The spectre of the care crisis

A critical look at a current debate

Abstract

In the last years, many social researchers diagnosed a severe care crisis in the fields of paid as well as of un-paid person-related services. Care is defined in the areas of education, health, child care, elderly care and other fields, but the boundaries of the sector often remain unclear. It is argued that care activities in general are undervalued, neglected, feminized and socially marginalized. In contrast to this view, we argue that these generalizations of the conditions in certain parts of care activities are not convincing. We argue that it is more useful to analyze the developments case by case to understand the social and societal dynamics of care work. For this purpose, we compare two exemplary cases: the development of child care and elderly care in Germany in the last decades. They differ from each other according to the level of professional qualification, the wages of the employees, the general working conditions, and the quality of the services. These differences are due to social movements which have led to the understanding that child care is a matter of public responsibility whereas elderly care remained trapped mostly in the realm of the private sphere. We regard improvements in both sectors as necessary, but we think it is important to recognize that they have experienced achievements, impasses, drawbacks and contradictions in different ways and should not be lumped together too easily under the same heading.