This study explores interpretations of interpersonal aggression involving older adults, through an analysis of semi-structured interview data from 13 assisted living (AL) tenants and 19 AL service and/or care workers. Differing relations (tenant-tenant and tenantworker) shape the kinds of tenant actions experienced as problematic and/or aggressive. Tenants and workers invoke communal living, aging, and dementia as explanatory frames, in part to mitigate victimization experiences through normalization and neutralization. This was more prominent among workers, who are less able to enact empowering responses as they sought to keep working in difficult circumstances. Structural constraints, and the power and social hierarchies that contribute to victimization, generate interpretive responses that obscure fulsome and contextualized understandings of the problem while further reinforcing oppressive discourses including a sense of the inevitability of aggression in older adults-especially those living with dementia.

How are workers organizing to retain long-term care as a public service and what have been key opportunities and challenges in organizing? How has organization around public ownership of long-term care been influenced by the COVID-19 Pandemic? This thesis contributes to these questions by examining long-term care sector union activities in Manitoba. I draw on Feminist Political Economy to consider how social, economic, and political factors shape gender and race-based inequalities, and Social Unionism, to understand union engagement with social justice issues affecting union members and communities. I employ four qualitative methods: a literature review; semi-structured interviews; social media analysis; and digital ethnography. Findings show unions constructed collective action frames which identified the diagnoses (problems) of forprofit care, privatization, and lack of care standards. Mental health support, a seniors advocate, ending for-profit care and national care standards were prognoses (solutions).The repertoire (strategies) included union-community coalitions, political lobbying and mobilizations.

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