Introduction: Caring Skills, Emotions and Budgets
For the last thirteen years, Olla V. has been working as a care assistant in after-school clubs for children aged 3â9. She serves lunch and involves the children in educational activities that maintain the childrenâs interest. Her skills, knowledge and experience are necessary: if she is skilled enough, the children will willingly stay in the after-school care service until 4:00 p.m. when they will be fetched home. If she is unable to generate interest, the children will refuse to stay and their parents will be left with no child-care services between the end of the school day and the end of their work day.
Until the Israeli government responded to the 2011 cost of living protests, Olla V. was employed by a division of the city council as part of a system that charged parents more for after-school care services than they pay currently. It was a system that made her feel that her educational skills as a care assistant were recognized, since the city council rewarded staff who attracted parents. They were not paid per capita but they were made to feel part of the serviceâs success. The 2011 reform responded to the parentsâ protest movement against the high expenses of child-care services by externalizing the after-school service. The municipal response meant that costs to parents could be reduced. Outsourcing enabled the elimination of the child-care assistantsâ rights to the city councilâs employment conventions that took their number of years of experience into account. Thus, their income was flattened: the payment scale disappeared and was replaced by fixed-term employment and minimum wage hourly payment. This made Olla V. extremely frustrated. All her years of experience, all the training courses she had taken and her status as a senior child-care assistant, got erased. She understands the economic rationale for this erasure: âUnder this new system, it doesnât make sense for them to employ us; weâre no longer part of their economic considerations.â
Olla V. used to take pride in the recognition she received, both professionally and personally, as part of the council unitâs team. She was entitled to various forms of occupational training, and was invited to customary wine toasts before holidays. These small gestures could be experienced as ceremonies of recognition and appreciation for her valuable contribution that validated her occupational pride as well as her sense of belonging. The option of moving up the payment ladder didnât mean that her salary was much higher, but it meant that her experience was recognized. The most important thing was the fact that direct employment by the city council meant that she continued to receive her salary during the holidays, when the after-school caring service was closed. The reform resulted in painful exclusion:
After years of occupational pride, Olla V. is now exposed to what can be called âa ceremony of degradationâ: her contribution, so valuable in her eyes, so often praised in the past, has practically been erased, treated as non-existent. The frustration and resentment manifest in the way she describes the process of erasure she has experienced suggest that her pride has been replaced by insult and humiliation. This humiliation emerges not just on an abstract level but in specific situations as well. Because reaching the office is almost impossible, in real terms outsourcing means that she cannot go to the office to claim any payment entitlement that has not been respected in the preparation of her pay check. Further, outsourcing in her daily experience means that the coordinator, the certified occupational expert, the person she could potentially turn to with caring-related questions, is not there to respond to her needs. Outsourcing emerges as a mode of operating an after-school caring service in ways that erase caring skills in two ways: first, if the child-care assistants had years of experience and training, these are not recognized; and second, the person whose occupational skills are recognized faces such intensified workload expectations that she cannot practically provide occupational advice when required because she is too busy with other issues. The certified employee cannot provide occupational guidance despite the assumption made in the contract on the basis of which the service is operated, that certified employees will supervise the service. These are common features of contracted-out caring services where cost considerations marginalize considerations related to the quality of the service. As Epstein (2013) noted, public sector agencies have no incentive to protect service quality when it comes to populations too weak to lobby for quality services. However, the emotional experiences of the employees expose another facet of the process.Our employment conditions are much worse than they used to be and show no respect for us. Under these conditions, no experienced child-care assistant is willing to stay, and the turnover is so high that sometimes children do not know the name of the child-care assistant ⊠we feel they cheated us ⊠they handed us the contract right before the beginning of the school year so that we couldnât prepare our rebuttal ⊠we couldnât challenge it ⊠The most insulting part is how they smashed the payment ladder into three categories regardless of the training courses you took; they now consider you a new employee of the new employer, which means most of us have lost our rank from our years of experience. Suddenly, our pay checks tell us we have no experience and that is just so insulting. Because they changed our employer, they consider all of us to have no experience as if there arenât any differences between us ⊠Nobody at the city council protected our interests when they planned this reform, and nobody is there if something goes wrong. The coordinators never have the time for you, and will tell you theyâre sorry but they canât help you with your problems. Many of us do not even know who our employer is ⊠let alone go to see them to find out why your pay check was calculated the way it was. Many child-care assistants were fired right before the summer, and they made no attempt to find alternative employment for us during the summer vacation, as was always the case in the old system. They donât care about us ⊠they can get rid of us whenever they want.
Care and service jobs constitute a major component of the opportunity structure open to women and it is particularly significant for women who havenât managed to attain higher education or an occupational certificate. When outsourcing becomes a predominant preference for administrators in the delivery of services, for many women and the men who enter these fields, insult becomes a repeated experience. Womenâs feelings of insult over work left invisible, of skills going unrecognized, of valuable work being appropriated so that others are praised, are age-old. As an occupational experience, however, this insult is locally new: Olla V.âs pride could be developed and sustained by a history of professionalization and unionization. Their fading status is new. Shame, humiliation and insecurity in response to employment practices tended to be relegated to women who were excluded from these positive trends, often those in organizational cleaning or other menial jobs. Public sector reforms and more specifically the introduction of outsourcing to the delivery of welfare, education and health services have gradually made feelings such as Olla V.âs common to increasing numbers of employees in service and care occupations (SACO) 1 in their encounters with myriad forms of exclusion, introduced despite better conventions already having been established. The insult and humiliation are signifiers of a triple exclusion: from the locally accepted form of citizenship; from unions, womenâs organizations and occupational associations, each too isolated to protect them; and from regulatory bodies monitoring the quality of services. This triple exclusion can easily go unnoticed. How has the public discourse treated employeesâ exclusions and feelings of insult and humiliation? Well, primarily by silencing them. Silencing has made it possible for the gendered nature of many of the public sector reforms, in Israel and elsewhere, to be disguised. To expose this gendered nature, it is important to unsilence these emotions by exposing the justification structures administratively used in their silencing while listening to how feelings of insult and humiliation have come to color experiences of working in outsourced caring services.
In neo-liberal times, occupation-related negative emotions such as insult and humiliation are not often expressed. As Richard Sennett showed in The Corrosion of Character (1998), they are seen as an admission of failure when faced with job insecurity. People experiencing job insecurity are expected to quickly adjust and move on to other jobs where they will be able to regain their pride and success. However, once precarious forms of employment generate job insecurity among education, health and welfare employees who cannot get jobs outside the services in these areas, they are exposed to the shame of dependence on their âbad jobs.â I therefore depart from Sennettâs claim that the most important outcome of the social process prompting negative occupational emotions is the isolation that âerodes mutual trust and commitmentâ (141). When it comes to the âbad jobsâ created in education, health and welfare services, the most important outcome signified by negative emotions is a reverse movement in the historical pendulum of gender relations. In the world of SACO employees, outsourcing re-established the assumption that womenâs caring hard work and caring skills should remain unpaid or deserving of pin money alone. Policy-makersâ tendency to treat care employees in this manner is particularly visible in the case of child-care work, where occupational skills are still associated with mothering skills. Not recognizing these skills as âlearned and valuableâ (Findlay et al. 2009: 423) insults women who are proud of the skills they have acquired through years of experience.
Job quality is assumed to be associated with employeesâ level of skill and the time invested to develop that skill (Findlay et al. 2009). It is commonly evaluated by the distinction between extrinsic dimensions primarily related to material remuneration and intrinsic dimensions primarily related to workersâ occupational identity and satisfaction. Skill recognition also has these two dimensions: the first is manifested through material remuneration related to skill development, payment scale and promotion. The second is âdirect participation,â manifested when employeesâ opinions on occupational matters are taken into account. When the various dimensions of job quality are high, employment secures social citizenship, i.e., access to basic economic welfare and to the basic standards of living prevailing in a society.
However, in SACO what can be considered a skill, and how long it takes to develop it, is a question of political stance. It is political in the sense of commitment to recognizing service and caring work as valuable. It is also the political commitment involved in providing those served and taken care of with best practice care (Tronto 1993). Recognition of skill is essential for enhanced job quality and service quality (Howes et al. 2012). To secure quality jobs and quality services, feminists have engaged in the project of professionalization in SACO since women began to enter higher education (Dahle 2012). Once policy-makers aim at reduced service costs, sometimes phrased as âbest value for money,â the feminist project of professionalization is attacked, resulting in reduced quality of services associated with low-quality jobs and high overload. The questioning of professionalization is implicit for certified SACO and explicit for uncertified SACO and occurs in the institutional sites where standards of quality of services are negotiated and decisions concerning public funding are made. These emerging institutional spaces are the procedures of contract design taking place in the Ministries in charge of operating the service. Outsourcing intensified the decision-making in the contract design procedure and made it a requirement of any contracted service, both the first time and at the end of each contract period. These emerging institutions have become the new âmodernizedâ loci for political action, conflict and power relations. These institutional spaces and the negotiations they embed may be more important for understanding job quality in SACO and employeesâ experiences than their workplaces themselves. If the contract between a public agency and a service deliverer dictates, for instance, the job size and hence the workload of a social worker, the contract must be studied to understand how policy-makers treat this individualâs occupational knowledge, skills, experience and rights. In the following chapters I present my study of the institutional space taking feelings as my vantage point.
Womenâs feelings in this context have not received the attention they deserve and their political significance has not been explored. Systematic attention to womenâs feelings, or the unsilencing of womenâs feelings, could however shed light on a fascinating political process taking place globally, that will be examined here in the context of the Israeli outsourcing of services. These feelings are relevant to increasingly more SACO employees whose skills are now undervalued, whose wages are flattened in various ways, and whose jobs are of low quality and insecure. These feelings emerge in a process in which entitlement to skill recognition and appropriate remuneration is defeated by policy-makers and budgeting administrators. Outsourcing as a policy is based on ignoring womenâs feelings, which become a historical resonant of the feelings experienced by caring women throughout history. Because the value of caring work has generally been ignored in numerous settings, the feelings of humiliation triggered by the invisibility of caring work constitute the ultimate feminine subject. It is a feminine subjectivity based on devotion that is often accompanied by a clear moral commitment to best practices of caring for others and that takes pride in such practices. The coexistence of pride in delivering high-quality caring standards, and of humiliation triggered by invisibility, ignoring and devaluing, has a political potential but also the potential to become a resource for the self. If acted upon collectively, so that humiliation and pride can be turned toward initiatives demanding changes in social policy and more generally in the social organization of care, its political potential can take the fore. If not acted upon, if such feelings remain on the level of the individual, their potential to become a resource for the self remains limited and privatized.
By focusing on these feelings, and on the emotional ambivalence of pride and humiliation, a specific gender/class position can be delineated, raising Crompton and Scottâs question of what claims of recognition can become persistent. Emotional politics, the perspective offered by Skeggs (1997) for an understanding of gender/class positions by looking at how the feeling structure that allocates shame, humiliation and uncertainty to working-class women is refuted, sheds light on the emerging potential of claims for recognition.
Outsourcing, wit...