Below is the story of one of our members. This accompanied the letter we sent to MPs in September 2024. Other stories were written by Anonymous E, Kate, Anonymous A, Julie and KR. You can download all of our stories here.
I will never forget my first care visit flying solo. It was 7am on a cold weekday morning. I knocked and let myself into the flat of an elderly gentleman living with limited mobility and other health conditions. Despite calling out hello, I found him fast asleep in bed in the dark. I so clearly remember looking at him there, and realising that it was all on me to make sure that in half an hour this man I did not know should be up, washed, dressed, sitting in an armchair, having eaten breakfast and taken his medication. I would also need to leave the house clean and tidy, bed made, bins emptied, laundry sorted. There was another person waiting for me to arrive in thirty-five minutes’ time.
That is the basic level of pressure involved in standard time-and-task-based domiciliary care work. We managed, just about, and in time got to know each other well. By the end of my first week doing homecare, I felt a deep sense of contentment. I had found my vocation.
It wasn’t until I was a few weeks in that I noticed a major flaw in my employment conditions. I was only paid for direct contact time with clients. That meant that every gap in my rota spent travelling from one client to the next was unpaid. Even if all of those gaps were just five minutes in length (often they are ten, fifteen, sometimes longer), then to do forty hours’ work in a week you’d need to be at work for more like fifty, or even sixty hours. Ten unpaid hours a week amounts to being around £100 out of pocket per week, £400 a month, £4,800 a year.
So the upshot was that, if in need of full-time hours, you had to choose between your health or your finances. My boss told me that people who go full-time always burn-out within a few months. I was lucky enough to be able to prioritise my health, so I took home more like thirty hours’ pay each week, despite being at work for closer to forty. A major concern now is that the Health & Care Worker Visa scheme contracts people to a 40 hour working week and ties them into this role for years on end. This is incompatible with humane working conditions wherever travel time is unpaid.
After eight months of full-time homecare I dropped my hours to just one day a week, doing this alongside another job, but during the pandemic I returned full-time. At this point, I decided to try to find an employer in my area who paid travel time. My local authority is one of hundreds that have pledged to Unison’s Ethical Care Charter, which includes a commitment paying homecare workers for their travel time, so this should not have been difficult. In the end, I trawled through the websites of 42 local homecare employers only to find one that paid travel time, and even then the policy had caveats. This demonstrates just how hard it can be to get an accurate impression of life as a frontline care worker from the outside looking in.
After the country’s clap for carers in the pandemic, there was a glimmer of hope that this unprecedented recognition for care workers might finally lead to improvements in our employment conditions. Instead, the government introduced the Health and Care Worker Visa scheme in August 2020, inviting individuals from overseas to plug some of the shortfall in the social care workforce. These individuals generally feel unable to speak out about poor working conditions, for fear of deportation.
Last year, I created a secure online support network for domiciliary care workers in England (Homecare Workers’ Group). I have received messages from so many individuals who have come to the UK via the Health and Care Workers Visa scheme who are experiencing atrocious employment conditions. This labour abuse and, in the worst cases, - modern slavery - is hidden in plain sight in every community in the country.
It is true for me that care work delivers a high level of personal reward, which is exactly what I was looking for in a job. Yet just because care work is capable of being highly rewarding on an emotional level, this should not justify a payoff in terms of its material rewards. Equally, the fact that care work originates from unpaid domestic work performed predominantly by women should not be grounds to associate it with low material value. Care work’s valuation should be based on its social currency, and the intense interpersonal demands of decent quality care, rather than a time-and-task based calculation of value.
No care worker expects to be highly paid; we know that is not realistic in this society. Yet we should at least be paid enough to get by (a real Living Wage), and ideally a bit more than that in recognition of the immense social value of our work and the urgent need to expand the workforce in line with rising demand for services.
Thank you for taking the time to read about my experiences as a homecare worker.
Yours sincerely,
Rachel
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