The “Work” of caring for the elderly: Labor, value and the gift

Abstract

This thesis focuses on paid eldercare relations which are claimed to be “family-like.” Contrary to the scholarly tendencies that reduce the claim of being “family-like” into mere tactical usage in paid-care relations, this thesis suggests taking this popular idiom seriously, and aims to trace what this claim corresponds to in the daily materiality of the paid care of the elderly. To focus on the singularities of paid eldercare, the thesis starts with an investigation of the organization of care work and explores the kind of labor that it requires. One of the central arguments of the thesis is that the site of care labor expands to include actions and practices which are traditionally seen as non-labor. Therefore, what counts as “labor” becomes one of the major discussions of this thesis. Following the discussion on what care labor is, the second major concern of the thesis is to focus on the question of the “value” of such labor. Here, it is argued that the labor of the care provider becomes valuable to the extent that it is articulated with non-labor. An analysis of the questions of “what makes care labor valuable” and “in which ways it is valorized” directs us to consider the gift as a mechanism of surplus extraction from the non-labor of the care provider. In this respect, the third major concern of this thesis is to explore the substantial role of gift relations for paid care relations to be considered as “family like.” The question of the gift is posed particularly considering what it costs to care providers to gift their non-labor in exchange for employers’ gift of living-with. The thesis argues that gifting non-labor, before anything else, guarantees these women to “stay” as the care provider.