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Care to Speak: Building an Ethic of Support for Care Workers

SAWRO at Another Park is Possible Erin Howley What does it mean to care? The idea of care is most often thought of as a matter of the close personal relationships that we rely on for a sense of security, stability, and safety. These may be with circles of friends, colleagues, romantic partnerships, and families […]

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SAWRO at Another Park is Possible

Erin Howley

What does it mean to care? The idea of care is most often thought of as a matter of the close personal relationships that we rely on for a sense of security, stability, and safety. These may be with circles of friends, colleagues, romantic partnerships, and families of origin or of making. However, we don’t think as often of care as an aspect of public policy and institutional practice. Rather, we depend on our closest relationships to fall back on and buffer us from the cold halls of institutions and bureaucracy. But the realms of policy and law affect some of the most essential aspects of our well-being: what we do when we get sick or injured, what happens at school, who we turn to for help, the land we walk on and the water we drink. For this reason, the ethics of care can be seen as essential to the policies that affect our daily lives. 

However, the public has been calling the government to task over a shifting of the moral status quo that is central to a civic notion of care. Within Ontario, comprehensive funding cuts to the Ontario budget under Premier Doug Ford are meant to decrease the province’s deficit, but this purpose seems to double as a way to pull social and economic supports for the most vulnerable. The effects on healthcare alone are sweeping. To name just a few out of dozens of changes: large cuts in mental health funding, elimination of surge beds for hospital overcrowding, reduction of provincial healthcare funding to less than inflation and population growth, decrease of ambulance services, reduction of pain management coverage and services, cuts to hospitals and long-term care homes, and an overall consolidation of the healthcare system (1). Provincial health care funding cuts mean that municipalities must pick up the bill for 30% of costs, shifting the onus onto city budgets and taxpayers with simultaneous cuts in services (2). On top of healthcare, one of the most fundamental changes affecting the workforce in general is the roll-back to $14 an hour of the planned minimum wage increase, frozen until 2025 (3).

At the workplace, we expect that basic safety, security, and personnel are an obvious precursor to our ability to contribute labour towards a greater purpose. However, especially in helping and service professions, this expectation isn’t a given. CUPE Ontario’s recent campaign, Violence: Not Part of Our Job gathers personal anecdotes of people who have experienced workplace violence, to relay the deep void they face when their safety as employees is disregarded:

Being a long term employee with community living, the numerous acts of violence towards co-workers throughout the years are countless. Now that they are integrating more and more individuals with “dual diagnoses” the violent acts are more frequent and becoming more aggressive slapping, hair pulling biting, spitting, name calling, swearing, biting, kicking, grabbing worker’s body parts and not releasing which results in bruises and marks being dug into the skin, throwing items. This issue needs to be dealt with and more support for workers is needed.

Minister of Labour, increase enforcement of workers health & safety laws. Ensure employers follow right to know laws. Ensure appropriate staffing ratios to manage situations before they become violent (4).

CUPE Ontario is also calling on the government to legislate a minimum of four hours of active care per day at long-term care homes through the Time to Care campaign, amidst the Ford administration’s push for decreased funding and privatization of the sector (5).

Both of these campaigns call attention to the gaps in staffing and support for workers in health and service sectors, who do so much to attend to the welfare of others. Personal anecdotes are important to understanding what exactly workers experience when facets of care at the workplace are not accounted for; the fear, insecurity, and pain it causes. These stories help us understand the real effects of policies and institutional protocol on the everyday lives of those who work so hard to keep the net of health and social supports in tact.

A premise of the feminist movement over the past 50 years has been that the labour of care needs to be seen and valued as a fundamental cornerstone of life, a complex nexus of real work that keeps entire economies afloat. An essential tenet of care is that we depend on others for our well-being and survival, particularly in the moments when we need help and aid the most. There is something inherently reciprocal in this notion of care that serves a wider mutual benefit; that if we extend assistance to others, we will also be provided for. Yet it is also in these moments of need when we feel gaps in care and assistance most drastically. Turning our focus towards policy, the premise of care can be seen as the willingness to proactively support people who do the work of attending to others within education, healthcare, homecare, and social service sectors. It also includes baseline economic and social support for the people whose care labour is not formalized, including the domestic work of parents, caregivers and community advocates.

The South Asian Women’s Rights Organization (SAWRO) is a completely women’s led group that has been working since 2007 to build up ‘social, cultural, and civic support’ within the Oakwood-Crescent Town community of Toronto (6). SAWRO has linked low overall income rates in the neighborhood to the parallel low employment of racialized and immigrant women who are the nexus of their families and communities. With a recent focus on assisting immigrant women to gain equitable employment, SAWRO has led research into the temporary work conditions commonly faced by South Asian women within the neighborhood. They have found that immigrant women are most often only able to access low-pay, low-skilled, precarious jobs, even if they have high levels of education and work experience from their countries of origin (6). A principle of SAWRO’s organizing is that when women lead, the entire community rises. This is feminism in which racialized, immigrant women lead research and public dialogue on the problems and needs that affect the health and wellbeing of their communities, at the same time building the venues — oftentimes with their very hands — where they will be heard. 

A culture and politics of care is visible in the actions of the SAWRO women whenever they gather together. With a disciplined and focused work ethic, they meet every Wednesday evening – after days of long work hours and family obligations – in a Teesdale apartment turned office. Sitting around a long folding table, they organize outreach and training, community gatherings, research, and actions. Mayworks hosted a brunch and film screening as part of the 2019 festival to recognize and honor SAWRO’s ongoing work, and in extension, the labour of all care workers: late night meetings, lifting and lowering of festival tents, banner making, conversations for emotional support, focused study, cooking, setting up chairs and tables, counting board election ballots, they clicking of a keypad in the effort of shared administration, encouraging youth from the side of a stage, singing together in a chorus of pride. In the inimitable words of Executive Director Sultana Jahangir, “SAWRO does not do cultural programming. Our work is political; culture is part of our blood.”

In summer 2019, artist Karen Ancheta worked with SAWRO women to develop narrative performance about their life stories. In her storytelling work with caregiver groups, Karen has seen that it can sometimes be difficult for women to recount their experiences, which often include difficulty and strain. However, she has also seen how powerful it can be when people discover their own ways of speaking their truths, connecting with others, and considering their own dreams. “When developing the stories with people I ask them, ‘what do you want people to know about you?’ That truth usually provokes a strong emotion in regards to their current story, as well as the story they want to have. Sometimes it prompts change.” The women read their stories as part of Another Park is Possible, a Mayworks event held at Prarie Drive Park, across from the Teesdale buildings in Scarborough. The stories reflected the deep ways that workplace discrimation and exclusion have affected their lives. At the same time, as the women walked one by one to a podium to share their stories under the open sky, they carried a sense of collective pride and self-honouring that asserted a much more just and fair vision of the world. 

The narrative storytelling of SAWRO showed that community organizing is a work of care; an attentiveness, respect, and understanding of the felt needs of a community and the willingness to invest in action that requires deep personal investment. The act of storytelling around gaps in care is a method for demanding a renewed public ethic and standard of wellbeing for all. In the act of telling, those whose work so often goes unseen and unacknowledged can finally be recognized. Care work is multifaceted and essential to the very fabric of social and economic life. To fully value and uphold this work requires a willingness on the part of policy makers and workplace managers to be receptive — to listen to those who hold families, workplaces, and communities together. 

The need for care is perhaps one of the most elemental of human experiences, something that every single person knows and faces within a lifetime. Care is an ethic that also connects us with the world outside of human encounters; with the natural world and with past and future generations of life. To gather around the stories of those who do the work of care is to regard how deeply their knowledge and wisdom may penetrate public consciousness with a fuller regard for mutual well-being, sustenance, and prosperity.

Presented in collaboration with CUPE Ontario.