Liminality in Ontario’s long-term care facilities: Private companions’ care work in the space ‘betwixt and between’

Abstract

Nursing, personal care, food and cleaning are publicly funded in Ontario’s long-term care facilities, but under-staffing usually renders all but the most basic of personal preferences superfluous. This individualization of responsibility for more personalized care has resulted in more families providing more care and opting to hire private, private companion care. With direct payment of companions becoming a growing but largely invisible facet of care, exploring companion’s roles is important. Using a six site rapid ethnographic study in long-term care facilities (i.e. observations, documents and key informant interviews (n = 167)), this paper argues that private companions occupy a liminal space between policy, family and market, and their role within institutions and in private homes may be the missing link in the care work chain in the sense that it can at once be classified as formal and informal and draws on their own and others paid and unpaid labour.

Non‐job work/unpaid caring: Gendered industrial relations in long‐term care

“…For LTRC workers, we suggest the unpaid work they undertook was ‘non‐job’ work as it was something other than paid work though it closely or exactly replicated paid work. In LTRC, this non‐job work, focused in particular on fostering and sustaining dignity‐enhancing relationships, operates in liminal spaces between time and effort that is recognized and paid for and that which is expected, informally recognized but entirely unpaid (Daly, et al ).…”

“…In addition to master contracts, feminist political economists have noted that these unions have used strategies to challenge masculinist hegemony and draw in the female membership, such as women's caucuses and conferences, though masculinist structures appear to remain largely intact within the larger union bodies (Briskin, ) or, as Acker () might note, at the organizational level. Despite this, unionized LTRC workers have managed to make some advances in terms of pay and conditions but very little in terms of moving beyond assumptions about under‐valued gendered skills and gendered job ghettos (Daly, Armstrong, & Lowndes, ; Laxer, ).…”

Liminal and invisible long-term care labour: Precarity in the face of austerity

“…retired, former homemakers, etc.). As in other areas of elder care, there is a care gap driven by under-funding and under-staffing (Burke, 2008;Daly et al, 2011Daly et al, , 2015Diamond, 2001;Fine, 2012;Foner, 1994;Harrington et al, 2000;Lopez, 2007).…”

“…The liminality construct presents interesting conceptual room to examine invisible work, private work performed in public work spaces, and publicly funded work performed in private work spaces. For instance, Zadoroznyj (2009) examines the position of publicly funded 'mothercarers' going into private homes to provide care, while Daly et al (2015) examine privately funded companions going into publicly funded facilities to provide care to residents. Zadoroznyj refers to these workers as 'strangers' who are welcomed by some new mothers for the anonymity they afford when providing intimate care such as laundry after the birth of a baby, and unwelcome by others for not being as familiar as family in these intimate family spaces.…”

“…Sweeney (2009: 570), in referring to student tree planters, notes that '[l]iminality denotes a time/space where subjects are "betwixt and between", neither "in" nor "out" and separated from familiar space, routine, temporal order or hegemonic social structures'. Indeed, as Daly et al (2015) argue, liminal work as a construct can link formal and informal, paid and unpaid care work. In a similar way, Baines (2006) notes how paid care workers in the social services sector often perform unpaid work -in an 'endlessly stretchable' way -to meet an under-funded organization's needs.…”