Who are today’s care workers?

The question of who are today’s care workers is complex, involving decisions about how care work is defined, what types of work are done by care workers, for whom the care work is done, how organised the work is, and whether the work is paid or unpaid or somewhere in between the two. Care work can be considered along a continuum: at one end are those people carrying out care work as a formal paid occupation (the formal care workforce). At the other, there are those who do caring work as an activity without pay or formal employment structures (informal care workers). However, there is much fluidity in the construct and practice of care work, and these different categories of care worker are neither fixed nor mutually exclusive. Moreover, along this continuum are those whose care work shares features of formal and informal care. Examples include voluntary workers, including mentors who may be formally organised but unpaid, or paid expenses rather than salaries, and foster carers who are paid expenses but not usually employed. For the purposes of the discussion in this chapter, these varied roles will be considered together as ‘other care workers’, while acknowledging that their differences are as many as their commonalities.