For the first time, employees in Great Britain are going to have the right to time off work for caring responsibilities. This change, which comes into effect tomorrow, will affect about 2.5 million people who are juggling employment with caring for long-term sick, disabled or elderly loved ones. I know first-hand why carer’s leave is sorely needed. For about four years, I balanced paid employment with caring for my mother, finally resigning from work altogether when her cancer became terminal. I was fortunate to have kind employers who allowed time off, but the right to care for our loved ones shouldn’t rest on goodwill. It should be enshrined.
Plenty has been written about the difficulties that working parents face, but working carers are almost entirely overlooked. We experience so many of the same challenges: the stress of being pulled in two directions, the anticipation of accidents or emergencies, and the guilt of never doing our job nor our care to the best of our abilities. But in some ways it’s worse, because the person we love is suffering, not learning and growing. And some people are struggling under the double burden of childcare and eldercare. It’s exhausting and hard. It’s also incredibly lonely. While parents have photos of offspring on their desk, carers are left out of the camaraderie. For us, there is no workplace chatter about the people in our care; no photos, no news about sports days or exams. We’re invisible.
Despite the difficulties they often face, many carers want to keep working. Working Families surveyed parents of disabled children and found that 88% of those who weren’t in paid work wanted to be. Their reasons are partly practical – the benefits available to carers are insultingly low. But there’s another reason, too. For many carers, work is the sole place where they are known as a person in their own right, rather than a facilitator of someone else’s needs. Holding down a job can reduce the likelihood of “role engulfment”, a term psychologists use to describe the way carers feel their own identities have been subsumed. As one user of Carers UK’s public forum has written: “Does anyone else feel that their own life has been swallowed up and disappeared?”
Ignoring working carers is bad for the economy, too. About 600 people leave work every day in the UK because of caring responsibilities. A report by Harvard Business School found that US companies incur millions of dollars of hidden costs due to their failure to accommodate these obligations. This is partly due to high rates of unplanned absenteeism: when carers don’t have the right to leave, we have no choice but to be absent without notice, which creates all sorts of problems for employers.
The rights available to carers have long been abysmal. Unpaid “dependant’s leave” is only for emergencies. This isn’t realistic for carers – in the throes of cancer, my mum had a minimum of two hospital appointments a week. That they were planned and not emergencies didn’t make it less necessary for me to attend. Even though carer’s leave will only amount to five days a year for most people (ie, a working week), it would have helped me hugely, allowing me to deal with caring tasks without eating into weekends or annual leave. Research has found that a quarter of carers haven’t had a day off in more than five years, and most are struggling with stress and anxiety. I feel immense gratitude to the people who have eased the working lives of tomorrow’s carers, namely Wendy Chamberlain, the MP who introduced the policy to parliament as a private member’s bill, and Carers UK, the charity that has been campaigning for carer’s leave for decades.
But while the introduction of this new right to carer’s leave is a vital step forward, it’s not a complete victory. First, it’s only applicable to people who are legally defined as “employees”, not those who are “workers”. This excludes people in precarious roles, including many paid care workers in our social care system. And although it’s a legal right, some will fear requesting it: many people avoid disclosing caring responsibilities in case it undermines their career prospects. For carer’s leave to become more than a piece of paper, we need a communications campaign to legitimise the new policy and to reassure potential users. We also need to pay attention to the characteristics of the people who take it up. Political philosopher Nancy Fraser has written about the risk of such policies being used by more women than men, creating what she calls a “mommy track” – a two-tiered, gendered labour market.
Second, carer’s leave is unpaid. Of course, this will prevent poorer paid employees from accessing it, but it points towards a deeper problem, too. So long as it is unpaid, carer’s leave will maintain the power imbalance between waged work, seen as valuable by politicians because it contributes to GDP, and unwaged work, like care, which doesn’t show up in national accounting. This value system underpins our entire economy, and means that remuneration is something you should only get when you’re doing non-domestic work. Consider this: the only way I could be paid a wage to support my mum was if I signed up to be an agency care worker, and somehow got myself allocated to her.
Our lack of paid carer’s leave, and of any livable carer’s income in general, demonstrates what a distorted and inhumane system we have created. The ideas underpinning this system need exposing and challenging. We need to dethrone waged work as the only worthwhile human activity, and place care in its rightful place: at the centre of our lives and our economy.
Emily Kenway is a social policy doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving and How We Solve It (Wildfire, 2023)
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