Caring for Nothing

Abstract

Unwaged work is a widespread practice in the pro-market, non-market public and non-profit social services in Canada. Under performance-based models of public management new forms of work organization have standardized social services work and expanded the use of volunteers, including the volunteer labour of paid employees. Increasingly routinized work makes it easier for unwaged volunteers to assume work, and for managers to supervise it. New developments include heightened expectations from management and a willingness of workers to perform volunteer work in their own or other agencies. The article suggests that the unwaged social services workforce operates along a continuum with ‘compulsion’ at one end and ‘coercion’ on the other. As workers’ identities and knowledge base are tied to notions of altruism and caring, and there are often implicit threats to their continued employment, most workers are not refusing unwaged work. Rather they see this and other forms of unpaid work as resistance against an increasingly alienating society, as well as a way to meet the needs of clients, relatives and friends.