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https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/care-home-workers-are-underpaid-because-most-of-them-are-women-v7jjh6blw

Sorry business, this care home crisis. The sector has been struggling for years, of course, but is now on the brink of collapse according to Donald Macaskill, the chief executive of Scottish Care. Something that has always confounded me is how criminally underpaid care workers are when their jobs form such a vital part of society’s scaffolding. Well, I know the reason why: it is a workforce composed mostly of women. An estimated 80 per cent of adult social care staff in Scotland are female, and any profession with this sort of gender skew, or that involves caring responsibilities, tends to be undervalued. Particularly because historically a disproportionate number of women have undertaken these types of duties for no pay at all. My sister was a care worker for a few years in her twenties, looking after a man with profound disability. He required round-the-clock care and she did overnight shifts at his home on her own in a rundown part of Glasgow. Often, this man would lash out in distress, and occasionally he would hit her. Eventually my sister quit because she felt too unsafe to continue and it wasn’t worth it for the low pay. In her subsequent job as a waitress she earned more money for significantly less stress (apart from when she had to serve a certain moany — or should that be Mone-y? – baroness, but that’s another story). That’s partly why we’ve arrived at this point. The caregiving industry is underfunded, yes, but that’s because it is perceived as low-skilled, low-status work when in truth it is demanding and requires a range of skills that cannot be learnt from books. So the wages don’t budge beyond the bare minimum, fewer people want to do it because of the toll it will take on their health, and care homes struggle to find staff. Macaskill’s suggestion that Scotland should have its own visa immigration system to recruit overseas staff ignores the root of the problem — that this profession shouldn’t run on cheap labour.

https://archive.ph/hZ41l