Why in news?
UN’s ILO cautions of a severe shortage of care workers.
Who is a care worker?
- According to International Labour Organization (ILO), there are unpaid and paid care works.
- Two kinds of work fall in the unpaid category, and these overlap suitably.
- There are the direct, personal and relational care activities.
- E.g. mother feeding a baby or a son nursing his ill parents.
- Indirect care activities include cooking and cleaning and other household chores.
- On the other hand, paid care work involves healthcare or other professionals.
- It includes nurses, teachers, doctors and personal care workers.
- They take care of patients, aged people and people with similar challenges and vulnerabilities.
What is ILO's observation?
- There is a shortfall in paid care - the nurses, teachers, doctors and personal care workers.
- Already, there are over 380 million such workers.
- They account for 11.5% of total global jobs.
- But this is not enough given the pace of population growth, ageing and diseases.
What are the driving factors?
- In 2015, ILO estimates showed that around 2 billion people were in need of care.
- This comprised of 1.9 billion under age 15 and 0.2 billion senior citizens.
- This number is estimated to go up, touching 2.3 billion by 2030.
- This is a significant increase considering the way healthcare improves.
- Besides, changes in social dynamics and the concept of family are also the reasons.
- Growth in nuclear families and fragmentation would increase people in need of care.
- Notably, nuclear families account for the highest share of the world’s working-age population.
What are the shortfalls and possible measures?
- Policies - Governments and businesses must formulate policies to provide decent care work.
- ILO estimates that this will need doubling the investment in the care economy.
- It could lead to a total of 475 million jobs by 2030, which means 269 million new jobs.
- Pay - In countries such as India, care workers like nurses are alarmingly underpaid.
- Nurses and midwives constitute the biggest occupational group in healthcare.
- Nursing remains the most feminised of the healthcare occupations, according to the ILO.
- Low, poor wages force them to try multiple jobs, more shifts or working overtime.
- Such practices not only endanger the quality of care work but also impact work-life balance.
- Any policy in this regard should promote social justice and gender equality.
- Unpaid work - The ILO and several rights agencies now consider unpaid care as proper work.
- An ILO survey shows each day unpaid care work constitutes 16.4 billion hours.
- In other words, two billion people working eight hours per day with no remuneration.
- If this is assigned a price, it would be $11 trillion i.e. 9% of global GDP.
- Notably, nearly 80% of this is household work, mostly done by women.
- There is a need for more childcare and elder-care services so that more women are free to pursue careers.
Source: BusinessLine
