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L.J.B. Hayes: Stories of Care: A Labour of Law

Document Cited authorities 2 Cited in Related
AuthorRosie Harding
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12148
Published date01 March 2019
Date01 March 2019
Winner of the 2018 Hart-SLSA Prize for Early Career Academics
STORIES OF CARE: A LABOUR OF LAW BY L.J.B. HAYES
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 228pp., £70.00 (hbk) £29.00 (pbk))
Adult social care in the United Kingdom seems only occasionally to graze
the consciousness of the media, policy makers, and government. When it
does, we are told that it is `in crisis'.
1
Yet there appears to be scant attention
paid to the causes or consequences of that `crisis' on those involved in the
system, people who need care and people who provide care, whether on a
professional or informal basis.
2
Instead, every time policy makers put their
minds to regulatory reform in the care system, the focus seems to be on who
should pay for the current system, rather than more comprehensive reform.
The current care crisis has its roots in law and regulation. The conditions
that have created the current problems are a product of neo-liberal ideology,
privatization, and the dilution of labour rights. This wonderful book by Lydia
Hayes excavates one of the least understood areas of the care sector: the
experience of domiciliary care workers. Her sensitive and nuanced ethnog-
raphy of this crucial role offers unique insights into one of the key problems
of the care system: how low-paid, precarious workers are tasked with all of
the frontline work of care, whilst the financial rewards of privatization line
the pockets of the private companies that employ them.
Stories of Care is a detailed and rigorous legal ethnography, built on
extended close engagement with those whose working lives Hayes interro-
gates. In an outstanding example of feminist socio-legal scholarship, Hayes
uses narrative methodology to expose four vistas of the experiences of
homecare workers. Each of these narratives paints a vivid picture of the every-
day working lives of homecare workers, and sets the scene for an exploration
of the legal and regulatory issues underpinning this aspect of domiciliary care.
The first substantive chapter, `Cheap Nurse', explores the issue of equal
pay law in this highly-gendered work. Hayes draws on the experience of
homecare workers to highlight how care work has been marginalized in
political discourse, demonstrating how the domestic location combines with
gendered expectations to render care work invisible. She deftly exposes the
low-pay consequences of the invisibility of the `cheap nurse' through a
historical analysis of the emergence of homecare as an extension of the
`home-help' of the past. Hayes provide a convincing argument about the low
pay in this sector emerging as a consequence of the erosion of district
nursing provision alongside moves to provide more care in community
settings (rather than institutional care homes) and the privatization of care
since the early 1990s. The failures of the Equal Pay Act 1970 (and its
178
1 I. Ferguson and M. Lavalette, Adult Social Care (2013).
2 See, further, R. Harding, Duties to Care: Dementia, Relationality and Law (2017).
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School

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