities, and building resilience, averting future health and economic crises of themagnitude of the ones we are barely emerging from.