The Labour Crisis in Long-Term Care

The latest book by Pat Armstrong and her team of researchers continue to compare data from the long-term care sectors in Canada, Norway and Sweden. This volume focuses on the strategies each country has used to address shortages in their long-term care workforces. Strategies include efforts to:

• retain long-term care workers in a sector that is notorious for high turn-over
• reduce the need for a publicly-funded paid labour force
• replace labour with technological innovations
• recruit new people into the long-term care workforce

The authors argue that many of the governments’ efforts have not been successful because they have been guided by neoliberal principals and failed to consider care as a relationship in which the well-being of the care workers and the well-being of the care recipients are intrinsically connected.

Pat Armstrong is a member of the advisory board for the Care Economies in Context project.