Episode 22
· 28:33
The world is in a care deficit, meaning there are not enough workers to care for those who are in need of care. The World Health Organization in, I think it was 2017, declared that we're in a global care deficit. I think they projected that by 2030, there'll be a short fall or a deficit of 11,000,000 care workers.
Dr. Sonia Kang:During the COVID 19 pandemic, we got a sense of how devalued care work really is. Care workers were and still are working long hours in poor conditions for low pay to support elders, children, and people with disabilities. These care workers provide some of the most essential labor in our society, but their work is often overlooked. We rarely stop to think about how much we rely on care and how everything would fall apart without it. That neglect has consequences.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Care workers have been leaving the sector, and we're now facing a global care crisis with not nearly enough carers to support everyone who needs care. Today, we'll be busting the myth that care work is low value. We talked to researchers about just how vital care work really is and what it would look like if society recognized that our communities and economies are built on and sustained by care. I'm Dr. Sonia Kang , academic director at GATE.
Carmina Ravanera:And I'm Carmina Ravanera, senior research associate at GATE. In our last season, we busted the myth that care work is women's work. We talked about why everyone, especially men, should be involved in caring and how that shift could benefit all of society. Today, we're digging deeper into another side of the issue, why care work is so often economically undervalued, who that hurts, and what we can do about it.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Right. If you haven't heard that earlier episode, it's a great companion to this one. Definitely check it out. It'll give you a good background on care work and how it's gendered. But for now, let's get into it.
Dr. Sonia Kang:Why doesn't society value care work the way we should?
Carmina Ravanera:I asked doctor Carieta Thomas, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Carleton University. She explained three big reasons why care is seen as low value.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:There are maybe three big overarching reasons which are all connected. So it's the type of labor and where that labor takes place. So care labor is really intimate. You're often touching bodies, sometimes naked bodies. Is often dirty work, and it's emotional labor as well.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:And importantly, that labor, it it doesn't often sometimes it doesn't necessarily directly bring profit to the recipients or anyone else. Of course, it's caring labor, like taking care of children and cooking meals that allows people to go out into the public sphere and make money on the market. But that often goes unacknowledged, and care labor is not seen as, quote, unquote, productive labor. And because of this, it's regulated to the private sphere. So most people receive care in their home, and care work is seen as something that is within the private domain.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So and that's in contrast to other labor that takes place in what we understand as the public sphere. And even when it's done in care facilities, like long term care facilities or hospitals, it's seen as something that's done in private spaces. So I'd say that's one reason that it's seen as less valuable. And then related to this is the who. So who actually does this labor?
Dr. Carieta Thomas:And we know that it's women who do most of the caring work in the world. And that's whether it's unpaid care labor in the home or paid care labor in the in the labor market. And part of the devaluation of this labor is because it's a gendered form of labor that's seen as natural for women. So it's associated with, like, motherhood, and it's understood as unskilled, labor that all women can and should do. And this means that a lot of care labor is done by women and particularly women of color and migrant women of color.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So this also has an impact on how it's valued. And the last big reason I'd say is the people on the receiving end of care labor. So in societies like Canada, we value independence and autonomy, and the recipients of care are seen as dependents. Children, older adults, persons with disabilities are the people that we think of as in need of care. But the reality is that everyone needs care, especially if we think about it across time.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:You would think that caring for some of the more vulnerable members of our society would mean that this labor is valued more. But, unfortunately, those people are also often unable to pay for this labor or not able to pay a lot, or they can't pay for it on their own. They need the help of the government or other family members. So that's part of this idea of dependency around care. And I think that's part of why this labor is not valued highly because it's also related to who is on the receiving end of it.
Carmina Ravanera:I also spoke with Dr. Susan Prentice, a sociologist at the University of Manitoba and the Duff Roblin Professor of Government. She highlighted a powerful misconception that's been around for a long time: the idea that care is free.
Dr. Susan Prentice:The basic answer is it's got to do with sexism and gender expectations. For a very long time, care work was provided in the home, largely by women outside of the formal economy. And as such, in that classical way that economists used to get to do it, it was considered free, and things that are free have no value. So that's really the origins of of why we think it's not important. It's also the origins of why we think it's low skill work, which when done for pay, is really just done for love and doesn't have to be, well paid, well remunerated, or require much training.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So it sounds like there are several reasons why care is so undervalued. off, it's usually done by women, especially women of color and migrant workers, and often in the home where it's not recognized as skilled work. the people who receive care are often dependents, children, elders, or people with disabilities, and they usually can't pay much, if anything, for that care. And care isn't seen as productive in the economic sense. It doesn't generate profit, even though it's what makes productivity possible in the place.
Dr. Sonia Kang:It's essential work, but it's often invisible. So what happens when we don't value it?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, the big thing is that the people who do this essential work are often treated as disposable. Care workers, especially people like personal support workers and early childhood educators, are usually paid very low wages. And that often isn't enough to make a living.
Dr. Susan Prentice:I I enter the care economy mainly by thinking about child care. Early learning and childcare services, the kind of things that parents use when they work or study or need time away from children and the kind of services that children need to flourish and grow and have other friends. It's really early education. In Canada, we think of this just as a market service that parents pay for only when they need and only if they work or go to school. But in many places around the world, it's seen as a child's right, and children start it because it's good for children irrespective of what their parents do.
Dr. Susan Prentice:So in Canada, because it's a market service, most of for most of Canadian history, parents have had to cover the costs, which has meant parents pay very high fees, was not at all uncommon in Canada for parents to be paying over, $20,000 a year for childcare. But little of that went to the caregivers. We've we've long had a crisis in Canada where the people who provide the care for young children in the childcare system, not in the school system. We won that battle some years ago. In the childcare side, the wages are really appalling.
Dr. Susan Prentice:It's it's, it's been a long failure to recognize and pay for skilled work. Some of that was because there was just not much money. If you have to have the users of the service be the only ones who pay for the cost of the care, then you then you get a real pinch point between users and providers of care. It's one of many reasons why the market is not a good model for care.
Carmina Ravanera:And it's not just about wages. The working conditions are often terrible too. A global survey of care workers by UNI Global Union in 2025 found that care workers face chronic understaffing, workplace violence and harassment, lack of union representation, and other unsafe conditions. These stressors inevitably lead to high turnover, which means lower quality care for everyone. Because let's be honest, everyone needs care at some point in their lives.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And the burden of all this falls hardest on women of color and migrant workers. They're disproportionately represented as carers in countries like Canada and The United States, so they face the brunt of this devaluation. For migrant care workers, the risks are even higher. They provide essential labor without legal protections, and that puts them in an extremely vulnerable position.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:A big proportion of, care workers are women of color who are also temporary migrants or immigrants. And this is if we look at the lower rungs of the care ladder. So not, doctors and nurses. They're personal support workers, home health aides. They're in home caregivers.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:Be because care work at that level is devalued, the wages are lower, and the working conditions are not optimal. So there's less job benefits and autonomy, in the work. In terms of immigration and migration, so despite this labor being one of the types of work that women migrate to countries like Canada, The US, Italy, UAE, and a whole all the countries that we consider developed nations, the immigration policies in these countries also limit and impact the working conditions for these care workers. So for example, in many countries, the care workers' immigration status is tied to their employer in a way that makes it difficult for workers to leave a place with poor working conditions if they wanna remain in the country. In Canada, until until that policy changed in 2014, some caregiver migrants were required to live in the homes of their employers, which, of course, bred a lot of exploitation.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So even though that policy is no longer in place, it's not easy within the immigration system now to change employers. And in some countries, that's not even an option. So it is an option in Canada. But this means that migrant care workers are are often making difficult choices between remaining in a position with unsafe and poor working conditions or their in intentions to remain in the country and work. Some women who lose their employment while still in the temporary migrant status fall out of of status, and that makes them even more vulnerable to exploitation and poverty.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:And we have to remember that, these mostly women migrate to countries like Canada because other women who are still seen as responsible for caring enter the labor market to engage in other types of work. And so these care workers enable them to do that. There's another issue in terms of immigrant care workers, but I I need to distinguish between migrants and immigrants in Canada. So in Canada, you're considered an immigrant if when you arrive, you have permanent residence or what's sometimes called landed status. And you're a temporary migrant if you do not have permanent residents, and your status is limited in some ways.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So another issue that is a result of the devaluation of care work and care workers is that they're often not given landed status. So they don't get permanent residence right away when they come. Instead, they often have to work for a required amount of time, then go through another application process and waiting period before they're granted permanent residence. And they can't bring their families to join them until they get permanent residence. In in some other countries, unlike Canada, permanent residence or citizenship status is not even ever an option for migrant care workers.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So when care work is undervalued, the harm goes far beyond low wages. Migrant care workers provide essential labor but face unfair immigration policies. They're unprotected, and many are separated from their families. Their work simply isn't treated as equal to other kinds of work. In Canada and elsewhere, other immigrants arrive with landed status, but not migrant carers.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So what would it look like to truly value care work?
Carmina Ravanera:Well, I asked the researchers just that. Susan pointed out that care doesn't just fuel the economy, it also improves lives, strengthens communities, and is deeply tied to freedom and justice.
Dr. Susan Prentice:There are real economic reasons why we need care and value care, and we see economic returns. Among other things, it's very labor intensive. So this is good news because labor intensive work has really high input output multipliers. It creates good ripple effects in the local economy. It brings a lot of local returns.
Dr. Susan Prentice:It enables parents to work or study, and then they go on to increase their human capital. So it's a job creator. It's a green job creator. It supports parental employment. It reduces family stress.
Dr. Susan Prentice:From a population health point of view, it keeps people healthier and happier. So there are strong economic reasons for doing this. But it's equally important to remember that it's an important part of living in a living living in a good way. Right? It it shares the work.
Dr. Susan Prentice:It provides a real way that, we create the village that it takes to raise a child. We don't just ask primarily mothers to do the work. We don't exploit women. We don't limit women's economic and social possibilities by basically demanding that they take care of children in the home. So it it creates more spaces and more capacity for women and others who care for children.
Dr. Susan Prentice:So it's got a very important sort of justice and freedom dimension. So these strike me as win win all around.
Carmina Ravanera:Carieta also spoke about the global care deficit, a significant shortage of care workers around the world. She emphasized that everyone needs care at some point and that care work is what holds our communities and cultures together.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:The obvious reason that we hear a lot about these days is that the world is in a care deficit, meaning there are not enough workers to care for those who are in need of care. And you can see this in, like, all the long wait lists for day cares. There aren't enough day care facilities, and there are not enough workers for those facilities. The World Health Organization in, I think it was 2017, declared that we're in a global care deficit. I think they projected that by 2030, there'll be a shortfall or a deficit of 11,000,000 care workers.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:And for countries like Canada, which has a rapidly aging population, again, the magic year is 2030. About twenty four percent of the Canadian population will be 65 at that point. So for countries like Canada, the aging population also makes this really important work that we need to prioritize. Another reason that care work should be valued is that we are not as independent as we'd like to believe. Instead, we are all interdependent, and everyone needs care in some capacity.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So even though children, older adults, and people with disabilities are seen as more in need of care, that doesn't mean that we don't all need care. So we all require food to eat, and sometimes we can't cook it ourselves. That's caring labor. We all need emotional support at at times. That's caring labor.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:We can even think about the fact that things change for us as we age or as we make decisions to have children while still remaining in the workforce or circumstances like an illness or a car accident could result in us living with a disability. So we're all in need of care. Finally, I'd say our communities and societies are maintained by care work. So we're socialized as children by the care work of teachers and babysitters. As older adults, it's a care worker who sits with an older adult health helping them, like, sort through their memories, and that enables us to pass on traditions and stories that are important for cultural, reproduction.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So care work sustains our communities in a lot of ways, and I think that's one of the main reasons it should be valued more.
Dr. Sonia Kang:As Susan says, caring about care is a win for everyone. It's linked to freedom and justice for all, but especially women. When we care for others, we strengthen our communities and make sure that children, elders, people with disabilities, and so many others can live with dignity and thrive. And with an aging population, cares are more valuable than ever. So what policy changes would help us value them more?
Carmina Ravanera:Susan pointed to child care as one example. In Canada, the 2021 Canada wide Early Learning and Child Care agreements made a big difference. They've helped families by shifting child care toward a public good instead of a luxury that only some people can afford. But there's still work to do. We need more focus on improving work conditions for care workers and making sure that there are enough child care spaces for everyone who needs them.
Dr. Susan Prentice:Well, many years ago when I was a young graduate student, I was really interested in what happened to children during World War two in Canada, and I started studying the daycare centers that got set up in Toronto. So I think a lot about World War two as my anchor because it was my entry point into thinking about the advocacy that mothers did to try to create services. So the happy news is that, right now, we've we're seeing more action on childcare nationally than we've seen since World War two, so that's a very long time ago. What happened in 2021 was the federal government, finally stepped up and said, holy cow. This is a public good.
Dr. Susan Prentice:And if we wanna see changes in Canada that need to happen, we better help pay for it. So through the Canada wide early early learning and childcare agreements called CWELC or the Canada wide and nicknamed the $10 a day plan, the federal government committed to over $30,000,000,000 over five years to work with provinces and territories and indigenous governments because those are the bodies that have the authority to truly really try to move things along. And the speed of change has been impressive. Right? In in less than five years, in most parts of the country, the licensed care that exists has fallen to a $10 a day cost to parents, still higher in some provinces.
Dr. Susan Prentice:$10 a day is still high for some people, so we still need to have subsidies for folks for whom that is too too demanding. The plans also included making at least a quarter of a million new childcare spaces across the country, and expansion has been slower because it's it's harder. Taking care of the labor force, growing it and remunerating it and making it a better career, there've been improvements, but there's still a lot of work to do there.
Carmina Ravanera:She also stressed that care shouldn't be a for profit business. Research shows that publicly funded, non profit care ensures quality of care for both caregivers and receivers. On the other hand, for profit care often leads to lower wages, worse conditions, and lower quality overall.
Dr. Susan Prentice:So one of the risks that happens as Canada now steps out to build, an early learning and child care system that will work for the whole country is that with these, these new dollars and this new interest, there's a real risk that for some people, this becomes a shiny opportunity to make profit. And although the federal government has asked that, in its all of its legislation and in agreements that child care expansion be primarily not for profit and public. We are seeing accelerating growth in commercial child care services for profit, and there are many people who don't see any problem with that. What's the problem with an entrepreneur starting up a day care center and and providing a service to parents? And it's just very important for folks to know that in in social services like child care, the profit motive is really antithetical to quality.
Dr. Susan Prentice:We've got mountains of evidence that shows that where there's a profit motive, corners get cut. Either the staffing quality gets cut, the education gets cut, the food and toy budget gets cut. And in all cases, somebody walks away with private money in their pocket that could be going to support the early learning and child care system itself. So it's gonna be very important, you know, that we put in the protective guardrails that keep services not for profit and public. We saw during the pandemic that the kind of care and safety and death rates in in homes for seniors was much worse in for profit programs.
Dr. Susan Prentice:And I don't I don't want to be alarmist, but for all the same reasons that the profit motive is very problematic in elder care, it's also very problematic in care for young children.
Carmina Ravanera:And Carieta made a similar point. We need to treat care as a public good, not just a private responsibility placed on families and especially on women. She also emphasized that migrant workers deserve landed status and full respect for the essential work they do.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:The big picture policy change that needs to happen is conceptualizing care as a social responsibility or as, like, a public good. So that would mean decentering the family as the only entity or institution that's responsible for care and instead recognizing that the government and all citizens and when I say citizens, I mean not in, like, the immigration sense, but in the sense that we're all members of a community, and we should all be responsible for care. But, really, conceptualizing care as outside of the family, today, a lot of care has to be has to take place in the market because of how our society is structured. So conceptualizing it as outside of the family and seeing it as a social responsibility could mean that the government provides more funding for those who are in need of care. So things like subsidizing care more for those who can't afford it.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So policies like the $10 a day childcare are necessary for managing the cost of care. And, also, government could provide more publicly funded care facilities and institutions for things like childcare and elder care rather than downloading those onto the market. This could help also regulate the wages for workers. Also, care workers migrating to perform this work should be granted landed status. So this would help to decrease the vulnerability of these workers in terms of wages and working conditions.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:And in turn, it might also help increase the number of care workers to fill the widening gap that I was talking about before. So it needs to be work that's respected at all levels so that more people want to do it. And there's also currently a backlog of migrant care workers trying to transition to permanent residents, and that needs to be addressed. So things like not requiring the two step process for immigration would help with that. So those are kind of some of the policy changes that I think would be necessary.
Dr. Sonia Kang:So to truly value care, we need to treat it as a public good, something that everyone needs, because everyone will need it eventually. And that means not turning care into industry. It means policies that protect and support care workers with fair wages, safe working conditions, and landed status for the migrants doing this essential work.
Carmina Ravanera:Exactly. Care should be accessible, affordable, and high quality. As scholar Pat Armstrong said, the conditions of work are the conditions of care. When carers are supported, our communities are supported, and our economies thrive.
Dr. Sonia Kang:To sum things up, if someone was to suggest or imply that care work isn't valuable or that it's low skill, what's one thing I could say to bust this myth?
Carmina Ravanera:Here's what the researchers had to say.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:They won't directly say it, but it's suggested often, or it's just kind of implied or understood. So I'd say that they should think back to the last time that you spent a day with an unruly two year old, or a time that you've been with an older relative who's experiencing dementia. Or remember during the height of the COVID pandemic when parents were boasting about not understanding how to help their children with their schoolwork or not being able to handle their behavior. Some parents were even complaining about having to be with their kids all day. Well, a teacher, a day care worker, a personal support worker, they're all licensed, educated, trained, and equipped with the skills that are necessary to handle children, older adults with dementia, and a whole host of other things.
Dr. Carieta Thomas:So these care workers are often behind the scenes doing really highly skilled and life sustaining work, and they're also often doing mundane tasks of that are part of our everyday living that are no less skilled or important. So I would remind them that care work keeps our society functioning.
Dr. Susan Prentice:Well, low value and low skill are kind of different. Low low value depends on what kind of economic calculations you're bringing in. It's very high value if you think about what it means to children to have a great start, to mothers to be able to go to work or keep a career going, to families that can share the labor, to employers who see that the productivity of their staff is higher, and they don't lose people when they have to drop to part time or leave the labor market. And it's only low skill if you think that educating and caring for young children, is not hard work, and you probably only think that if you've never done it yourself. So it is high skill, and it is high value, and it's time that the country does it better.
Dr. Sonia Kang:And with that, this myth is busted. Make sure you subscribe. We'll be back with a new episode soon.
Carmina Ravanera:In the meantime, happy myth busting. No. Gate's busted podcast is made possible by generous support from BMO. If you liked this episode, please rate and subscribe to busted. You can also find more interesting podcast series from the Institute for Gender and the Economy by searching Gate Audio wherever you find your podcasts.
Carmina Ravanera:Thanks for tuning in.
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