CANCELLED – Organising Childcare Workers
Childcare is essential infrastructure; however, the sector is in crisis. Chronic under-funding and the financialisation of formal childcare has catalysed exploitative working conditions (underpaid, undervalued, poor health and safety, inadequate social protections) and led to family and kinship networks taking on ever-increasing labour and responsibility for informal childcare. The COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated the vitality and fragility of the childcare sector. This event will focus on the urgent issue of the organisation of childcare workers, drawing on a diverse range of academic and activist expertise, to identify how the pandemic has compounded an array of issues across the sector, and consider how this also may have changed the mechanisms for the political organisation of childcare workers.
Speakers: Kate Hardy (Associate Professor of Work and Employment Relations at Leeds University Business School), Veronica Deutsch (nanny, activist, and co-Executive Director of the Nanny Solidarity Network) and Maud Perrier (Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bristol University).
Discussant: Sabrina Marchetti (Associate Professor of Sociology at University Ca’ Foscari in Venice).
Chair: Daisy Barker (Member of the Centre for Alternative to Social and Economic Inequalities, Lancaster University and PhD Student in Sociology).