Labours of Love

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* Book: Madeline Bunting. Labours of Love

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"An in-depth study of the ‘care economy’ combining interviews and sharp analysis."


Review

Richard King:

"An in-depth study of the ‘care economy’ combining interviews and sharp analysis, it is also a welcome tonic to Goodhart’s taxonomy. If Bunting is right to insist, as she does, that care work is characterised by its ‘invisibility’, then it’s especially important to know what it is that we’re talking about when invoking it.

Bunting’s aim in the book is to anatomise the crisis of quality and availability in the increasingly massive ‘care sector’. This crisis was highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which found jurisdictions across the world struggling to cope with the emergency, especially in hospitals and the aged-care sector. But for Bunting it is also part of a much longer process, one in which a deep-seated historical prejudice against the value and importance of care work has collided with an economic system stressing fiscal discipline and profit-based solutions. Nor is the situation likely to improve any time soon, with the number of over 85-year olds rising fast in rich countries (in the UK it is expected to double by 2035), and more and more families entrusting their children to a chronically underfunded childcare system. Having placed the profit motive above people, liberal democracies are finding out the hard way that capital seeks private returns, not social ones, and that the ‘centrist’ gamble that the twain might meet has frayed beyond all hope.

Bunting’s method is to listen and to watch, and only then to analyse. Travelling around her native UK, she visits home-care companies, charities and teaching hospitals, and interviews their employees (at length) about their experiences. Some of these institutions sit within the state, while others exist in the gaps that have opened up in the areas the state has abandoned. But all are full of decent people, whose accounts of the daily challenges they meet are often deeply moving. Moreover, they demonstrate the multiple skillsets they need to go about their work, which, though often routine and repetitive (as is data entry, or marking student essays) also needs expert knowledge and skill, empathy, insight, creativity, tactile sensitivity and physical strength. It is work, in short, that utilises the full range of human attributes. As the author puts it: ‘I learnt how care need not be gendered, and how it can all too easily be crushed in false dualisms, such as head/heart, active/passive or skilled/unskilled.’ And later: ‘Ambiguity is written into care as it straddles ethics, practical action, thought and a set of emotional responses.’

The invisibility of care is not a new phenomenon. Adam Smith accorded childrearing and housework no function within the economy, regarding the family, and the caring roles within it, as necessary counterweights to the cold rationalism of the marketplace. Care work was something women did, and were expected to do, out of the goodness of their hearts, while their husbands served as either fuel or lubricant to the throbbing engine of ‘the economy’ – conceived under capitalism, and only under capitalism, as something separable from social life more broadly. As Bunting explains:

[Capitalism] provoked unease because of its brutal inhumanity and the suffering it caused – workers thrown out of jobs or children working long hours in factories. Furthermore, it offered a chilling prescription for intimate human relationships, and had to be specifically excluded from the private world of family life. As industrial capitalism increased its hold on society, aspects of private life were shielded. The expanding middle classes enthusiastically reinvented the meaning of family and home. Marriage was no longer regarded as primarily a practical arrangement expanding property and family connections, but as a relationship in which the angelic wife offered succour and tenderness.

Of course, such ideas persist to this day; but as capitalism has burrowed its way into every facet of human existence, it has found in care a lucrative new outlet. Care work is now a profitable sector – indeed, the fastest-growing sector in industrialised societies, according to Bunting. Advanced under the rubrics of flexibility and choice, it depends on an army of poorly paid workers, the great majority of whom are female and as such fit the bill of the selfless (‘Heart’) worker. Thus the ‘angel in the house’ meets the engine of capitalism, and is given a crash course in supply and demand.

One of the consequences of conceiving care as a profit-making enterprise is that its efficiency, productivity and competitiveness need to be constantly monitored – an administrative regime that is as likely to get worse as better in light of the Royal Commission into aged care, should its conclusions find expression in a new set of ‘targets’. This entails redefining care work as a series of discrete and measurable tasks and then allocating these tasks to the lowest level of skill possible. This is a recipe for ‘poor service’, of course, but it is also a recipe for alienation, as both carers and ‘clients’ are expected to meet endless bureaucratic criteria. (This, incidentally, goes to the deep connection between capitalism and ‘bullshit jobs’, to use the late David Graeber’s phrase.) Some of the most harrowing passages in the book concern parents of sick or disabled children who are obliged to plough through stupid forms full of often intrusive questions. One of Bunting’s interviewees – a disability charity worker and the mother of a disabled child herself – proves especially revealing on this point, noting how this bureaucratic mentality brings parents close to breaking point: ‘The [Disability Living Allowance] form is fifty-odd pages, and it looks like a small telephone directory. The first time I couldn’t fill it in on my own, it was so depressing. I was in deep grief at my child’s diagnosis.’

Such bureaucratic outlooks are reflected in the language used to talk about care, and one of the most interesting things in Labours of Love is the way its author explores how words both shape and are shaped by changing conditions. Indeed, the book contains a number of short essays on how words such as ‘care’, ‘empathy’ and ‘kindness’ have evolved under ideological pressure – a method used by the great Marxist critic Raymond Williams in Keywords (1976). In particular, she notes the way in which the language used in the contemporary care setting is often remote from, or inimical to, any authentic idea of human flourishing. In some contexts, terms of endearment are banned; in others there are ‘empathy audits’; in nearly all of them ‘services’ are ‘delivered’ to ‘customers’, as if care was akin to a takeaway pizza. Then, of course, there is the language of ‘choice’, the logic of which, Bunting suggests, runs counter to the logic of care, which is often about dependence and even helplessness. Thus does neoliberalism drown out our genuine humanity, disenchanting our embodied social lives with the chilly language of calculation.

There is no call to condescend to care work. On the contrary, and as Bunting suggests, the ethic of care should be generalised to all areas of society. For while neoliberalism is an individualist creed, care is a fundamentally social one, and Bunting’s book shows us just how marginal the neoliberal verities of choice and competition are to the things that really matter to us. ‘No human life,’ wrote Hannah Arendt, ‘not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.’ Mutuality is not something we opt for in a spirit of kumbaya. Without it we simply don’t exist.

The point, then, is not to redistribute the value we put on this or that kind of work, but to change our ideas about what work is, which is to say our ideas about what it is for, and what it means to undertake it. For what it is for is not production in the narrow economic sense, but reproduction in the social one: it is the process by which societies recreate themselves, materially and socially, from one day to the next. Ultimately, it is not about profit and growth; it is the means by which and through which we flourish, as creatures in need of sustenance and comfort, and as beings whose selfhood is utterly grounded in their relations with others, significant or not. It is the essence of our ‘species being’ as social and uniquely creative animals." (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/sandel-goodhart-bunting/?)