Abstract to The
biannual conference of the Nordic Sociological Association, “Dissolution of
Society?”, Turku (Åbo) Finland 18 - 20 August 2006.
Workshop: Occupations and professions
Ole Johnny Olsen, Department of Socilogy,
University of Bergen
The
antinomies of the care worker – work,
labour and professional identity
Within the expanding
public care sector the last 40 years, in Norway, as in all the Nordic
countries, we have seen formations of special types of occupational labour at
the lower level of the hierarchy of the care institutions. The most typical of
this kind of labour are the auxiliary nurses. After first being an unskilled
type of labour, hired to help out the ordinary nurses at the hospitals, they
were from the 1960/70ies given a short education and later whole three years at
the secondary level. As educated occupational category they got the title
“auxiliary nurse”. During the 1980ies this group was pushed out of the hospitals
(from the nurses wanting back the control over the care at the hospital bed) at
the same time as they could enter the expanding elderly care – at home and in
institutions. During the 80ies the whole field of care work expanded, with a
variety of institutions for elderly care, child care, mental care and youth
care. Politicians, experts and leaders of the care sector started to see this
area as a broad “care sector”, with the need for a common broad care worker. In
the early 90ies a new program for “care work” were introduced at the secondary
level of education. This education was integrated in the apprenticeship system
for skilled worker training, and a complete new category of skilled worker –
“the care worker” – was established. This category should comprise a broad
field of work. It should represent an alternative for the auxiliary nurses and
it should offer a track for further education for workers in the public home
services. The auxiliary nurse and the care worker developed for some years as
complementary categories. Today renew initiatives have been taken to unite the
two in a new category, a health trade worker (helsefagarbeider).
In this paper I will
discuss some special features of these categories. The goal is to contribute to
the understanding of some main problems of their history such as the
difficulties of recruiting young people, the problem of the varying
recognition, the relative problem of professional organisation. The paper will
emphasize the antinomies of the category as skilled worker. First of all, as
all workers within a work organisation based on hired individual labour, the
care worker is put in a position with two kinds of interests or considerations.
On the one side, as labour or labour force, they have the interest in the question
of salary, working hours, working condition, reproduction of skills and general
labour market value etc. On the other side, as working subjects, they will
consider the content of work, work autonomy, their own standards of and
obligations for doing a good job. There are big variations in how occupational
categories are influenced by the one or the other dimension and the balancing
of the two. Is it the wage-earner or the employee interests that is the main
constructing factor or is it the professional and substantial interests? For
the care worker categories this double set of consideration is particular
difficult, both because of their special heritage as care giver and because of
their special position as assistant for the nurse. To organize care a wage
labour can in itself be seen as opposed to the ideas of care. For the nurses it
was up to few years back illegitimate to see themselves as employees and pursue
interests of that kind. The auxiliary nurses inherited that orientation, and
even more, as often adult women with part time work, their identity as
employees was subordinated their obligations for the care receiver as care
persons. Partly dissociated from that heritage over the years by occupational
organising, the care workers still had their problems finding an autonomous
place in the work organisation. Contrary to the skilled workers in the
industry, who can base their position as worker on special skills and
capacities of work, skills that are unlike the skills of the engineers, the
skills and the capacities of the auxiliary nurses and the care workers are more
or less shaped as parts of the skills and capacities of the nurse. Their own
position at work is therefore structurally defined as assistants, subordinated
the ordinary nurses.
The educational and
occupational history of these care worker categories has been well studied and
documented during the last 10 years. My discussion will be based on that
research, mainly the research done by Håkon Høst partly also some research done
by others including myself.