Finding Dignity in Dirty Work: The Constraints and Rewards of Low-Wage Home Care Labour

The aging of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere raises important questions about who will provide long-term care for the elderly and disabled. Current projections indicate that home care workers—most of whom are unskilled, untrained and underpaid—will increasingly absorb responsibility for care. While research to-date confirms the demanding aspects of the work and the need for improved working conditions, little is known about how home care workers themselves experience and negotiate their labour on a daily basis. This paper attempts to address this gap by examining how home care workers assign meaning to their “dirty work. ” Qualitative interviews suggest that home care workers have conflicted, often contradictory, relationship to their labour. Workers identify constraints that compromise their ability to do a good job or to experience their work as meaningful, but they also report several rewards that come from caring for dependent adults. I suggest workers draw dignity from these rewards, especially workers who enter home care after fleeing an alienating service job, within or outside of the healthcare industry