About the Harm-Less Care Labour project | Recreation and Leisure Studies

This inquiry builds on findings from the Free-from-Harm Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada funded Insight Development Grant, which identified the need for reporting and a plan for responding to/remediating the Gender and Race-Based Harm (GRBH) incurred through care work. We aim to address three key areas through this inquiry: 1) gender and racial justice through GRBH reduction; 2) care work visibility, advocacy, and appreciation; and 3) support and solidarity-building for care labour migrants through the sharing of similar stories. There is a critical need to not only expose and redress harm faced by Personal Support Care workers (via complaint), but also create restorative practices via compliments (i.e., gratitude, enhanced visibility, affirmation of worth) and community-making (i.e., solidarity-building, resource sharing/mutual aid) to counteract the difficult reproductive labour and burnout experienced by PSC workers.

Our project has the following objectives:

O1. uncover attitudes, practices, policies, and other aspects of organizational culture that enable PSC worker invisibility and inaction on GRBH incurred through care labour,
O2. understand needs for hearing and acting on complaints of GRBH in LTC,
O3. and co-create a website with knowledge users that mobilizes recommendations for just PSC labour, especially for PSC workers new to Canada and, subsequently, develop a sense of universality around the caring labour experience in an ageist, ableist, white supremacist, colonial, and production-focused system.

This research emphasizes listening as a restorative practice in itself⁴⁰, making care labour harm-less by affirming worth, hearing complaint, and restoring care labourers from GRBH through organizational change and creating a community culture of gratitude and experience sharing.

The present study will collaborate with knowledge holders/participant co-researchers including PSC workers, LTC administrators, residents, family members, volunteers, and advocates in labour, migration-rights, and diversity to ensure methods for dissemination reflect the insights on current barriers to complaint and PSC labour visibility. This inquiry will be grounded in and extrapolate from critical theories that interrogate power, privilege, and, consequently, the worth of labouring bodies engaged in care work under capitalism; in turn, creating a supportive culture for trainee learning. Taking inspiration from the goals of transformative justice^94,95, compassionate inquiry⁹⁶, and trauma-informed inquiry⁹⁷, our project is purposefully designed to be care-full⁹⁸ working with knowledge holders/participants as co-researchers.

Background and methods

To hear about how complaint is navigated by PSCs, the research team will conduct 50 trauma-informed narrative interviews with PSC worker knowledge holders to elicit insight of possible strategies for effectively hearing and acting on complaints of GRBH by asking co- researchers to draw on their own knowledge without sharing details of personal experiences. We are also interested in what enables GRBH harm to persist in LTC.
To hear compliments of PSC workers, we will invite 100 knowledge holders (e.g., LTC PSC workers, residents, family care partners, LTC leadership) from across Canada to record expressions of gratitude through a variety of media (e.g., voice memos, art, poetry, writing, music).
Our work with the reference group aims to hear insights on the preliminary findings for GRBH reduction and reporting, what approaches are most impactful for PSC worker engagement, and thoughts on the affective impact of the final website/repository.
By carving space for connecting through story, listening to PSC workers’ hopes for change, sharing newly developed resources for building individual capacity, and knowing more about processes for harm-reduction, new communities of health-full, sustainable, care labour are possible.

Presentations

Perspectives on avoiding re-harm and other ethico-methodological considerations in race and ethnicity research in older adult care

Kimberly J. Lopez and Diya Chowdhury
Toronto, Ontario - Canadian Association on Gerontology 52nd Annual Scientific and Educational Meeting

A 2021 scoping review described significant psychosocial burdens experienced by care workers, including moral job injury, poor communication, poor work/life balance, increased violence, and lack of financial security (Franklin & Gkiouleka, 2021). Further, legacies of gender and race politics and labour allocation have shaped the nature of PSW and other “minority”-dominated care labour, facilitating a disproportionate number of persons of colour and women living perpetually under-waged, precariously employed, susceptible to chronic stress, and vulnerable to race and gender-based care labour precarities (RGBCLPs), including harm from LTCH administration and colleagues, family members, and residents. In our team’s work to understand RGBCLPs in LTCH, our priority was to ensure that harm was not reproduced through the process of narrative data generation.

To redress harm, work through a Transformative Justice (TJ) framework may be a more “humane and just approach than punitive discipline” (Sandwick, 2019, p.3); it emphasizes remediating harm, supportive dialogue, privileging relationships, attending to root causes of misunderstanding, and developing collective accountability (Fronius et al, 2019; Zehr, 2014). Influenced by Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and Aotearoa (McCaslin, 2005), TJ attempts to unpack systemic conditions that enable harm (Kim, 2021). TJ involves resisting the perpetuation of these harms, restoring energy from the labouriousness of systemic oppressions, and seeking equity. To disrupt extractive research practices and move towards “free-from-harm” labour and inquiry, this discussion will centre the importance of a critical researcher politic, decentring of actor personal narrative in justice work, and the role of establishing mechanisms for remediating RGBCLP and harm.

Posters

Making visible workplace harm policies for Ontario PSW (personal support worker) staff protection: An environmental scan of long-term care home websites

Rachel Almaw, Kimberly J. Lopez, PhD, Jaylyn Leighton, PhD, Giana Tomas, PhD(c), Ashley K. Flanagan, PhD, Dr. Sherry Dupuis, PhD, and Michelle Fleming
Submitted abstract, Canadian Association on Gerontology 2024 Conference

Objectives

Workplace harm is a common experience for professions that provide direct, essential care (like, personal support workers (PSWs), particularly for genderacialised (Lopez, 2018) and migrant workers¹. The purpose of this project was to scan long-term care home (LTCH) websites to gather information on workplace harm policies and procedures for remediating harm in Ontario. The objective of this presentation is to discuss existing workplace harm policies and identify areas of improvement in relation to protection, and care of LTCH workers.

Methods

An environmental scan² of Ontario LTCH websites (628 LTCH websites³) was conducted (January to April 2024). We gathered insights on home-specific policies/procedures, diversity/equity considerations, and organization values/mission statements. Relevant content was populated into a spreadsheet for analysis.

Results

Analysis of the scan identified three common themes related to LTCH website and eldercare workers (like, PSWs). First, many websites lacked user-friendly interfaces, posing challenges for staff to access organizational policies. Second, worker-focused employment information is limited, compared to that for residents and supportive care partners. Third, care workers and care labour is not often acknowledged on LTCH websites, making care workers feel undervalued.

Conclusion

The absence of accessible and transparent communications on procedures for reporting/being accountable for workplace harms across LTCH websites for workers underscores a broader issue related to underreporting and silencing in LTCHs. The findings from this scan emphasize an urgency to create change around the visibility of LTCH workplace harm policies. This presentation is a part of the Free-from-Harm care work research project that advocates for policy-level changes to ensure safer environments for care workers in LTCHs.

Selected references available upon request.

Research Team

Dr. Kimberly Lopez

Lead Investigator and Team Lead
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Health
Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies
University of Waterloo

kjlopez@uwaterloo.ca

Dr. Sherry Dupuis 

University of Waterloo

sldupuis@uwaterloo.ca  

Dr. Jaylyn Leighton

University of Waterloo; Sinai Health Systems

jjleighton@uwaterloo.ca

Ms. Giana Tomas (she/her)
Student Collaborator
PhD Candidate
Faculty of Health
Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies
University of Waterloo

Gtomas@uwaterloo.ca  