De la précarité du travail émotionnel du care

Les apports d'une philosophie morale féministe à l'analyse de la précarité du travail

Abstract

From the perspective of the daily work experiences of racialised care workers employed in the older-age private care sector in London, Paris and Madrid, this article argues that to apprehend the lived precariousness of care workers, and shed light on the specific vulnerabilities engendered by their labour, it is necessary to achieve a gendered understanding of the notion of precariousness. The theoretical contributions of a feminist moral philosophy allow for qualitatively gendered understandings of precariousness to emerge, beyond the inequalities observed through statistical data. The article looks first into the non-recognition of the physical labour and the invisibilisation of the emotional labour of care workers through the study of the organisation of work within private care provision.  The gendered implications of work intensification against the background of increasing care privatisation are equally explored. The article analyses finally how these daily experiences of precariousness reveal the gendered and racialised inequalities upon which the social reproduction of contemporary western societies rely. The theoretical elaborations in this article draw on the analysis of 82 interviews with racialised care workers conducted in the framework of a doctoral thesis.