Australia does not care about care

 

Australia seems to have a dearth of care about care. The work of caring for people is of utmost importance to our society, as the pandemic has made even more clear. Hospital workers, childcare educators and teachers were abruptly noted as essential workers.

 

Yet the pay, conditions and time allotted to those who reliably care for those in our society who require it remains low or zero.

 

Within education, Union-adjacent research has noted that Higher Education and Early Childhood are the two most precarious settings, places where stable employment is hardest to find. Whilst women, who carry much of the caring duties have 45 percent of their jobs are part time.

 

Within the Primary and Secondary school settings, Australia ranks above the OECD average for time spent in class, meaning that both students and teachers within these settings lack opportunities to develop their skills.

 

For the parents of children and young people, Australia ranks second last among OECD nations for length of parental leave. The average being 53 weeks for mothers and 8 weeks for fathers. This duration seems eye-watering for Australians who are so far away from the average.

 

Of those people who stay home to care for children, only five percent are male. With this work going entirely unpaid.

 

As Kon-Yu notes, Early Childhood educators and Primary School teachers are an overwhelmingly female workforce, whereas Secondary and Higher Educator become increasingly male dominated. She proposes that this suggests that care is less valuable societally, than the dispersion and gathering of knowledge, as the perception goes, this takes place primarily within the latter two settings.

 

In total, the monetary value of unpaid care work in Australia alone is estimated at $650 billion dollars. Imagine what Australia would look like, if we started to care about care, and even more so, for those who provide it.

 

 Running word count:  65,519