Exploring the Mobilities of Double-Duty Carers: Introducing Mobility of the Care Economy
Chapters
Overview
Overview
abstract
The term 'double-duty carer' (DDC) refers to the primarily female healthcare workforce who provide unpaid care to family members or friends outside of work. In providing care during COVID-19, DDCs have been increasingly vulnerable to a blurring of boundaries across care environments, and consequently experiencing poor health outcomes. Unpaid caring is globally known to be a women's health issue, resulting in women shouldering greater physical, social and emotional costs. COVID-19 has exacerbated these costs by increasing the care load, making it more difficult to access support, and continues to result in many DDCs reaching the point of burnout. Especially during COVID-19, it is in employers' best interests to support DDCs to help prevent outcomes such as poor work performance, absenteeism and employee turnover. DDCs experience many spatio-temporal tensions as they juggle both paid and unpaid care work across different care environments. Mobility is one of the key tensions, especially for DDCs who work in community home care provision. And yet, mobility contraints and tensions are currently understudied in DCC research. This chapter places the mobility constranits of DDCs center stage. First, it introduces the unique position of DDCs at the interface of paid and unpaid care. Then, it reviews the literature on mobility and care, identifying two strains: research focusing on travel for unpaid household-serving mobility and that focusing on the commutes of paid carers. It then uses the important case of DDCs to put forth a new concept, which we name mobility of the care economy, that captures the travel that results from conducting both paid and unpaid care work and how they intertwine. In doing so, this chapter bridges the literatures on the care economy and mobilities of care, while highlighting avenues for future research.
