The Regulation of Paid Care Workers’ Wages and Conditions in the Non-Profit Sector: A Toronto Case Study

Abstract

<jats:p>This paper aims to contribute to understandings of the broader regulatory context in which remuneration for care work is negotiated and determined. It draws on a case study of the non-profit sector of Toronto and moves beyond an exclusive focus on the formal regulation of the employment relationship to include other crucial regulatory mechanisms in the analysis. The paper attempts to map the intersections between these different forms of regulation and to identify the effects they produce in practice.</jats:p><jats:p>The paper identifies four main regulatory forces that shape the quantum and basis of the wages and non-wage benefits paid to care workers. Firstly, industrial relations regulation plays an important role not only through the demarcation between unionized and non-unionized agencies, but in demarcations between smaller and larger agencies, between full-time and part-time workers and between regular and elect-to work workers. Secondly, the sources and structure of the social services funding market directly limit care worker remuneration and can work to trump the impact of unionization. Thirdly, the regulatory force of the gendered undervaluing of paid care work is reflected in and intertwined with changes in the protection offered to employees via industrial regulation. Finally, the gendered architecture of paid care work, including size of agency or whether the care work is undertaken in the home or in an institution, contributes to different outcomes for different groups of workers undertaking similar work.</jats:p><jats:p>The interaction of these regulatory forces plays out in the wage and non-wage outcomes in all social services work at the labour market, industry and workplace levels. While the non-profit sector in Toronto provides one specific context in which this occurs, these regulatory forces, particularly the normative effect of gender, are present in other provincial and national contexts. This is at least partly because the community services funding market in other developed countries is underpinned by the same features of new public management present in Canada.</jats:p>

‘If I Had a Family, There Is No Way That I Could Afford to Work Here’: Juggling Paid and Unpaid Care Work in Social Services

“…The skills required in care work are understood as personal to the service provider and as it is mainly women who provide these services, these skills and women's assumed natural abilities for emotional work are expected to be available to employers when they are hired (Rasmussen, , p. 511). In many ways, then, the highly gendered nature of care work provides a sector‐wide institutional logic (McDonald and Charlesworth, ) that shapes the expectations that employers, clients, communities and workers themselves have of the predominantly female workforce's capacity to provide elastic and endless care regardless of wages and working conditions (Charlesworth, ).…”

Government Funding, Employment Conditions, and Work Organization in Non‐profit Community Services: A Comparative Study

“…To explore the impact of NPM on outsourced non‐profit services, the article draws insights from several sources. Recent regulatory scholarship (Arup et al ; Braithwaite et al ) suggests that funding models employed in the sector can constrain and undermine employee protections provided by industrial regulation (Charlesworth ). The organization of work in non‐profits is shaped not only by the rules and institutions that deal with employment matters but also by government decisions about the funding of particular services and the way these factors create distinct funding markets.…”

Self-monitoring, self-blaming, self-sacrificing workers: Gendered managerialism in the non-profit sector

“…Not surprisingly, women make up the majority of staff, clients and volunteers in this sector, though men continue to make up the majority of upper management and executivelevel employees (Themundo, 2009). The selfless altruism assumed of staff in the NPSS overlaps with and reinforces the selfless and endless sacrifice assumed from mothers and other female caregivers (Baines, 2004;Baines et al, 1998;Charlesworth, 2010). Indeed, it is often difficult to differentiate between the "ideal" NPSS employee and the assumed and "naturalised" female focus on relationship, care of others and boundless capacity to put the needs of others ahead of one's own (Cunningham, 2008;Themundo, 2009).…”

“…This technical rather than relationship-based approach to NPSS work also extended to the extensive paperwork required to document outcome measures. Rather than deploring the loss of relationship-building and open-ended support often heard in the NPSS (Baines, 2010;Charlesworth, 2010) the "more masculinist men" liked the routinisation and sense of "scientific management" associated with standardised assessment and intake forms, took pride in keeping their paperwork "up to date" and kept close track of phone calls, meetings outside the agency and visits to the court house to recruit new clients.…”