“Unless you’ve actually experienced some sort of care in your life, it’s an invisible job,” says Sarah*, a senior adult social care worker who has more than two decades of experience.
“It’s an endless job. It’s a relentless job. With the ridiculous pay and the way we’re treated, yeah, you’ve got to have a passion.”
Sarah, who works for a local authority in the Midlands, helps clients coming out of hospital, providing vital in-home care to people who would otherwise be stuck on a ward or not be able to cope on their own.
“You’re a carer, you go in and support that person. But there’s so much more to it,” she says. “You might be the only person that client sees in the day, so you’ve got to be everything to them. You’re not just there to get them up, washed, dressed. You’re there to cheer them up, to have that chat, that social element of the care.”
Since she started she has seen wages drop, insecure work become the norm and colleagues struggle as they try to cover the work that needs to be done, without nearly enough staff to do it.
“The morale in social care now is so low. We haven’t had the full complement of staff in years. We find it so hard to fill roles, because of the hours and the pay,” she says.
“Most people are leaving to go and work for Lidl or Tesco, stacking shelves because they pay more and you’ve got no responsibility. You’ve got a bit more if you work on the till, but you haven’t got that responsibility of a person’s life in your hands when you go into them each day.”
The cost of living crisis is pushing even more workers out of the sector, she says. Most carers she knows work a second job to make ends meet. Some want to strike for better pay, others say they simply can’t afford to.
“You’ve got the cost of living going up, you can’t afford to live day by day. It makes you wonder why you’re doing the job. Because I work in the public sector, the expectation is that the staff get paid more than in the private sector, but there’s not that much difference now with all the government cuts.”
But even discounting the low levels of pay, Sarah feels, time and time again, that society places little value on the care she takes so much pride in giving.
“When you just get called a skivvy and an arse wiper, then that’s not nice. That’s not the nice side of the job,” she says, fighting back tears. “Even if you took the pay out of it, you’re still undervalued because you’ve not got that formal qualification, even though you have to do so much training and you have to really know what you are doing.”
Sarah says she is fearful of the future, and hopes the government will listen to calls for better pay and conditions for workers so they can provide the level of care ministers would want for their own loved ones. “There’s too many cutbacks, there’s not enough of us to do the work,” she says. “It’s a broken system. It’s undervalued, underpaid, and nobody gives a shit. That’s the way I see it right now.”
*Names have been changed