Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

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Photograph: Lisa Miller/ "Hold Still" National Portrait Gallery Exhibition View image in fullscreen ‘It cannot easily be measured. Surely this is the lesson of 2020, as Bunting suggests in her preface, whilst conveying the hope that the pandemic may indeed engender change. Numbed as we are by headlines about over-stretched nurses and overwhelming paperwork, it takes an outside eye to make us realise that our current set-up is strange but not inevitable. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in care and, as she shows, we probably all should be.

Hence the importance of Bunting's interviews in the heartlands of care, which often capture the elusive blend of attentive kindness that we know, intuitively, should be the essence of care. Social care is rewarding, it is fun, it has wonderful career opportunities for those who love the work. By the age of fifty-nine, women will have a fifty-fifty chance of being, or having been, a carer for a sick or elderly person.While women’s employment rates within Britain are at a record peak of 78 per cent (our cheap and flexible labour welcomed by employers), investment in care remains meagre. Bunting forwards the argument that the invisibility of care through centuries of Western thought is to blame. It asks important questions about the deficit of care in our society, to which there are no easy answers.

In the process, Bunting highlights the overwhelming impediments faced at every level by carers and those in need, resulting in an unprecedented crisis of care. She also notes that hands-on caring puts one in touch with vulnerability, dependency, ageing and mortality. Economist Adam Smith’s self-interested market actor is free from childcare restraints, his behavior governed by rational cost-benefit calculation.But Labours of Love is an important and unsettling reminder that we can’t afford to wait for the next crisis, because the health system on which we all depend is itself in intensive care.

As Bunting explains, part of the knotty problem we’re facing today is the decade of austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008.I most valued the general information in Bunting’s introduction and in between her interviews, while I found that the bulk of the book alternated between dry statistics and page after page of interview transcripts. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down. Caring is the key to human existence, yet it can be very challenging, especially when it remains marginalised in every sense. It's a word that's replaced a rich vocabulary of terms, bring aspects of medical and social services that were all previously regarded as separate under a single rubric. Bunting collates compelling stories from across the care sector to celebrate the tenacity, sacrifice and achievements of its employees, to critique the unsustainable system they work in and to offer an elegiac analysis of what it means to care and be cared for in modern England.