The Labour Crisis in Long-term Care

Focusing on different dominant strategies, chapter authors analyze how innovative approaches might be employed to reorganize, retain, reduce, replace, and recruit workers. They assess each strategy in terms of promoting the right to care and explore limitations on the right to access quality care services and the right to provide quality long-term care. Ultimately, they argue that the conditions of work are the conditions of care, conditions that include the overall structures, policies and practices that shape the work and care.

The Labour Crisis in Long-term Care is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to students and researchers in health services, aging, labour policy, sociology of work and social work. Managers, researchers and leaders in health care and health policy decision-makers will also benefit from this important resource.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share at Elgaronline.

Incorporating in-depth historical and empirical research, this book examines the widely acknowledged crisis in the long-term care labour force. A diverse array of experts compare labour force strategies in Canada, Norway and Sweden and invite readers to rethink approaches to the long term care labour force, starting with the lives of those who do the work.

?An essential volume that smartly reframes the current long-term care crisis as a labor force crisis. Drawing on feminist theory, the authors thoughtfully redefine care as a relationship built on the collective right to receive and to provide quality care. They carefully document how and why quality care for the largely female nursing home population depends heavily on the wages and working conditions of the industry?s largely female work force. Rejecting prevailing individualized explanations, they spell out much-needed systemic strategies to ensure that the ?conditions of work are the condition of care.??