“A Real Spark”: Resistance in Nonprofit Care Work in the Context of Neoliberalism and a Crisis in Public Health

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Nonprofit Organizing and Voluntary Action II: Theoretical Approaches and Applications

Abstract

Care work is a form of labour undertaken largely by a female-identified and increasingly racialized labour force in paid and unpaid contexts in the public, private and non-profit sectors. Since the 1980s, governments have increasingly privatized the public sector and introduced neoliberal management models, such as New Public Management (NPM), claiming to ensure cost-effectiveness and positive outcomes. Incorporating feminist theory, this chapter argues that NPM standardizes and removes practices that are not easily quantified. In the process, it lowers wages and working conditions. This reproduces women as an exploited labour force that resistances in various ways. Drawing on Fraser’s (2019) concept of epochal crises and a feminist analysis of civil society, the chapter argues that nonprofit care work and workers are central to reweaving the increasingly frayed social fabric and creating space for care and solidarity counter hegemonies to be thinkable and do-able in the context of late neoliberalism.

Author

• Donna Baines, The University of British Columbia, Jack Bell Building For The School of Social Work