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Care crisis: Why migrant labour and AI won’t solve our problems [1]

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Date: 2023-07

But we need to go further. For one thing, we need to be more imaginative about the role of governments in solving the care crisis. The amount of care we’ll need in future years is unsustainable if we’re all too busy working to support loved ones. We must rebalance work and care time, dethroning the former through policies like a four-day working week and paid, job-protected care leave.

And we’ll need new social infrastructure to cope. Our living arrangements must shift from the narrow confines of the traditional family to more porous, care-friendly arrangements, such as co-housing projects where people live in private spaces but share common areas and collective endeavours.

We should all be afraid of what’ll happen without these radical new pathways. We can’t chart those paths without making care as personal as it is political. Because while we need government investment, a rebalancing of work and care time, and many more changes, at the crux of it, this is a crisis of our own vulnerability.

Care is often talked about as if it’s solely about birth, parenting and reproduction. But it’s also about frailty and death. We’re taught to revere our freedom and independence, or at least to aim past the things that tie us to drudgery and dependency. As Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1891 essay on socialism, “it is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure”.

We must be wary of how deeply this idea reaches into our lives, because to reject unpleasant tasks is also to relinquish love. Care teaches us this, showing us that, if we love anyone, there will be hard things to do; toil and heartbreak. It’s the price we pay for love and community. This doesn’t mean accepting care on the terms dictated by capitalism, but it does mean accepting that our freedoms are subject to the vagaries of the universe: sooner or later, we’ll discover that today’s liberty was but a fleeting condition.

Fear of mortality makes us stigmatise and withdraw from the sick and impaired. There is a dissonance at the core of us humans; we are capable of charting the stars and mapping our interior helix, yet tethered to tumours and toilets. That knowledge of our own vulnerability, the eventual demise of our minds and bodies, makes us fearful of confronting care, but a confrontation is what we need. If we fail to do it by choice, it’ll be forced upon us, just as it was upon Ulla, Line, Safa and everyone else we met earlier.

We talk of care as a ‘sector’, something sectioned off from a larger whole. Consequently, we don’t think about it until the unthinkable happens. But care is not a sector like legal advice, or hairdressing, or podiatry. Rather, care is what feminist theorists Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher have termed a ‘species activity’, a fundamental task embedded in the very facts of life and love. Seen this way, it is a continuous presence, involving us all.

If we fight for change from this foundation – rooted in the reality of the human condition, connected in our mutual vulnerability, understanding that with love comes necessity but not under the terms that capitalism requires – then we just might get somewhere better. Maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll be in time for you.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/emily-kenway-care-crisis-failing-bots-migrant-labour-work/

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