WOMEN, RESISTANCE AND CARE - AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF NURSING AUXILIARY WORK

Paid care work has traditionally been marginalised within the sociolog y of work. This paper argues that this absence needs to be addressed a nd redressed as paid care is an increasingly important source of emplo yment for women in Britain. Ethnographic material from a study of the labour of auxiliaries in a nursing home is used to illustrate how paid care is affected by factors similar to those which are salient in oth er forms of work. Like workers in non-care occupations, paid carers us e resistance as an everyday strategy to get through their work. This p aper argues that ethnographic approaches, favoured by sociologists who studied factory labour in the 1970s and 1980s, may prove to be crucia l in revealing that care work is real work.