Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction 9781529214949

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C H IL DCA RE STRU G G L ES, MAT ERNA L WORKER S A N D SO CIAL R EP RO DUCTION M AUD PERRIER

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION Maud Perrier

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1–​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +​44 (0)117 954 5940 www.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1492-​5 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1493-​2 ePub ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1494-​9 ePdf The right of Maud Perrier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by blu inc, Bristol Front cover image: © Alex McInnis Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents Acknowledgements

iv

Introduction

1

1 2 3 4

5

Counter-​Thinking from the Nursery: Theorizing Contemporary Childcare Movements Selfish Strikers and Intimate Unions: Early Years Educators’ Walkouts and the Big Steps Campaign, Australia Mothering the Mothers: Stratified Depletion and Austerity in Bristol, United Kingdom At the Table or Thrown under the Bus: Migrant Nannies’ Organizing and Childcare Coalitions during the COVID-​19 Pandemic Maternal Worker Power

21 42 62 80

98

Pandemic Postscript

115

Notes References Index

119 122 137

iii

Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the workers who took care of my own daughter over the last six years including the wonderful team led by Justine Britton at the University of Bristol nursery. I want to acknowledge the support of the University of Bristol with this research and especially the research leave that enabled me to write this book. Thank you to Shannon Kneis at Bristol University Press for approaching me about this project and for seeing it through. At the University of Bristol, Junko Yamashita, Egle Cesnulyte, Jessica Paddock, Bridget Anderson, Julia O’Connell-​Davidson, Lydia Medland, Maria Fannin and Josie McLellan have all spurred me on to complete this project. I want to thank Jackie West and the Half the Sky Women’s Collective for their political generosity. Thank you to all my University and College Union (UCU) comrades, especially Lucy Langley-​ Palmer for her invitation to speak at the International Women’s day UCU Strike rally in March 2018. I would not understand othermothering as lived praxis without Hannah Parrot and Kate Fairhurst. I am grateful to the Clovelly Childcare Centre and to Randwick Occasional Care for Kids, Sydney, for allowing me to conduct interviews on site, and to United Voice in New South Wales for their support in reaching educators. Thank you to Rozanna Liley and Neil Maclean and their son Ewan for hosting me graciously in Petersham, Sydney and for moral and practical support when I thought all my interview recordings had been lost. Thank you to the Nanny Solidarity Network (London, UK) and the Matahari Women Worker Centre (Boston, USA) for participating in this research at such a dangerous time for their members. The Centre for Feminist Research at the University of York, Toronto, welcomed me with open arms to its thriving community and ­Chapter 1 especially benefitted from discussions following a virtual seminar I gave in May 2020. Special thanks to Meg Luxton and Enakshi Dua for being such generous virtual hosts during the spring of 2020. Meg Luxton’s comments on earlier drafts have been crucial in refining my engagement with social reproduction. Simon Black’s support of this project was invaluable. Sue Ferguson’s work has been a source of inspiration all the way through this project, I treasure our stimulating conversations especially when I was down and a little out in the winter of 2021. Thank you to all iv

Acknowledgements

of the Christie family who opened their hearts and homes to me during the pandemic: Eric Williams, Fay Brunning, Laura Hillier and David Christie, Elizabeth Christie and Craig Woodcock. Thank you especially to Max Christie and Nancy Genge for having us as guests for much longer than we could have ever anticipated. My days at the University of Warwick seem like a long time ago; through all this time, Srila Roy and Robin Cohen have remained loyal friends and comrades. Their industrious dedication to sociological inquiry continues to inspire me. The UK Feminist and Women’s Studies Association has been a continued source of feminist community, and I am especially grateful to Maria Do Mar Pereira, Claire English, Karen Throsby, Kate Sang, Catherine Eschle and Lynne Segal. I am lucky to count Elaine Swan as a feminist intellectual companion. I am indebted to her insights on whiteness, feminist ethnography and depletion. She can almost always find pockets of joy in the darkest days. Thank you to Hannah Lowery for excellent guidance in the Feminist Archives South. Thank you to all the members of the Postpandemic Childcare Coalition for their insights and sharing their experiences so generously. My friends Marta Bolognani and Katrina Mitcheson have both hugely expanded my understanding of mothering in good and bad times. My parents’ commitment to care across kinship, borders and generations has not been defeated by Brexit nor the pandemic. They inspire my writing daily. My siblings-​Marie, Maëlle and Manuel-​have each deeply enriched my thinking about mothering, both as a sister and an aunt. Anaïs, thank you for your interruptions, they were just what I needed. I do not know how to express my gratitude to Ryerson Christie. Thank you for your unwavering practical, emotional and intellectual generosity. It is to Anaïs and Ryerson that I dedicate this book.

v

Introduction Childcare labour continues to be some of the lowest-​paid work in society and is disproportionately performed by working-​class, migrant and racialized minority women. The large-​scale entry of middle-​class women into paid work continues to rely on the low value attributed to the labour of economically marginalized women who care for their children. Childcare continues to be subject to intense policy scrutiny from neoliberal governments, yet workers, especially those in the lowest-​paid jobs in the informal sector, are rarely at the table in these discussions. The classed and racialized divisions in paid childcare continue to pose an ethical, practical and political challenge to 21st-​century feminism. This book returns to a well-​rehearsed debate about feminist divisions and solidarities by offering a distinctive framework that theorizes maternal workers as divided and yet connected through comparative case studies of contemporary childcare struggles in three distinct sectors. The biggest transformations to childcare provision in post-​welfare neoliberal economies over the last 20 years are the increased share delivered by corporate chains (Penn, 2011), the increasingly minute amount of state-funded provision and increased public subsidies for private, in-​home, unregulated childcare, often performed by migrants (Adamson and Brennan, 2017). The worsening conditions of childcare labour and its continued devaluation matters for the future of a broad-​based social movement for childcare justice. Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction builds a sociological schema that can both capture and contest these transformations to the social organization of childcare. During the pandemic, most media coverage in the UK focused on the damage that the disproportionate share of childcare that professional working mothers took on was causing to their careers, with journalists lamenting that ‘Lockdown has proven a step backwards for gender equality, with women bearing the brunt of home-​schooling and their career prospects diminishing’ (Morissey, 2020). The liberal feminist framing of the pandemic childcare crisis as one of gender inequality within individual households predictably neglected the impact on waged childcare workers, especially those in the informal sector. The widely reported desperateness 1

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

of dual-​earner working couples with no childcare contrasts with the relatively limited attention given to the many childcare workers who lost their jobs, were made homeless and lost their lives after catching the virus at work. The only way to redress these continued erasures and avoid pitting groups of women against one another, I argue, is a differentiated analysis of capitalism’s devaluation of reproductive labour. While some from the Left (Berry, 2021) hope that collective conscientization about middle-​class families’ dependence on underpaid childcare workers will be more than a lightbulb moment, the recalcitrant classed and racialized hierarchies of whose pandemic exhaustion and triple shifts deserve more sympathy and attention suggest a more pessimistic picture. At the time of writing, the UK government –​unlike in Australia, Canada and Ireland –​has so far failed to adopt bailout policies to protect the sector. The heightened vulnerabilities that the pandemic exacerbated made visible to more people the gendered, classed and racialized divisions that have long characterized the organization of childcare in neoliberal economies. What these moments of heightened sensitivity to inequality will generate for grassroots childcare organizing postpandemic is still unfolding. At a time when some see our overemotional attachment to work as a major obstacle to work-​based organizing and conscientization (Weeks, 2011; Jaffe, 2021), this books shows that in the case of childcare labour, this often works in reverse, as workers experience simultaneously the devaluation of their labour and their communities’ reliance on them for their survival. One of the debates that continues to animate both academic and policy discussions is how to define what counts as childcare. Childcare workers engage in multiple types of tasks that cannot always be described as drudgerous: wiping noses, changing nappies and play-​based learning with preschool children can be mind and body numbing, but they can be joyful and growth inducing too. Feminist Marxist explorations have centred sex work and domestic work as offering distinctive windows onto gendered and racialized capitalism, not least because of their shared stigmatization and perceived proximity to dirt. The category of childcare worker has a different relation to ‘dirty work’ because of its location across both the formal and informal sectors, and its accompanied professionalization. Furthermore, the ongoing battle over whether childcare should be a matter for the state, families or reformers that goes as far back as the 19th century, continues to make widescale international childcare labour organizing challenging. Today, the social organization of childcare labour, carried out by domestic workers, parents, female kin and, low-​waged workers in institutions, is characterized by deepening international and local divisions of labour. ‘Childcare worker’ is a term deliberately not used by some migrant care worker-​organizers precisely because international definitions of domestic work have historically excluded care work, a debate I return to in Chapter 4. Anyone who has 2

Introduction

cared for children knows of the blurred boundaries between childcare and domestic work. In turn, some unions and professional associations argue that childcare is closer to teaching in order to seek professionalized recognition. The construction of childcare labour as more respectable than domestic labour has a long history connected with the birth of the public and private spheres. In Victorian Britain, nannies (and, to an even greater extent, governesses) of the middle and upper classes occupied privileged positions in the household in comparison to domestic servants (Hughes, 1993). Compared to other European countries, childcare in England has always been organized along more rigid class lines, a trend that has continued (Willekens and Scheiwe, 2020). Since the 1990s, childcare employment conditions have deteriorated in many parts of the sector, which means that most childcare workers are now assumed to be less likely to experience working conditions similar to teaching than they once were. Some of the indicators of this transformation are the falling wages and numbers of nursery based childcare workers who are leaving the sector for customer service work, as well as the corporate chains that are fast taking up a larger share in the childcare landscape (Penn et al, 2020). In turn, the growth of in-​home nannies to make up for the shortfall in public and charity-​based provision in Global North countries is a significant part of this story, as is the increasing preference of middle-​class parents for in-​home childcare. These transformations to the social organization of childcare deserve to takes centre stage in 21st-​ century analyses of feminist divisions and solidarities. To that end, this book considers what light contemporary childcare struggles throw on the question of feminist divisions and solidarities in Global North contexts. It is not only that the stories of working-​class and migrant women’s autonomous organizing for childcare justice continue to be neglected from mainstream sociological stories about childcare, but also that the tools at our disposal to analyse childcare labour relations reflect this partial story. I argue that the framework of maternal worker can redress this impoverishment. The first step to do so, I suggest, is to reframe the analysis of childcare struggles to foreground questions of classed, racialized and migration-​based stratification. By doing so, the book seeks to address the continued confinement of childcare to the fields of early-​years education, social policy and childhood studies, and argues that it should take centre stage in the feminist sociology of labour.

Why maternal workers When one enters the words ‘maternal workers’ into an Internet search engine, not only does it fail to generate an exact hit, but none of the occupational categories that are discussed in this book come up. Instead, 3

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

the hits are either associated with health employment related to pregnancy and birth (maternal care assistant) or to organizations who provide legal support for pregnant women fighting workplace discrimination. The maternal continues to be narrowly associated with women’s reproductive bodies and workers remain constructed as adults who earn a wage outside of the household. It is in France where a term that comes closest to maternal worker exists: ‘assistante maternelle’ (literally, ‘maternal assistant’) is a term used by home-​based childminders to define themselves as professional carers, requiring training and accreditation (Collombet and Unterreiner, 2019). Yet, the term ‘assistant’ suggests somewhat problematically that they are mothers’ helpers. Throughout the book, I show that the lack of vocabulary we have to understand relations between waged and unwaged maternal workers –​ including employment legislation, sector-​w ide training regulations, academic debates and union organizing –​maintains an opposition between mother and worker that organizes and limits our thinking. I use the term ‘maternal’ to mean a distinctive way of politicizing childcare from the margins. The maternal worker framework allows me to connect the construction of lower-​class and black mothering as deficient with the unequal relations of waged childcare work today. One example that illustrates this is the disconnection between studies that document the caring practices of migrant, low-​income and racialized mothers (Bell, 2016; Hamilton, 2020; Davey and Koch, 2021; Suerbaum and Ljinders, 2020), and the worsening conditions of childcare workers (Busch, 2015; Razavi and Staab, 2010). Another example is the fact that discussions of worker power and unionization in feminized professions (Ally, 2005; Yates, 2010; Boris and Unden, 2017) are disconnected from discussions of contemporary expressions of collective maternal power (Lawson, 2018; O’Reilly, 2021). Moreover, the term ‘maternal’ continues to be over-​associated with ‘soft’ feminist politics and sidelined within political sociology as a result. A conception of the maternal grounded in marginalized mothers’ struggles, I argue, is needed for a reconceptualization of childcare struggles. The term ‘maternal worker’ allows me to track how these histories of struggles continue to both persist and be threatened by the increased corporatization of childcare and neoliberal policies of state retrenchment. Maternal workers are not only or primarily biological mothers, women or even parents within this framework, but also those who build social relations inspired by the praxis of past social reproduction struggles connected to anti-​poverty and anti-​racist struggles. Black feminist theorizing emphasizes mothering as community labour, and attends to its location beyond the household and across multiple kinship ties. Second, mothering is defined as involving explicit political education about overlapping systems of racist, sexist and class oppression. Third, wage earning is defined as a central dimension of mothering, often with mothers and children working alongside each 4

Introduction

other to face economic hardship. Patricia Hill Collins’ (1994: 47) call to shift the centre of theorizing merits returning to: For women of color, the subjective experience of othering/​ motherhood is inextricably linked to the sociocultural concern of racial ethnic communities –​one does not exist without the other. Whether because of labor based exploitation of African American women under slavery and its ensuing tenant farm system, the political conquest of Native American women during European acquisition of land, or exclusionary immigration policies applied to Asian Americans and Hispanics, women of color have performed motherwork that challenges social constructions of work and family as separate spheres, of male and female roles as dichotomized, and of the search for autonomy as the guiding human principle. This type of motherwork recognizes that individual survival, empowerment and identity require group survival, empowerment and identity. In this schema, motherhood represents a particular praxis that explicitly politicizes child rearing from the margins. This definition counters the individualizing neoliberal version of the maternal that appears as unassailable and that, if left unchallenged, depletes our imaginations. Scholars have produced rich vocabularies that redress the separation of paid and unpaid work, from Lynn Macdonald’s (2010) ‘shadow mothers’, to ‘intimate labours’ (Boris and Parreñas, 2020), ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2000) and the ‘total social organization of labour’ (Glucksmann, 1995). However, few conceptual frames work through how specific forms of solidarity might emerge across one type of care work and are grounded in situated analysis of labour movements. If ‘empowering the universal caregiver, who is not necessarily a mother, is the only way forward’ (Segal, 2020: 11), then we need to outline a roadmap to first rebuild the impoverished definitions of the maternal that currently predominate. The category of maternal workers starts this process through a comparative analysis of groups of paid and unpaid carers who share a distinctive experience of caring for small children in order to investigate the possibilities of establishing shared political commitments despite highly differentiated employment and social relations. As I argue in Chapter 5, establishing what these shared political commitments might be can only be done after closer engagement with workers’ distinctive praxis of maternal worker power, which I suggest complicates current accounts of solidarity. First, let me address some of the risks of the concept of maternal workers in relation to de-​gendering care. While some still see the maternal as too overtly connected to feminine bodies and identities, there is a long tradition of deploying the maternal as a praxis that men, non-​binary and trans people 5

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

and childless women actively take part in reshaping when they engage in caregiving and nurturing (Doucet, 2018; Yamashita, 2016; Zwalf, 2020). In adopting the terminology of ‘maternal workers’, I am not assuming that men, trans and non-​binary people or children who perform paid and unpaid childcare are excluded from these processes, but rather that they acquire these skills in a society that continues to see childcare as mothering done predominantly by women (Doucet, 2018). As Maria Fannin and I have argued, the maternal continues to hold a contested space within feminist theorizing, but legacies of black feminist and socialist feminist which decentre individualized mothering endure, which those emphasizing neoliberalism’s erosive tendencies often fail to notice (Fannin and Perrier, 2018). The project of de-​gendering care and moving towards models of the universal caregiver (Fraser, 2016) can only happen by building outwards from the legacies of such past and present childcare struggles. A second and perhaps more significant challenge is how to separate maternal workers from the spectre of maternalism, its reformist agendas and its problematic social policies. In the USA and elsewhere, programmes that pathologize groups of mothers, and aim to save poor children from their mothers, signal the risks of state involvement (Boris and Kleinberg, 2003). It is not only mothers who are on the receiving end of maternalist ideals; rather, as Bridget Anderson (2000) documents, maternalism is often deployed to better conceal the racism of employers towards the domestic workers they employ. By asking for financial protection from the state for raising worker-​citizens, maternalist demands leave unexamined the way social reproduction is a central pillar of capitalist reproduction. Women’s liberation groups’ calls for both state-​funded childcare infrastructure and community control of childcare 40 years ago were aimed precisely at tackling this dilemma. As I show in Chapter 3, the legacies of maternalist philanthropy continue to shape some of the organizing in the UK’s contemporary third sector, hence the importance of building a framework of maternal workers grounded simultaneously in workers and organizers’ accounts. Finally, the concept of maternal workers addresses the separation between waged and unwaged childcare labour in a distinctive way. By investigating how the separation between mothering and labour shapes childcare movements, it is possible to identify times when the separation becomes blurred and to take stock of its consequences for theorizing feminist movements. Using nursery based childcare workers’ stories of politicization, I rework Dorothy Cobble’s call for more ‘intimate unions’. The field of maternal studies today emphasizes the growing importance of international divisions of labour, and shows how neoliberal mothering simultaneously reinstates class stigma and conceal the erosion of the welfare state, yet these literatures operate separately so that the schemas that guide the analysis of migrant and transnational mothers, low income and racialized mothers are seldom in conversation with 6

Introduction

one another. The concept of maternal workers provides a lens through which sociologists can explicitly challenge these methodological and conceptual separations in their analyses. Maternal labour has the potential to disrupt economic, political and sociological understandings of work, capital and reproduction (Baraitser and Tyler, 2010). This tension –​which some see as meaning labour ‘cannot bear the association with the maternal without swallowing it up’ (Sandford, 2011: 2) –​is generative. It is precisely the uncontainability of the maternal within the category of labour that means maternal workers can spearhead more wholistic sociological schemas. First, by bringing together paid and unpaid people who care for small children, the concept of maternal workers enlivens the demand for collectivizing childcare and for redistributing the affective and material resources it demands. Importantly, one of the arguments made during the women’s liberation movement for collectivizing childcare was to counter the psychoanalytic consequences of raising children in nuclear families, including its tendency to reproduce adults predisposed to liberal individualism rather than collective solidarity (Mitchell, 1971; Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Segal, 1983). Those arguments for collectivizing childcare are grounded in the recognition that the raising of children in most late capitalist societies is repetitive, isolating, unfulfilling and sometimes destructive. The framework of maternal workers acknowledges that mothering labour not only includes practices of nurturance, but also involves the daily experience of hatred, aggression, guilt, violence and despair. This means coming to terms with the fact that ‘Maternal care, from this perspective, is the name for the collective management of hate that emerges at the very point that we can recognise that love and hate can be directed towards the same (maternal) object’ (Baraitser, 2016: 395). If redistributing the psychosocial cost of raising children is part of the political project of feminism, then we need vocabularies that explicitly centre the collective. As mothers and childcare workers are seldom thought of as economically and politically connected, we need analyses that grasp how these divisions are maintained across historical economic transformations. Waged and unwaged maternal workers alike both reproduce workers on a daily basis and build social relations that contest the exploitative and competitive character of capitalism. Mothers, fathers, othermothers and waged childcare workers in homes and institutional settings face varying working conditions that are difficult to join up without the labour lens of social reproduction. One of the barriers to the task of connecting these experiences, is that most mothers continue to be socialized to think about themselves as being more necessary for their children’s well-​being than any other caregiver. On the other hand, some waged maternal workers in institutional settings may foreground their professional identities in opposition to mothers, emphasizing that they have received training and qualifications that enables 7

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

them to deliver ‘high-​quality’ care. For home-​based workers, who are often migrants, being seen as substitute or shadow mothers may give them a very limited form of power over their employers, who may feel jealousy and deploy racist and racialized tropes about migrant women’s nurturing nature to justify the employment conditions of their nannies. Cameron Lynne Macdonald (2011) highlights that nannies’ relationships with the children of their employers are simultaneously concealed and envied by their employer-​mothers. Such divisions mean that the spaces where waged and unwaged maternal workers have the opportunity to share space and power democratically, and to build social relations of solidarity, are ever shrinking, though the numbers of parent-​led cooperative nurseries, to cite just one example, suggest that there is continued interest in transforming these relations (New Economics Foundation, 2016). The framework of maternal workers that I propose allows us to identify under what conditions and which social relations of solidarity –​if any –​can emerge across those groups of workers. To do so, I argue, we need analyses that centre both interdependency and opposition across different groups of workers.

Childcare struggles on the rise Childcare workers’ strikes in Scotland in 2018, Australia in 2017/​18 and Ireland in 2020, as well as in different US states, suggest a wave of large parent-​and worker-​led mobilization around childcare across Global North postwelfare states. Childcare workers in the formal sector have seldom had enough union density and collective bargaining rights to achieve large-​scale mobilizations, yet they are currently playing a key role in the resurgence of a care labour movement. In Quebec, an outlier in terms of state-​funded childcare within Global North neoliberal contexts, there have been successive waves of strikes by unionized workers, most recently, 10,000 home childcare workers voted to strike over pay on 8 March 2020 (CBC News, 2020). In June 2021, the Childcare Providers United union led by women of colour, representing 40,000 home childcare providers, signed a contract with the state of California that included pay increases (Childcare Providers United, 2021). In Ireland, a coalition of childcare providers and unions organized against pay and conditions that saw half of the country’s providers closed for one day in February 2020 (Irish Times, 2020). Understanding the extent to which these local movements represent a significant shift within childcare movements requires analysing their repertoires, alliances and demands in more detail. Do they signal a shift towards demands for a state-​funded universal childcare system, as well as wage increases? To what extent are these struggles simultaneously community-​and work-​based? Where are the voices of the more precarious and informal workers located in this resurgence? 8

Introduction

This book addresses three under-​theorized aspects of childcare movements in this context. First, the stratification within the childcare workforce are seldom given much attention, with nannies and, to a lesser extent, home childcare providers generally not counted as part of the childcare workforce despite the childcare work they perform in the informal sector. Most studies consider one part of the childcare workforce and focus on one occupation even though there is growing recognition that a cross-​sector analysis is needed given, for example, that repercussions for migration regimes are significant (Adamson, 2016; Findlay, 2017; Rosen et al, 2017). This omission in the academic literature has important connections to the lack of a childcare movement that treats seriously the differential devaluing of childcare labour across classed, racialized and citizenship lines. The gender equality argument for public spending on childcare perpetuates these blind spots. One example is the siloing of early childhood education and care (ECEC) from migration policies, which disadvantages migrant home care workers. Furthermore, the silencing of the construction of childcare employment as jobs for working-​ class girls in government discourse and training programmes means that a politicized language that can make class visible is more needed than ever (Osgood, 2005; Colley, 2006). Researchers and activists have attended to the difficult question of how the fragmentation of the sector produces competing interests –​yet often using the frame of intersectionality rather than social reproduction. Additionally, the connections between work-​based organizing and community organizing for childcare justice that would consider the joint interests of parents, workers and children are assumed to be extremely important as they have indeed played a decisive role in enabling strikes and walkouts, but these social relations are seldom under the sociological microscope long enough to grasp their implications for theorizing solidarity. Contemporary childcare movements’ ties to grassroots community organizing, which were central in the 1970s and 1980s, have been undermined to different extents in the UK, Canada and Australia. Small-​and medium-​sized grassroots organizations were a key infrastructure of women’s liberation movements, and their erosion under austerity has important implications for the state of childcare movements, a question I address specifically in Chapter 3. As third sector organizations have been depleted and their workforces precaritized by austerity cuts across Europe and North America, the question of their shifting role within feminist childcare movements requires attention (Emejulu and Bassell, 2015; Cunningham et al, 2016). Furthermore, studies of work-​based organizing in the childcare sector often neglect the ambivalent role of third sector and grassroots organizations as an infrastructure of dissent leading to an incomplete picture of childcare mobilizations. The UK –​similarly to Australia, Canada and the US as neoliberal welfare states –​has adopted market mechanisms in the delivery of childcare, instead 9

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

of developing childcare as a publicly funded service. Childcare provision is split across a very small number of public and not-​for-​profit providers, as well as an ever-​expanding, for-​profit private sector underpinned by the logic of increased ‘parental choice’. As states continue to treat childcare and early-​years education as distinct sectors –​by separating formal nurseries (large, for-​profit chains and smaller, not-​for-​profit community organizations) and informal in-​home childcare provided by nannies and childminders –​ this stratifies different groups of workers and exacerbates their competing interests. In the UK, childcare costs are among the highest for all Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development (OECD) countries, while childcare professionals are some of the lowest paid in society. In 2018, childcare workers across all qualifications in England numbered 716,000 (Bonetti, 2019); however, due to their location in the informal sector and high representation of migrants, there is no exact or recent data on the size of the nanny and au pair workforce. In the UK, public provision through municipal nurseries makes up only 12 per cent of all under-​five education nationally (Department for Education, 2019). The scale of the privatization of the sector is extensive with over 80 per cent of all childcare places for under-​fives are provided by the private sector, with over 55 per cent being provided by large, for-​profit corporations. Pre-​pandemic, 17 per cent of childcare providers in England’s poorest areas were facing closure and annual staff turnover had reached 24 per cent (Hall and Stephens, 2019); now, the Early Years Alliance reports that 25 per cent of all UK childcare providers fear closure as an effect of the COVID-​19 outbreak (2021). Even with rising qualification levels, its low pay and feminized composition constitutes compounded class and gender employment disadvantage, which translates into high turnover (Simon et al, 2015). In the UK, access to 30 hours of childcare subsidies when children turn three introduced in 2016 has been dependent on parents working full-​time; this policy has largely benefitted middle and high earning women and has put many providers in deficit when they have had to pay the difference. The large corporate childcare chains are owned by foreign investors and traded on the stock market, bringing in £5.5 billion to the UK economy each year (Penn, 2018). State subsidies tend to take the form of childcare vouchers but can also operate as tax breaks for working parents in the UK. In this context, much policy, public and academic discussion of childcare has abandoned the vision of a publicly funded, universal childcare system. The argument for public childcare as a route to social investment, to improving women’s workforce participation and to decreasing child poverty has not been successful even though it has been more palatable to some neoliberal welfare states. Since the 1980s, large national advocacy childcare organizations, charities and think tanks have played a significant role in lobbying governments for more funding for early years workforce professional development and better regulation of the 10

Introduction

for-​profit sector that would mitigate the worse impacts of the marketization of childcare. The stories of increased marketization, familialization and state retrenchment matter, but they offer a partial vision of childcare politics that often neglects local attempts to mediate and upturn these tendencies. This book seeks to add complexity to this narrative by deploying the maternal worker lens and centring workers’ perspectives.

Telling stories of fightbacks How the story of the transformation of the social organization of childcare over the last 50 years is told matters for how we imagine and organize for its future. One well rehearsed story is that the idea of childcare as a universal right has been severely eroded in the UK, Australia, the US and, to a lesser extent, Canada over those decades. However, this is not the whole story. While the attacks on publicly funded childcare under neoliberal regimes are undeniable, large-​scale analyses often miss smaller-​scale attempts by grassroots women’s organizations, advocates and workers’ movements to contest this unequal social organization. Nancy Fraser (2013) has argued that feminism has directly contributed to the development of flexible capitalism and that this crisis can only be resolved through the complete reinvention of the production–​reproduction distinction. Angela McRobbie (2009) develops a similar argument claiming that feminism’s selective incorporation of neoliberal tendencies means it can no longer be defined as a collective social movement. Those are seductive accounts, but they neglect the distinctive ways in which local feminist movements have continued to mobilize for radical structural transformation over those five decades. By drawing a distinction between second-​wave feminism and feminist movements that followed, these accounts also underplay important historical continuities. Whether or not one agrees with Fraser’s diagnosis, the question remains of how feminist socialism can best respond to neoliberal policies that both privatize and familialize childcare and push a publicly funded universal childcare system further out of the horizon. One of the arguments I develop in the book is that the concept of depletion (Rai et al, 2014) can help us to record and hold states accountable for the increased harms when public resources for care infrastructure are withdrawn and replaced by financialized corporate care and social enterprises. Under austerity, and even more acutely during the pandemic, more middle-​class women’s work and family lives have shared some of the labour intensity that lower-​class, racialized and migrant women have long experienced to make ends meet, yet we have little sociological vocabulary to make sense of these transformations to the organization of women’s labour. Chapter 1 connects studies of mothers’ community-​based organizing and childcare struggles through the lens of social reproduction. This 11

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

book resists a monolithic account of how neoliberalism shapes childcare movements, instead paying simultaneous attention to its contradictory and multifaceted consequences, as scholars of the impact of neoliberalism on feminist movements have done in other contexts (Roy, 2015; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2006; Pereira, 2017). In doing this, I show that paying attention to maternal worker power also avoids the resistance–​co-​optation dichotomy and foregrounds situated examples of diverse practices that both sought survival strategies and organized to hold states responsible. For example, my participants not only wanted their work to be publicly recognized as essential or to gain better wages and conditions; many of them also wanted the state to recognize their rights as citizens and as workers, and sought to wrest resources from local and national governments. Whether walking out in equal-​pay protests (Chapter 2), saving community centres from closure (Chapter 3) or organizing migrant nannies (Chapter 4), each of these cases illustrates the importance of paying attention of how workers attempt to seize state resources. I track the increased public visibility of discontented childcare workforces and parents to ask how they can inform 21st-​century social reproduction debates and, more specifically, feminist debates about worker power.

Feminist ways of knowing: making workers’ voices count This book centres workers’ voices to investigate current childcare struggles. Contrary to accounts that locate class as an individualized experience and work-​based collective mobilization as belonging to the past, each of my case studies shows how work continues to play a significant role in processes of politicization and in the building of childcare movements. First, the choices of case studies reflect where I was and what I noticed as childcare mobilizations both locally and internationally. I then ask in what sense the maternal was sidelined or missing in those movements in order to illustrate the separation of waged and unwaged maternal labour. This dual lens of labour and the maternal allowed me to produce analyses that, I argue, better centre divisions of race, migration and class than those that scholars who approach childcare through the lens of care can do, as I discuss in Chapter 5. While the book predominantly analyses waged workers’ struggles, I also show how the term ‘maternal worker’ can shift feminist sociology’s schema for understanding unwaged maternal labour. In Chapter 5, I reflect on how dual terrains might best catalyse the connections between work-​based and community organizing. The book considers three distinct sets of workers: first, childcare workers in nurseries; second, maternal support workers who were either self-​employed or employed by local authorities and third sector charities; 12

Introduction

and, third, migrant nannies and nanny organizers. Each group represents a distinctive sector, set of employment relations and culture of political organizing. I interviewed ‘rank-​and-​file’ childcare workers in not-​for-​profit nurseries and nannies, as well as elected union officials, charity workers, community activists and organizers employed by unions. Chapters 2 and 3 are based on face-​to-​face interviews with early years educators and activists in Sydney in 2018, and maternal support workers in Bristol between 2015 and 2018, respectively. All of the interviews with nannies were conducted online during 2020 during the COVID-​19 pandemic. In addition to interviews, I consulted primary sources, including childcare policies, trade union agreements and campaign materials, and archival documents relating to feminist childcare movements in the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly in the UK.1 This book is indebted to the long tradition of studies of working-​ class and migrant women’s organizing that contests their representation as powerless. The location of these case studies –​spanning Britain, Australia and the US –​meant that I was able to observe how the interplay between the social organization of children’s and of mothers’ care and the distinct histories of labour, migrant and feminist movements produce locally distinct childcare struggles across neoliberal welfare states often used as comparators. By including workers across the formal and informal sectors, as well as childcare provided by market-​based, state-​based and civil society, I track how transformations of social reproduction –​such as those related to, for example, austerity –​differentially affected workers’ vulnerabilities and organizing power. Nannies are an important group because their employment is often outside of standard labour law and include a large proportion of migrant and minority racialized workers in informal paid childcare. Migrant women find work as paid domestic workers because they are excluded from other segments of the labour market and are more vulnerable to exploitation: this stratification in labour markets is reproduced by employers’ beliefs that racialized minority women or women from the Global South are better suited for this work. This comparative approach allows me to investigate the effects of how divisions within the childcare sector construct some workers as professional educators and others as mothers’ helpers, and how such divisions weaken attempts to build broad-​ based inclusive childcare movements. Beyond these cross-​sectoral divisions, there are significant differences in the working conditions within each sector. The pay that a British-​registered, ‘Norland’-​type nanny can earn contrasts with the majority of live-​in nannies, a sector that remains largely dominated by migrants and poorly paid. Similarly, early-​years educators’ pay and conditions vary depending on whether they work in a corporate chain or a city council nursery. In this sense, each of my case studies offers a deep insight into how particular groups of workers organized within each sector. Two groups of childcare workers who are not included in the 13

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

book are au pairs and childminders. Since the abolition of the au pair visa in 2008, au pairs working in the UK occupy a distinctive space, resulting in an increasingly blurred distinction between au pairs, nannies and other migrant domestic workers, so that the line between a ‘nanny’ as a form of paid employment and the use of au pairs for temporary childcare and housework is increasingly unclear (Cox and Busch, 2018). Childminders are growing as a form of childcare labour that sits between formal and informal sector, in the UK it is increasingly regulated but often cheaper than institutional settings. Childminders or family childcare providers in North America are also more likely to struggle against associations with mothering, and because of their location in the home, their status as workers continues to be contested (Tuominen, 2003; O’Connell, 2011). While these groups would provide contrasting perspectives on transformations to hierarchies of childcare labour, my case studies were explicitly identified in relation to instances of collective mobilization, both of which have been less prominent in the au pair and childminding sectors to date. The theoretical framework of maternal workers that I develop is the result of ongoing conversations with feminist researchers, activists and participants over the last six years. My analysis has been guided by the theory of social reproduction. This has meant centring the question of how workers and worker-​organizers, both within and beyond community groups, unions and civil society organizations, mediate the conflict between capital accumulation’s profit imperative and the standard of living of workers. I sought to understand how workers individually and collectively contested the devaluation of their labour by asking questions about how they started working in this sector, what motivated their activism, their relationships to their co-​workers and communities, the difficulties they faced as organizers, and their hopes and fears for the future. In Bristol, I was most familiar with the city, its grassroots politics and the repercussions of national childcare policies and austerity cuts, whereas for the interviews carried out in Sydney and, to an even greater extent, with migrant nanny organizers in London and Boston, I needed to fill out the gaps in my knowledge about the local and national contexts with supplementary questions and background research on interviewees’ organizations and national migration policies. A central theme of this study is the construction of workers’ rights as irreconcilable with their work-​based identities as ‘carers’. This was particularly salient in relation to industrial action, with the phrase ‘What will happen to the children?’ used repeatedly and sometimes with irony to capture the (im)possibilities of withdrawing one’s labour. I show that this binary frame, embedded in notions of liberal individual autonomy, hinders forms of organizing that centre interdependence. My analysis also brings to light distinctive repertoires of organizing which I theorize as maternal worker praxis in Chapter 5. Those power relations, including differences in the accounts of workers and 14

Introduction

worker-​organizers, were important for understanding whose version of a particular dispute, protest or campaign was given authority. While this book was motivated by the desire to make workers’ voices count, I have interpreted their accounts and constructed my own story based on our conversations. As I discussed earlier, my employment as an academic, a representative in a large educational trade union, a researcher of class and mothering, and a white mother of a preschool child shaped the sorts of relationships I could build with participants and the questions I chose to ask. More than once, participants told me that they were sceptical about the point of academic research, especially done by white, middle-​ class women like myself. Many interviewees said they enjoyed offering their perspectives and some challenged some of my interpretations. As Beverley Skeggs (1997: 38) argues: ‘it is in the connections between different types of situated knowledges and the relationships established that the validity of feminist research can be established’. The insights I develop and present in this book cannot be separated from those relationships. As I argue in Chapter 5, we need stronger frameworks to map the relationship between work-​ based and community organizing. The legacies of the women’s liberation movement –​its archives and conversations with women active in it, who are now in their 70s –​are important resources to historicize this praxis. This book is also about a particular phase of neoliberalism, characterized in the UK by two decades of state retrenchment of childcare, a policy vacuum on au pairs and nannies, and the mass corporatization of childcare. The book offers a rationale for why social reproduction can animate a sharper critical theory of labour, gender and mothering. One’s place in the labour market is a key question for studying childcare movements from a social reproduction perspective: ‘Marxist feminism assumes that, in any society, the ways in which people make their living determine their social relations and significantly shape the ways in which they understand themselves and the world around them, including their political visions’ (Luxton, 2015: 22). Not all of my participants identified as workers; some also sought recognition as ‘educators’, ‘therapists’ or ‘nannies’. These claims play a significant part in producing a hierarchized workforce and making cross-​sector coalitions difficult to build, both in the childcare sector and within women’s non-​governmental organizations (NGOs). The term ‘worker’, despite its flattening of racialized and gendered assumptions, allowed me to ask on what basis and under what conditions people who earn a wage taking care of children might consider themselves as having some shared interests. Migrant nannies’ location in the informal sector, outside the protection of employment law, is particularly salient when considering this knot. Across these hierarchies of childcare, parents rely on the labour of nannies and childcare workers in the formal sector so that they can engage in waged labour themselves. One of the ways in which capitalistic 15

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

thinking’s separate spheres ideology has succeeded in displacing the connections between productive and reproductive labour is by constructing childcare as a private responsibility. I discuss the reasons for the absence of the maternal in childcare movements and the disconnections between waged and unwaged reproductive labour in the sociological literature in Chapter 1, and argue that the concept of maternal workers can play a part in transcending this harmful separation. What follows is an intellectual-​political biography of this book.

The making of maternal workers This book is also intertwined with politicizing moments as a worker and a mother. As a French migrant from a lower-​middle-​class background, I worked in a variety of part-​time jobs after arriving in the UK in 1998 until I completed my PhD eleven years later. I worked part-​time in mostly low-​paid jobs, gaining access to better-​paid teaching and research contracts as I entered postgraduate studies. I worked as a shop assistant, secondary school teaching assistant, kitchen aide, meal attendant in a hospital, kindergarten assistant, English as a foreign language teacher, cleaner, babysitter and many other hourly paid part-​time jobs. In none of these jobs did I come into contact with organized workers’ resistance or unions. As a French citizen who grew up under Mitterrand (and later Chirac’s) presidency, I have long been taken back at how socialism is considered an extremist word in Britain and how rare strikes were in Britain. My desire to continue studying was to escape this sort of paid work: the promise of teaching and writing was alluring, and I imagined university life as a space shielded from market values. Five years of a lectureship showed me that the marketized university could be alienating, despite the job security and autonomy so many seek. When I came to Bristol in 2009, I was fortunate to meet some of the women active in the women’s liberation movement, without whom I would not necessarily have known that the university nursery –​and other women’s services in the city –​were secured through their activism. Over the next ten years, regular visits to the feminist archives –​which are cared for in Bristol University’s Special Collection–​continued to physically connect me to these histories. The perspectives of socialist feminists featured very little in my doctoral training, and I seem to remember them being regularly dismissed as simplistic and out-​of-​date. Whether it was the ‘fault’ of post-​structural feminism or Bourdieu’s hold on British sociology, political economy simply would not have been on my radar if it had not been for meeting these women or visiting the feminist archives in Bristol University’s library. Shortly after I became pregnant in 2015, I co-​organized a series of workshops with mothers in partnership with the Single Parent Action Network, a grassroots anti-​poverty organization set up in the early 1990s. 16

Introduction

One participant’s reflections at one of these workshops prompted me to question my own assumptions about motherhood as work, which I felt was a neglected perspective. The young woman was attending the workshop because she wanted to gain skills and connections that could help her start her own craft business and gain an income. I had very naively failed to see mothers’ empowerment in economic terms. While I –​and some of the co-​organizers –​had been focusing on the importance that mothering be recognized as a form of labour, for working-​class mothers and women of colour, economic provisioning has always been central to mothering. This encounter and other conversations led me to question whom I should speak to in order to comprehensively map Bristol’s maternal workers. The birth of my daughter crystallized my sense of structural divisions between mothers. I had internalized the liberal assumption that the main problem as a working mother was going to be overcoming the unequal gendered division of labour, but it was experiences of deep separation from other women and mothers that shaped this book more profoundly. During the maternal entrepreneur project myself and Maria Fannin carried out, some of my interviewees in Bristol were neighbours and acquaintances-​some of whom became friends-​without whom I would have produced a much more limited account of maternal work. Doing insider research into the political economy of white middle-​class mothers’ ‘survival’ strategies meant facing and then seeking to make visible the economic and cultural advantage I was embedded in, without the safe distance from my ethnographic site. It was desire to theorize this discomfort which fuelled the writing process and influenced my choices of further case studies with low paid maternal workers. As a full-​time working mother, I found few opportunities to make collective sense of the austerity policies that were bringing children’s and parents’ services to breaking point across the UK and in my community. I continued to visit the Feminist Archives South and to read about the women who founded the university nursery in 1976. As my daughter was now attending the same nursery, I was, at times, envious of the political communities I read about. While I was feeling the lack of political community as a parent, becoming the union representative for my school and being elected to its executive committee during a period of intense industrial action gave me a much-​longed-​for taste of work-​based organizing. Organizing with colleagues over our pensions and casualization opened not only a new form of sociality among co-​workers, but also lived moments of solidarity as students, precariously employed and retired colleagues momentarily came together. The process of seeing usually union-​sceptic colleagues rallying to take part in the pensions’ strike, witnessing students occupying the vice-​ chancellor’s office for a week and socializing on picket lines and pubs over those months, with my daughter in tow, cemented my identification with the labour movement. These were rare and precious moments when the 17

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

worlds of waged work and motherwork temporarily collapsed for myself and other staff, lecturers and students whose pre-​school children took part in marches. It was transformative because despite many colleagues’ initial doubt that striking would make any difference, as soon as the action started, the tone of the communication from senior management changed, concessions were made by the pensions regulator and senior University figures all over the country spoke up as the action grew stronger. It was collectively and personally empowering to see that withdrawing our labour could make senior managers and ministers wobble. As Sheila Rowbotham (2001: 195) writes: ‘Once you’ve seen this happen, you don’t forget –​even if the world does appear to go on much the same.’ As our campaign emphasized the ways in which women would be particularly hit by the pension cuts, when a fellow union officer asked me to speak at the International Women’s Day rally, I jumped at the chance to make a speech to a packed hall of riled-​up students and lecturers about the unequal division of household labour and childcare, arguing that gains over pay and conditions can only be made with collective action, not liberal-​individualist definitions of gender equality. Speaking to my peers and students as co-​workers physically connected me with an international community of socialist women beyond Bristol, the academy and the 2010s. After the mass strikes of 2018, I wanted to make the conditions for workplace politicization central to my analysis of maternal movements and shifted my focus to investigating childcare labour struggles. This framing was also no doubt informed by the spirit of militancy beyond the university strikes, for example, in the International Women’s Strike, the campaigns against the closure of children’s centres in the UK and the strikes of early years educators in Scotland in 2018 to name a few. These experiences made me hungry for theories that could speak both to these ongoing and deepening divisions between mothers but also to my own and my participants’ yearning for belonging to a political community. This shifted the project to an investigation of how worker power is built inside workplaces and communities as a way to reconceptualize twenty first century maternal politics.

The structure of the book As I go on to explain in Chapter 1, my case studies focus on Anglo-​Saxon countries of the Global North –​the UK, Canada,2 Australia and the US –​ which share a history of limited post-​war state provision and increased marketization of the formal childcare sector from the 1980s onwards to meet middle-​class women’s increased rates of employment. These countries share connected yet distinctive histories of the women’s liberation movement’s limited success in making states fund community-​based childcare. The discursive frames –​of advocacy for professional wages and gender equality 18

Introduction

(Chapter 3), self-​care (Chapter 2), and, to a lesser extent, aid (Chapter 4) –​ competed with each other and sometimes constrained the possibilities for establishing cross-​sector worker power. I deploy the lens of social reproduction to show that the frames of both worker power and stratified reproduction –​ which centre the question of who benefits and who is harmed by the current social organization of childcare –​are often marginalized within contemporary discussions of childcare struggles. Each of my three case studies draws on individual accounts to deepen understanding of how childcare struggles are organized under specific historical circumstances, such as the large-​scale privatization of the formal childcare sector (Chapter 2), austerity cuts (Chapter 3) and pandemic bailouts (Chapter 4). I identify the extent to which political actors in my case studies sought to overcome unequal relations between parents and workers, as well as stratification of the workforce. In Chapter 1, ‘Counter-​Thinking from the Nursery’, I outline the theoretical framework for the book. My starting point is a definition of the maternal that emphasizes economic provision, community mothering and politicization regarding structural racism, sexism and racism. As this definition is seldom mainstreamed in discussions of mothering, the consequences are that the ties between how some women have organized as mothers and as workers continue to be missed; hence, we need to start our analysis from the history of community organizing among working-​class, migrant and black mothers. Furthermore, I discuss the implications of home care workers’ and nannies’ organizing having been sidelined from the study of childcare struggles. Chapter 2, ‘Selfish Strikers and Intimate Unions: Early Years Educators’ Walkouts and the Big Steps Campaign, Australia’, explores how the construction of educators’ strikes as either ‘selfless or selfish’ signals ongoing contradictions that construct care as antithetical to worker power. The chapter adds nuance to the concept of intimate unions (Cobble, 2010) and draws attention to community organizing and to migrant educators’ experiences. I argue that the walkouts constitute a shift towards modes of protest where parent–​worker solidarity plays an important role. Chapter 3, ‘Mothering the Mothers: Stratified Depletion and Austerity in Bristol, UK’, tracks how the combination of the marketization of maternal care and the post-​austerity cuts to charity and third sector organizations that support low-​income mothers in Bristol constrains the possibilities for building a citywide maternal workers’ movement. Through a comparative discussion of two groups of maternal support workers –​one made up of those employed in charities, social enterprises and local authorities to support mothers, and another made up of those who sell commodified self-​care services to women in wealthy and gentrifying areas of the city –​I show that growing socio-​ spatial divisions leave the task of reconstructing collective civic and politicized structures of care to working-​class and racialized minority women. Chapter 4, ‘At the Table or Thrown under the Bus: Migrant Nannies’ Organizing 19

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CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

and Childcare Coalitions During the COVID-​19 Pandemic’, draws on a cultural analysis of reports of the childcare crisis during the pandemic and studies of two migrant worker organizations, arguing that nannies’ distinctive vulnerabilities continue to be partially excluded from childcare movements. Nannies’ conditions and organizing shift the assumptions made about solidarity building in contemporary childcare struggles, including the extent to which coalitions between and across waged and unwaged mothers can be established where nannies’ interests will be treated equally to those of working parents. Chapter 5, ‘Maternal Worker Power’, modifies Jane McAlevey’s (2016) definition of ‘whole worker power’ and adds nuance to claims that social relations in the workplace and the community can act as a strategic wedge against the privatization of childcare. The chapter emphasizes how the maternal worker approach furthers social reproduction theory’s refusal to put either waged or unwaged mothering above the other, and draws out the implications of theorizing maternal worker power as praxis for sociological theorizing on gender, labour and social reproduction. I end the book by elaborating a set of criteria for evaluating when childcare movements put social reproduction to work as a threat to neoliberalism.

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1

Counter-​Thinking from the Nursery: Theorizing Contemporary Childcare Movements

Introduction This chapter1 outlines the theoretical framework for the book. My starting point is Patricia Hill Collins’ definition of black mothering as centring economic provisioning, othermothering and politicized mothering. The marginalization of this definition of mothering means that the maternal continues to be neglected in discussions of labour organizing and worker conscientization despite its long-​established significance as a space of collective classed, gendered and racialized politicization. The consequences of this neglect are that the ties between how women have organized as mothers and as workers continue to be missed; these connections only appear once we start our analysis from the history of community organizing among working-​class, migrant and racialized minority mothers. In turn, this means that the nursery needs to be foregrounded as a site of waged labour for women whose own mothering has historically been erased or subject to over-​regulation. By connecting the community activism of women of colour and working-​class mothers with childcare workers’ labour movements, I suggest how the concept of maternal worker addresses these limitations. First, I outline how a social reproduction lens makes visible the devaluation of the unwaged maternal labour of lower-​class and racialized minority mothers, and produces them as deficient and in need of disciplining. I then turn to studies of women’s community organizing to show that the depletion of women’s community activism and third sector over the last 40 years needs to be centred as the context for conceptualizing childcare movements. Contemporary and earlier literature on childcare struggles lacks conceptual frames to make sense of waged and unwaged childcare workers as a stratified 21

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

workforce, including the ways in which home domestic care workers’ and nannies’ organizing have been absent from definitions of childcare work and childcare movements. I identify the concepts of stratified reproduction, depletion and intimate unions as central to building this framework, and show how they need to be brought together into a unified theory of the social relations of waged and unwaged maternal labour under neoliberalism. First, I turn to why the concept of social reproduction offers the best lens to understand 21st-​century divisions between women.

Why social reproduction? The recognition that mothering is a form of labour was a key contribution of early feminist sociology. Contrary to analyses of transnational mothering, studies of mothering in Global North countries that foreground an explicit analysis of capitalist relations have receded from mainstream sociology over the last four decades. Bourdieusian-​inspired feminist analyses of mothering dominate this field. Although they have provided rich accounts of the processes through which child rearing compounds gendered and classed disadvantage (Lareau, 2003; Gillies, 2006; Perrier, 2013), because of their focus on processes of the reproduction of class advantage, they underplay an account of capitalism as a unified whole. For example, the ways in which the raising of children in private households perpetuates women’s divergent interests under capitalism and reproduces an unequal labour force are largely missing.2 These divergent interests were accentuated by Western Europe’s professionalization of mothering from the late 19th century, which meant that particularly migrant and poor mothers were increasingly disciplined (Smart, 1996). Since the late 20th century, sociologists have depicted a culture where intensive mothering requires especially white, middle-​class mothers to be wholly child-​centred (Hays, 1996), to view their children as projects to be developed and to maximize their cultural and social potential (Lareau, 2003), as well as critiques of governments’ neoliberal policies that identify parenting as the main cause of inequalities (Gillies, 2006). Across all of these studies, the ways in which neoliberal capitalism pits groups of mothers and children against one another, and how ideologies of child rearing conceal these structures, are evident. However, without the lens of social reproduction, the oppositions between ‘mother’ and ‘worker’ remain insufficiently challenged, and collective attempts to counter its privatization, regain community control and socialize the costs of social reproduction are left out. The emergence of social reproduction scholarship is closely intertwined with social movements that have forced states to give up capital for the costs of social reproduction, whether in welfare rights struggles or campaigns for public schooling and free healthcare. Deploying social reproduction to study contemporary childcare movements means a 22

Counter-Thinking from the Nursery

commitment to analysing how patriarchal and racial capitalism appropriates the life-​making capacities of reproductive labour. Social reproduction makes visible the hidden, unacknowledged and unpaid reproductive work predominantly carried out by women in the home, in communities and in gendered ways in the workplace. Social reproduction theory constitutes a large body of work (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Federici, 1975; Laslett and Brenner, 1989; Bakker and Gill, 2003; Mitchell et al, 2012; Peterson, 2004; Luxton and Bezanson, 2006; Bakker, 2007; Bakker and Silvey, 2012; Rai et al, 2014; Meehan and Strauss, 2015; Bhattacharya, 2017; Ferguson, 2016), with one strand continuing to be closely informed by the International Wages for Housework Campaign and the International Women’s Strike (Federici, 2012; Barbagallo, 2016). As Nadasen (2021) argues, social reproduction offers several advantages to care. First, because gender was a foundational category in the emergence of care scholarship, this means that it is more likely to centre the public–​private divide and less able to connect the current organization of reproductive labour with the histories of slavery, racism and colonialism. Second, care is still associated with a history of state and corporate policies fought by and for middle-​class women, such as family leave, flexible work options and childcare tax credits. Social reproduction’s labour lens and its attention to the racialized, classed and gendered stratification of waged and unwaged social reproductive work are needed to shift the dominant construction of childcare struggles as white, middle-​class women’s fight for more time to work. This book is also a call for sociologists of mothering, childcare and childhood to turn to social reproduction as a way to better theorize the continued stratification of waged and unwaged social reproduction. Social reproduction enables us to understand social relations and activities that would otherwise be concealed as outside the economy by capitalistic thinking. In an often-​ cited article, Laslett and Brenner (1989: 283) define social reproduction as follows: Writing on the gendered division of labor, feminists use social reproduction to refer to the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. Social reproduction can thus be seen to include various kinds of work –​ mental, manual, and emotional –​aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care necessary to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation. 23

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Contrary to misinterpretations, this quote is not merely a description of types of human activities that have been invisibilized, but an analysis of the quality of the internal relation between reproductive and productive labour. This means a recognition that ‘devaluing the reproduction of human life was a central pillar of capitalism, one of the main engines of the accumulation process’ (Federici, 2018). Feminist political economy shows that under capitalism, there is a central contradiction between social reproduction and capital accumulation (Picchio, 1992; Vosko, 2006). This dynamic results in the separation of production from social reproduction, generating a conflict between the standard of living of workers and the profit requirement. One of the key insights of social reproduction, then, is that oppression is based in the contradictory relationship between productive and reproductive labour. In other words, for waged and unwaged workers involved in social reproduction, whose labour is distinct from –​though not superior to –​capitalistic productive labour, the processes of exploitation are not totalizing. This means refusing the hierarchization of work-​based exploitation versus other systems of oppression and paying greater attention to how struggles on productive and reproductive terrains need to be bridged (Ferguson, 2019). Social reproduction also produces distinct insights about where and who we should look to for understanding the struggle to mediate the conflict between capital accumulation’s profit imperative and the standard of living of workers. Norton and Katz (2016: 7) make this point in relation to the factory worker on strike as the quintessential radical subject: the factory worker on strike, and waged workers more generally can no longer be constructed as the only revolutionary subjects –​or even the most likely. While some Marxist theorists continue to question what constitutes social reproduction under capitalism, and whether or not certain types of nonwaged labor and extra-​market relations produce value, it is clear that theorizing social reproduction beyond the reproduction of waged labor–​capital relation brings with it a new way of imagining –​and organizing –​the working class, and opens up new arenas for mobilizing resistance to various relations of domination and exploitation. Luxton and Bezanson’s (2006) definition of social reproduction stands out as enabling an integrated analysis of gender, class and race that can capture the reproduction of a differentiated labouring population. It prompts scholars to centre the different rates of pay, employment protections, relations to employers and working conditions of migrant and working-​class workers in their analyses. Capital’s interest in keeping labour rates as low as possible means that it is economically marginalized, migrant and racialized minority 24

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women who are forced to accept poverty wages to perform precarious and unregulated social reproductive work. This definition of social reproduction can produce an analysis of capitalism that sees it as always concretely racialized3, patriarchal and colonial: ‘Capitalist development depended on supplies of labour from people who originally lived outside regions where capitalist relations were dominant and on people in and from colonies; the transnational trans-​regional locus of social reproduction and capital’s mobility mean that capitalist expansion is foundationally racialized’ (Luxton and Bezanson, 2006: 38). Social reproduction’s approach to multiple axes of oppression draws on but is distinct from intersectional perspectives due to its integrative ontology, which attempts to capture ‘the unity of a complex and diverse social whole’ (Ferguson, 2016). This vision of capitalism as an ever-​changing set of intersecting power relations can produce an analysis of how differentiated labour populations are reproduced and ask under what conditions connections across divisions of class, race, sexuality, citizenship and formal and informal sectors might emerge. This study mobilizes this framework to ask how childcare workers create social relations across households, workplaces and communities that contest the stratified devaluation of childcare.

Unequal maternal labours Working-​class, poor, migrant and racialized minority mothers have been subject to heavy social and legal regulation of their child rearing, which means that these women have often struggled to gain access to the category of mother, as their reproductive4 and parental rights have been curtailed. Two important dimensions of how some women’s labour came to acquire a low value are captured by the concept of social reproduction. Following industrialization, the reproductive labour of some women was appropriated to reproduce the children and households of wealthier white women, thereby producing an internationally and racially divided labour force.5 In the UK, the nannies and governesses hired by middle-​class women to take charge of their children were largely constituted of working-​class and poor rural women, yet these positions typically received higher pay and status than domestic servants. The idealization of the bourgeois Victorian woman as the virtuous and pious angel in the house served an ideological function: it helped conceal her dependence on her domestic servants’ physical labour (Davidoff, 1974). In the US and parts of Canada, the hiring of nannies and domestic workers was and remains strongly connected to the legacies of slavery. In addition, states play a central role in furthering these unequal relations by recognizing some women’s parental rights and supporting some women to rear their children –​for example, through child benefit payments –​and not others. Social reproduction’s attention to the conflicting interests between 25

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groups of women –​who are differently disempowered to nurture their families –​drives my analysis of maternal workers as a divided workforce. Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1992) has shown how racial divisions of social reproduction relations emerged historically. Her analysis of the changes in the organization of social reproductive labour of Mexican American women, African American women and Japanese American women in different parts of the US through the 20th century demonstrates that the shift of reproductive labour from household to market was accompanied by a shift from face-​ to-​face hierarchies to structural hierarchies. According to Glenn, the racial division of paid reproductive labour relied on the invention of a racial gender ideology that, first, constructed some racially minoritized women as inherently suited to this type of work and, second, denied these women’s identities as wives and mothers. She describes the conflicting interests of white women and racially minoritized women as key in this process: The needs of employed middle-​class women and women on welfare might thus be thought to coincide: the needs of the former for services might be met by employing the latter to provide the services. The divergence in interest becomes apparent, however, when we consider that employment in service jobs at current wage levels guarantees that their occupants will remain poor. (Glenn, 1992: 36) This history of the racial division of reproductive labour highlights how some gains for some parts of the labouring population –​such as increases in wages –​would necessitate a loss of privilege for others. In the Global North, the public expression of the negative aspects of middle-​ class mothering became public discourse through white women’s activism for the first time in the 1960s. It included the claustrophobia and emotional damage that staying home with small children creates for white, middle-​class women (Friedan, 2010; Oakley, 1979). By recording the complex emotional minutiae of feeding, washing, clothing and entertaining small children, sociological analyses of mothering made visible the multifaceted forms of labour that had previously been occluded from malestream sociological investigation. Over the same decades, feminist analyses of family life from white, working-​class women’s perspectives that sought to redress sociology’s class bias grew rapidly (Oakley, 1979; Luxton, 1980; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989; Reay, 1998; Gillies, 2006). In contrast to stories of isolation, these accounts highlight how a gendered division of labour and economic hardship was made bearable through community mothering –​where networks of co-​workers, friends, relatives and neighbours come together. Meg Luxton’s (1980) More Than a Labour of Love: Three Generation of Women’s Work in the Home stands out as offering a detailed analysis of how working-​class life was sustained by the connected processes of wage labour and domestic labour in 26

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a Manitoba mining town. In Democracy in the Kitchen, Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) show that developmental psychology played a central role in the UK in transmitting the view that working-​class mothering is deficient and could be improved by making it more middle class. In her Chicago-​based study, Annette Lareau (2003) shows how both black and white, working-​class mothers encouraged respect for authority and discipline in their children –​ rather than adopting the democratic style of parenting characteristic of the middle classes. In turn, poverty and class oppression produced distinctive practices of mothering that diverged from the norms of middle-​class nuclear families across different capitalist countries. The critique of motherhood as oppressive in advanced capitalist economies elaborated by Betty Friedan and others silenced the experiences of women of colour and colonized women who always worked outside the home (Caulfield, 1974; Collins, 1994; Reynolds, 2005. As Tracey Reynolds (2001: 1061) writes, black mothers in the UK, Caribbean and US have long been primarily constructed as workers: ‘The historical experience of slavery, colonialism and economic migration, within a British context, shows black mothers’ economic labour capacity for work is a primary status.’ Black women have long seen their economic provisioning as a central part of their mothering labour, rather than in competition with motherhood as assumed by white, middle-​class definitions of mothering. Furthermore, African-​ American and black British mothers have understood mothering to include preparing children to be resilient to, and fight against, racism outside the home. The scholarship on transnational mothers illustrates that as migrants entering Global North countries as care workers through coercive systems of labour that do not recognize family rights, their responsibilities for their families are erased to an even greater extent. The transnationalization of this childcare labour is facilitated by the economic vulnerability of migrant domestic workers, who often work for longer hours, in more precarious conditions and for lower pay than citizen workers. The perception of migrant workers as ‘free’ from caregiving responsibilities to their families is precisely what makes them so attractive to some employers. Yet, the invisible cost of the transnationalization of this childcare labour is that many of these workers experience long periods of forced family separation as emotionally damaging (Arat-​Koç, 2006). The long tradition of feminist studies on waged social reproductive labour (Glenn, 1992; Skeggs, 1997; Anderson, 2000) shows how caring labour appropriates classed and racialized difference. In particular, domestic workers, nannies and au pairs experience unique kinds of oppression (Romero, 1988; Colen, 1995; Cox, 2014). Working within their employers’ homes, coupled with the class and ‘race’ hierarchies between employers, produces the conditions for what Romero (1988: 341) calls ‘the dialectic of intimacy and domination’. Researchers have long documented how employers often play 27

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down power relations through giving gifts and referring to domestic workers as members of the family or friends. At the same time, nannies and au pairs variously try to resist these forms of oppression by seeking control over the work process, including by withholding emotional labour. The stereotyping of some migrants as ‘naturally good with children’ and ‘part of the family’ has justified the devaluation of their labour as unskilled work. At the heart of the devaluing of childcare work is thus a combination of racialized and classed ideologies about the value(s) of women’s work. The contradiction, as Glenn articulates, is that working-​class and racialized women have been coerced to direct their ‘caring nature’ towards other women’s children rather than their own. The social reproductive work of working-​class, poor and racialized minority mothers continues to be constructed as lacking. Not only are definitions of what counts as ‘proper’ maternal labour classed and racialized, but the differential valuation of some women’s reproductive labour entrenches unequal relations of subordination: some children are taught to demand respect while others are expected to be respectful. As Nadasen (2021: 179) highlights, for those groups of mothers, a crisis of social reproduction is far from new: ‘Poor and working-​class families have always faced a care crisis. For the poor, state policies around care work have often been a site of surveillance and policing.’ Connecting the historical stratification of maternal labour and the unequal relations of childcare work today shows that racialized minorities and working-​class mothers have always been differentially devalued. If we forget how some women have long been over-​regulated by social, political and policy systems that construct them as deficient mothers, we leave out their differential access to the categories of ‘mother’, ‘citizen’ and ‘worker’. What we need, Shelee Colen (1995) argues, is an understanding not just of how social reproductive work is unequally distributed across class, race, gender and migration status, but also of the social relations of who is empowered to nurture and reproduce while others are disempowered. Colen’s concept of stratified reproduction, based on her research with West Indian childcare workers in 1980s’ New York City, captures how the nurturing of workers’ families has been curtailed by racist and colonialist legacies, such as lack of access to public childcare or compulsory residential schools. This means that analyses of contemporary childcare movements need to be connected with the four decades of scholarship on working-​class, black and migrant mothers’ community organizing to secure precisely such resources. Low-​ income and racialized women’s rejection of their construction as faulty mothers and their collective strategies for community survival have centred mothering beyond the nuclear family. It is to these counter-​stories of stratified reproduction and the extent to which they persist today that we now turn. 28

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Tales of depletion: grassroots women’s organizing, 1980–​2020 Feminist political economy has highlighted that the potential for resistance to alienation lies within relations of social reproduction because of their distinctiveness from capitalistically productive labour (Ferguson, 2019). A rich body of qualitative research shows that lower-​class women have practised community organizing, extensive kin work and mutual aid precisely to secure their social reproduction beyond the nuclear family. These groups of men and women have also been key actors in local and national struggles for socializing the costs of social reproduction, including during periods of community activism where women were excluded from formal union membership. Yet, community organizing is neglected within accounts of labour and social movements, and continues to be discounted as reformist. Since the 1980s, women’s grassroots community organizing has continued to connect economic precarity with anti-​racist struggles and to seize state resources for healthcare, education and housing. The accounts of those designated as ‘improper subjects’ show that they do not internalize the logic of capital and the norm that care is of low value (Skeggs, 2014: 14). Lisa McKenzie’s (2015) insider ethnography of a Nottingham estate during austerity highlighted how experiences of economic exclusion and abandonment contributed to a sense of belonging and social network, with mothers having a significant role. Yet, this alternative value system –​strong social networks and being respected on the estate –​ was not transferable to the outside world. Raw and McKie’s (2020) research highlights that low-​paid women organize informally at work to meet the impossibilities of both caring responsibilities and unpredictable shifts due to precarious employment. This type of workplace reciprocal mutuality not only enables women to respond with interdependency, but also further entraps women into low-​paid work and absolves employers and governments from problematizing flexible working policies. Crean’s (2018) ethnography of working-​class women community activists in Ireland suggests that women’s care identities strongly inform their actions for social change, yet continue to be refused legitimacy as a form of politics in sociological discourse. Mutuality then is central to working-​class women’s politicization, with organizing and consciousness raising historically taking place across workspaces, homes and community spaces. Luxton’s (1980) much earlier study of working-​class women documents how housewives in a 1970s’ Canadian mining town set up a rape crisis centre, lobbied the local hospital board for better access to contraception and supported their mining husbands’ unions. Collective grocery shopping, cooking and childcare swaps became even more necessary to survival during periods of long strikes. These activities not only reduced women’s isolation, but also empowered them to negotiate a fairer sexual 29

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division of labour in the home and become conscious of their collective power. In contrast, Skeggs’ (1997) landmark ethnography of working-​class women in late 1980s’ North-​East England highlighted and documented a lack of politicization around class and gender inequality, with a caring identity remaining one of the few sources of worth and respectability available. Skeggs argues that these women’s rejection of class consciousness –​because they saw respectability as a source of value –​significantly shaped both their analysis of injustice and their access to collective politicization. Patricia Hill Collins’ foundational work on othermothering called to ‘shift the centre’ of feminist thought on mothering to foreground the historical legacy of slavery. Emphasizing the significance of othermothers, she shows that the practice of raising the biological children of other black women experiencing economic or emotional hardship, helps to secure the survival of children in racist societies. Building on this insight, black feminist scholars have continued to show how racialized minority mothers practise a distinctive form of mothering that encompasses both biological and non-​biological kin, community mothering, and anti-​racist and anti-​poverty activism. Nancy Naples’ (1998) ethnography of low-​ income Latina and African-​Caribbean community activists in New York and Philadelphia highlighted the significance of racial difference in their organizing strategies. Her analysis of activist mothering highlighted the need for no longer separating definitions of labour, politics and mothering, as whether participants were organizing for community control over public schools, taking their children to community meetings or sharing their homes with community members in need. This blurring was far from seamless and involved additional labour, constituting a triple day of family care work, unpaid and paid community work that sustained the social fabric of these communities. While all activists adopted a racialized understanding of gender relations, Latinas were more likely to express affiliation with the women’s liberation movement, whereas African Americans preferred to organize autonomously. More recently, Erel, Reynolds and Kaptani’s (2018) participatory research with migrant mothers in London highlighted how theatre creates opportunities to challenge normative definitions of citizenship and create alternative political subjectivities. In contrast with Naples’ study, these women’s new arrival in Britain, constrained access to health, education and social services, and segregation in low-​paid, precarious reproductive work severely limited their ability to meet the demands of caring for their families, paid work and activism. Emejulu and Bassell’s study of minority women’s activism in the third sector in France and the UK similarly suggests that racialized minority mothers continue to be significant political actors in social reproduction struggles (2015). One of the impacts of austerity measures is that some of their interviewees working in grassroots and third sector organizations chose not to engage in activism 30

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as one way to retain energy for their family and kin networks. Thus, the transformation of the third sector produced contradictory subjectivities among their participants: ‘social enterprise reconfigures this relationship between public and private, where “public” caring is possible for racialized migrant women when interpellated as enterprising carers’ (Bassell and Emejulu, 2018: 53). According to many studies, the conditions that made it possible for Naples’ ‘maternal grassroot warrior’ to emerge in 1980s’ New York no longer exist. Although economically marginalized women’s capacities for organizing have been further depleted following austerity, community work continues as one significant sites of politicization, especially for racialized minority mothers. In spite of neoliberalism’s effects; including the shrinking of public spaces and the outsourcing of paid care labour, politicized caring subjectivities endure. Furthermore, I show that the women’s NGO sector more specifically has played a significant role in sustaining childcare movements under the radar, often through anti-​poverty campaigns. Yet the well documented roles of community organizing and the NGO sector, including their contradictory effects, is under-​theorized in social reproduction theory.

Living legacies of the women’s liberation movement: universal childcare 50 years on The contemporary childcare struggles I studied in the 2010s are living legacies of the women’s liberation movement’s demands for state-​funded universal childcare in the 1970s across such liberal states as the UK, US, Australia and Canada. Childcare struggles in the Global North –​the UK, US, Canada and Australia –​share a similar context. They had very limited state provision after the Second World War for only the most economically marginalized families, and they faced increased marketization of the formal childcare sector from the 1980s onwards to meet middle-​class women’s increased rates of employment. There are important differences in the shape of national childcare labour markets, in that at-​home childcare is much more common in North America and is less associated with the upper-​ middle classes, as has historically been the case in the UK until recently (Adamson, 2016). Theorizing contemporary childcare struggles necessitates revisiting childcare movements’ ambitions and coming to terms with the limited gains provided by alliances with liberal feminists, whose success in framing childcare as beneficial for furthering gender equality brought gains to some women. The history of childcare movements led by working-​class and racialized minority women is ongoing and should not be told as one that only belongs in the 1970s and 1980s (Rosen et al, 2017). Whether we tell the histories of earlier childcare struggles as ones of failure matters profoundly 31

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for contemporary childcare struggles within neoliberal post-​welfare states. Their attempts to revalue and socialize childcare constitutes a rich archive that is too often disconnected from contemporary sociological analyses; therefore my aim is to situate today’s movements as part of this longer history. In the UK, despite the gains for some centrally funded childcare systems, the marketization of childcare and the fact that access to full-​time childcare has been dependent on parents’ hours of work since 2007 has largely benefitted women who earn enough money to pay for childcare and left behind low-​earning women and women who work inside the home. The framing of childcare as a universal right was largely abandoned in the UK, Australia, the US and, to a lesser extent, Canada by the 1980s. The erosion of welfare states through neoliberal restructurings that focused on empowering individuals to be economically active played an important role. For example, New Labour’s policy of introducing Sure Start centres in the late 1990s improved access to childcare for low-​income parents but also individualized class inequality by making access contingent on coercive parenting programmes (Gillies, 2006). The fourth demand made at the Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College Oxford in 1970 was for free, 24-​hour, state-​funded and community-​run nurseries. Camille Barbagallo (2016) argues that at the heart of this demand was a utopian aspiration that women should be freed from childcare not to take part in waged work, but to have child-​free time. The scholarship on the women’s liberation movement suggests that childcare was significant enough to be included as one of five demands, but the attention to the wages and conditions of the workers who would do childcare at this particular conference were limited to the fact that they would be paid by the state.6 Although there were some significant differences in how the women’s liberation movement mobilized and organized around childcare in the UK, Australia and Canada, one significant influence in these demands were the perspectives of socialist feminists, who argued for reproductive work to be seen as socially and economically productive. The childcare campaigns of the women’s liberation movement walked a tightrope between collaborating with left-​liberal governments in the hope of securing a universal childcare system and organizing childcare at the grassroots community level, where nurseries could be organized more democratically for children and parents. The Birmingham Women’s Liberation Playgroup’s (1975) Out of the Pumpkin Shell: Running a Women’s Liberation Playgroup gives a detailed account of such an experiment. The demand for childcare to be both ‘community controlled’ and ‘state funded’ (Federici, 1975: 2; see also Rowbotham et al, 2013) reflected a vision of early education in which communities would retain control of transforming nurseries’ pedagogies, organization and curriculum towards non-​sexist, non-​authoritarian relations. As the authors of Out of the Pumpkin Shell write: 32

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we seek a socialist and feminist form of childcare which will combine a transformation both in the structure and content of childcare provision. We cannot therefore absolve the state of responsibility and rely on voluntary effort. We must combine pressure on the government to extend facilities with constant emphasis on the nature and quality of those facilities. (Birmingham Women’s Liberation Playgroup, 1975: 4) The authors also give an account of extending the playgroup to parents beyond white, middle-​class, women’s liberation movement members without compromising their focus on using anti-​sexist, anti-​racist socialist pedagogies. The impossibility of paying a playgroup supervisor above minimum wage without facing bankruptcy illustrated how the group’s political principles and economic realities often collided. The difficulties of building a broad-​based parent-​and worker-​led childcare community are powerfully illustrated in this account but are often left out of the analysis of national childcare movements. By the 1970s, the labour rights of childcare workers were already important for mobilization in the UK. For example, in 1979, the Islington Action Group secured the unionization of childcare workers across several nurseries (Rowbotham et al, 2013: 254). The refusal to define childcare as a social service to regulate black and working-​class families –​including their construction as deficient mothers –​meant that welfare rights activists insisted on childcare as a universal right and protested against policies that used childcare to impose work as a condition for receiving benefits. In the UK, the women’s liberation movement’s grassroots efforts to collectivize childcare through playgroups were followed with a national campaign for a state-​funded childcare system based on community nurseries. Penn’s (2018: 49) memoir illustrates the difficulties of building a broad-​based and united national campaign with members whose political allegiances ranged from ‘mild liberalism to extreme socialist sectarianism and feminist anarchism’. Importantly, community nurseries were at the centre of this national campaign and signalled that ‘everyone involved, staff, parent and children alike made decisions to pursue the nursery’s objectives’ (Penn, 2018: 54). In 1984, after four years of existence and following grants from the conservative government, the National Childcare Campaign reconstituted itself as a charity called the Daycare Trust (now the Coram Family and Childcare Trust), which, according to Penn, contains little indication of its women’s liberationist past. Over the following five decades across the UK, North America and Australia, the childcare movements and coalitions that developed departed to different extents from the vision articulated at the Women’s Liberation Conference in Oxford and in socialist feminist groups and coalitions elsewhere. Coalitions between parents’ groups, childcare advocates and childcare workers’ unions demanded high-​quality, community-​controlled, 33

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state-​sponsored childcare, and decent wages and conditions for nursery workers. Dinner (2010) argues that in the US, the childcare movement’s shift to unionization and labour consciousness was prompted by the failure to secure national legislation that would universalize the right to childcare. She shows that the universal character of the rights claim encouraged working-​class and middle-​class, African American and white, radical and liberal feminists across the women’s movement to recognize shared policy interests and to build coalitions across their differences. Deborah Brennan’s (1998) history of Australian childcare demonstrates that childcare has been an industrial issue since the mid-​1970s as Australian feminist and women’s groups worked to influence unions and the government. This led to the submission of a working women’s charter that asked unions to campaign for the establishment of publicly funded childcare centres in 1977 by the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Stressing how a community-​based childcare movement was marginalized under the Labor government of the 1990s, Brennan (1998: 227) characterizes the state of Australian childcare as follows: ‘the loss of community managed services in which people have a stake not only because of their own private needs, but because of their concern for the needs of their fellow citizens, marks the end of a century long tradition in Australian children’s services.’ That the interests of a community-​ based childcare movement and a childcare workforce labour movement might not always intersect is evident across the scholarship. The similarities in how commonwealth countries responded to the increased marketization of its childcare systems, including the role of trade unions and grassroots community groups in mitigating this, highlight the need for analysis that takes into account international, national and local scales of contestations, as well as developing concepts that do not see unionization as the only way to revalue social reproduction. In contrast to Australia, childcare movements in Canada from the 1970s have benefited from the labour movement’s strong connections with popular social movements, including feminism and anti-​racism. At the same time, liberal feminism collaborated within the larger women’s movement and was committed to putting working-​class women’s concerns, including childcare, at the heart of its analysis. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, cooperation between professional women’s groups and labour movements seeking better wages and conditions enabled them to secure state intervention in the family and women’s employment. Canada has occupied a distinctive place as a world leader in counting women’s work through its survey of women’s unpaid work in the home (Langford et al, 2013), yet the fight for a public childcare system has eluded feminists for nearly 50 years. In the UK, the emergence of a childcare movement encompassed both liberal labour women and radical, grassroots socialist feminists from the 1970s. Some childcare advocates sought to work closely with governments to 34

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improve childcare access for all, and from the 1980s, a significant amount of childcare activism had primarily shifted to this form of lobbying. In Canada (Langford et al, 2013) and, to a lesser extent, Australia, childcare movements have been professionalized; as a result, the framing of childcare has tended to reflect the concerns of the most secure workers in the sector. It is difficult to avoid telling the story of feminist childcare activists as one of partial failure, at least in terms of universal, state-​funded childcare that would redistribute and revalue waged care work. Universal, state-​funded childcare was the demand that was most quickly abandoned across these national borders. At the same time, there is evidence across all of those countries of local successful alliances between labour and grassroots social movements that sought to both widen access to childcare and protect decent working conditions for childcare workers. This meant that in cities across North America, the UK and Australia, some feminist groups and their allies were successful in securing local childcare resources from city governments, federal states, universities and large employers after attempts to lobby central governments failed. As more social reproduction is offloaded on to individuals and households, and as childcare markets have grown exponentially in post-​welfare states, it has become more difficult for anyone to think outside of the neoliberal language of ‘affordable childcare’ and ‘parental choice’. Theorizing how workers develop a politicized praxis despite this context is important in order to tell a different story than one of complete erosion following neoliberalism. The comparative approach I develop across the following three chapters shows that there are significant continuities and differences in workers’ politicization across national contexts that can only be understood by closer engagement with the distinctive histories of labour and women’s liberation movements in those respective countries. Drawing comparisons between similar types of neoliberal economies helps to identify a body of shared knowledge of how social movements contest the withdrawal and restructuring of welfare states. For example, the universal caregiver model has not been embedded within European Union benchmarks, highlighting that welfare state redesign does not happen exclusively within national borders (Mahon, 2002). There has been much policy research on the connections between the childcare policies of Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US, and how states openly draw attention to each other, but there has been less focus on comparative studies of social movements that demand alternatives to current neoliberal policies on childcare. The adverse effects of profit-​making childcare are worse for the most economically marginalized families, and in corporate chains, the focus on the bottom line has resulted in both a higher incidence of safety incidents and worsening employment conditions (Van Lancker and Ghysels, 2016; Richardson, 2017). It is in this context of lack of care –​for children, parents 35

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and workers –​that demands for universal, state-​provided childcare are being returned to with renewed vigour in several countries,7 as well as refusals to see a universal, publicly funded system of childcare as ‘pie in the sky’. The recent upsurge of strikes of parents, nannies and childcare workers in very different welfare states as Scotland, the USA and Australia suggest that the promise of a state-​funded childcare system is still alluring today. Where does the vision of a broad-​based movement for childcare stand today given the transformations in the composition of the childcare workforce over the last four decades?

Intersectionalizing contemporary childcare movements The project of building intersectional8 childcare coalitions continues to haunt feminist movements today as it did 50 years ago. Childcare workers’ mobilizations through unions, grassroots organizing and advocacy continue to be disconnected from the feminist analyses of childcare work that adopt a policy or educational-​inequality approach (Brennan, 1998; Cohen, 2001; Randall, 2000; Tuominen, 2003; Osgood, 2011). This means that the question of stratification is repeatedly sidelined from mainstream sociological enquiry. Some unions and childcare advocates have chosen to emphasize the similarities of their work with teaching rather than care in order to make their case for professional wages more convincing. Professionalization often hinders building solidarities for childcare workers in different sectors, not least with racialized and migrant workers in the informal sector. Despite a growing body of scholars aiming to ‘intersectionalize’ childcare movements, there are few comparative studies of the diverging and overlapping interests between childcare workers in the formal and informal sectors. Studies of centre-​based and home childcare workers’ labour movements in Germany (Ferree and Roth, 1998), Scotland (Mooney and McCafferty, 2005), Canada (Yates, 2011; Pasolli and Smith, 2017) and the US (Reese, 2010; Black, 2018) foreground what structures shape unions’ abilities to secure ‘wins’ but undertheorize the significance of workers’ relationships in shaping these struggles. I argue that there are some limitations in how childcare struggles are theorized. According to Simon Black, the ability of labour–​community coalitions to save municipal childcare depends on the specific local political structures. Toronto’s existing ‘well-​established coalition of unions, students, women’s groups, social service agencies, antipoverty groups, child care centers, advocates, and activist parents with a tradition of mobilizing to defend public child care in the city’ (Black, 2018: 136) were key factors in the success of this campaign. In the Australian context, O’Toole (1998: 64) foregrounds the neglected role of the Union of Australian Women (UAW) –​a grassroots working-​class women’s organization –​in 36

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shaping the Australian childcare movement from the 1970s: ‘While the centre piece of the campaign was its concern with the plight of working class mothers of young children, the UAW was concerned to make child care a universal right for all women’. The UAW played a key part in the development of community childcare and wrested the issue of childcare from philanthropic maternalists, who had organized childcare centres throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By developing childcare advocacy organizations, convincing local councils to set up creches and organizing a campaign to involve parents, they contributed to developing strong grassroots childcare coalitions. Importantly, the perspectives of childcare workers and demands over wages and conditions were absent from their organizing, with parents being protagonists in this campaign. In contrast, home-​based care workers’ labour mobilizations are usually framed as part of domestic workers’ movements. Their exclusion from definitions of ‘employee’ and from basic labour rights protection (Adamson, 2016) highlights the significance of their migration status. Exclusionary state definitions of who counts as a worker and what is not a site of waged labour (the home) further devalues home-​based care work, as these exclusions interact with social policies that allow the state to deliver care services –​such as home healthcare or home childcare –​‘on the cheap’ (Black, 2020). Recent research in the US highlights that the construction of the home ‘as a rights-​free enclave’ has not necessarily been an impediment to successful organizing, as home-​based childcare workers have unionized at a greater rate than centre-​based childcare workers in some parts of the US (Cobble, 2010). Reese’s research on the unionization of home-​based childcare workers in 12 US states since 2007 challenges assumptions about home-​based care workers’ organizing. Based on the successful campaigns of home-​based workers who gained collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Reese argues that the intimate nature of home-​based care facilitated the mobilization of clients by home-​based workers for maintaining and expanding a subsidized system of childcare. Coalitions to pressure states to negotiate over working conditions could be established because ‘Care workers employed in home-​based child care provided a service that was intimate in nature, creating close bonds between clients and workers that could be used to forge community–​labor coalitions’ (Reese, 2010: 236). Unionization was about much more than deserving better wages and conditions; it was also about expanding and improving the quality of publicly funded childcare services. Even though welfare state restructuring and labour law represents significant challenges for home-​based workers, the powerful bond between clients and workers was mobilized effectively at the local level in each of these cases. There are few attempts to connect home-​based childcare workers’ struggles –​where most racialized minorities and migrant workers are 37

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located –​with other childcare workers’ mobilizations; rather, they continue to be discussed separately, which is not surprising given the significance of citizenship status to their struggles. As Tammy Findlay (2017) argues, a dialogue is urgently needed between domestic workers’ movement and the childcare advocacy movement; however, the colonial legacies of the kindergarten movement’s coercive approach to indigenous families and limited advances in intersectional public policy severely constrain these conversations. Such a coalition would need to start from recognition of domestic workers’ decades of activism against exploitation and exclusion from employment protections.9 Movements have also centred gaining access to citizenship/​landed status, family reunification policies and recognition of migrants’ qualifications. The lack of discussion of the racialized stratification of the childcare workforce is compounded by the lack of comparable disaggregated national data on ethnicity and ‘race’ for this workforce in the UK, US and Canada. Conceptualizing today’s childcare struggles requires more attention to the fault lines between these sectors, their different conditions for organizing and regulations. Developing an intersectional politics of care labour is not new, especially with regard to international divisions of labour, yet these insights are too seldom connected with childcare struggles in the formal sector where most care labour done by citizen workers is performed. Anderson’s and Shutes (2014) edited collection Migration and Care Labour stands out here. They argue that we need to avoid siloing different sites of care work and that state enforcement of labour regulation needs to be decoupled from immigration enforcement. There is also attention to intersectionality –​and, to a lesser extent, stratification –​ within recent research on childcare movements, as the edited collection by Langford et al (2013) documents through its chapters on intersectionality and childcare movements (Findlay, 2017), working-​class women’s organizing (Rosen et al, 2017) and Aboriginal children (Mashford-P ​ ringle, 2017). The comparative work of Adamson (2016) has been pioneering in showing how Early Childhood Education (ECE) and migrant worker policies are siloed, but these insights have not been fully connected with the childcare social movement literature. Given that we have yet to witness a broad-​based movement fighting for a publicly funded childcare system on a national or international scale, we need conceptual frames to make sense of this absence. There is little attempt to capture how the context of austerity and the corporatization of childcare affects stratification in the waged childcare labour force in the Global North. Second, comparative discussions across formal and informal waged childcare labour need to deploy social reproduction if they are to capture how patriarchal and racial capitalism hierarchizes and appropriates reproductive workers’ labour, which results in differential harms. Ferguson (2014, cited in Luxton, 2015: 166) succinctly describes it as follows: 38

Counter-Thinking from the Nursery

As there is no mechanism in the direct labour/​capital relation to ensure labour’s daily and generational renewal, it finds ways to organize historically specific embodied subjects –​differently gendered and racialized subjects –​in and through hierarchically and oppressively structured institutions and practices, such as private households, welfare states, slavery, and global labour markets. Dominant definitions of what counts as childcare labour movements often reproduce male worker model assumptions about worker conscientization. As Dorothy Cobble (2010: 283) highlights: ‘Women’s ties with family, household, and community as well as with those they serve –​or put another way, their sense of themselves as mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, partners, good caretakers, or providers –​have sparked successful workplace-​based organizing as much as deterred it.’ The assumption that physical dispersion, a presumed lack of full worker consciousness among women and intimate ties with one’s employer all constitute impediments to unionization endure despite being challenged by the history of non-​factory organizing in female-​dominated occupations for decades. This construction of worker conscientization endures despite the political potential of the intimate work of raising children to bring parents, communities and workers together in powerful coalitions. Although studies emphasize parent–​worker solidarities and deepening community–​union relations, there is little attention given to how solidarities need to be built to work through the divergent interests between different groups of workers and parents (for an important exception, see Rosen et al, 2017). This book develops Cobble’s call for more intimate unions and asks what looking at childcare workers as a divided workforce brings to discussions of worker power in neoliberal Global North economies.

Why maternal workers? The connections between some waged and unwaged mothering and how they are differentially devalued forms of social reproduction are implicit in many feminist analyses of childcare crises, but their implications are not sufficiently drawn out. If we do not connect how both paid and unpaid maternal labour are devalued to analyse the childcare struggles that are emerging today, we miss out an important insight of social reproduction. One of the consequences of these disconnections, I have argued, is the way in which the maternal continues to be sidelined from discussion of labour-​based childcare movements despite its central role in the community organizing of women of colour and working-​class women. Struggles against the privatization and familialization of social reproduction need to involve alliances between waged and unwaged workers, but our abilities to develop concepts and capacities to connect them are limited given that most sociological literature 39

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continues to separate them. The paucity of frames to make visible and analyse these connections reflects how capitalistic thinking depletes our conceptual imaginations. Rosen highlights that another dimension of this separation is the framing of children and mothers as antagonistic actors, with feminist scholars underestimating children’s role as workers, activists and citizens (Rosen and Twamley, 2018). This book develops a model of maternal worker power that attempts to redress this conceptual gap to better theorize the connections between employment-​based and community-​based organizing. Most studies of the childcare workforce tend to study early years educators, nannies, au pairs and home-​care workers separately. In contrast, my analysis connects how early years educators and migrant nannies’ labour is differentially devalued to build a multifaceted map of divisions and connections across childcare struggles. In addition, my study of maternal support workers in Bristol addresses an important gap with regard to the role of the third sector and community organizing within labour childcare struggles. Community mothering has long been a site of political consciousness raising and social justice organizing for working-​class and racialized minority women. Yet, the tendency to misrecognize all mothers’ movements as maternalist politics (Snitow, 1992) means that mothers’ movements are segregated in the social movement literature. Their construction as soft politics of limited relevance to broader socialist struggles continues despite the fact that mothers’ movements such as those against nuclear weapons in Argentina (Garc’a-​Gorena, 1999), racist police brutality in the US (Chatillon and Shneider, 2018), migrant mothers’ protests against deportation in the UK, and Indigenous mothers’ protests against corporate oil companies in the Niger delta (Tyler, 2013) explicitly deploy anti-​capitalist techniques and rhetoric. As the US scholar Patrice DiQuinzio (2006: 67) wrote more than 15 years ago, drawing paid care workers into mothers’ movements would broaden their base substantially; yet, the building of such alliances has seen relatively little development, with mothers’ and care workers’ struggles continuing to operate and to be theorized relatively separately. As more formal childcare unions are turning to labour action, attention to the conditions under which workers’ and mothers’ struggles could be brought more closely together is urgently needed. By drawing on early years educators’ accounts of withdrawing their labour (see Chapter 2), maternal support workers’ attempts to save free community-​ run creches (see Chapter 3) and migrant nanny organizers’ mutual aid work during the pandemic (see Chapter 4), I show that there are key problems in the ways childcare movements are currently being conceptualized because they insufficiently theorize the stratification of workers across the sector and they neglect the connections between waged and unwaged workers. The framework of maternal workers addresses these limitations in three main ways. First, I put forward a distinctive formulation of solidarity and division between care workers and communities that is more nuanced than studies 40

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that have not deployed a comparative approach across different workforces in the formal, informal and women’s NGO sectors. I also contribute to debates about the need to develop more intimate unions (Cobble, 2010) that centre kin and community relations, and argue for a specific way of connecting work-​based and community organizing in sociological theory without hierarchizing them. Second, I map how waged workers’ praxis of maternal worker power constitutes a significant body of knowledge that adds nuance to the characterization of neoliberalism as purely erosive of social reproduction feminism and that contests the claim that it is attachment to our work that is the main obstacle to conscientization (Weeks, 2011). Last, I bring the concept of stratified reproduction (Colen, 1995) into conversation with depletion to produce a crisper account of maternal worker power in neoliberal times. In the following three chapters, I show the factors that constrain the establishment of such a broad-​based childcare movement and why the maternal worker framework is best placed to explain, and potentially transform, this.

41

2

Selfish Strikers and Intimate Unions: Early Years Educators’ Walkouts and the Big Steps Campaign, Australia

Introduction In Chapter 1, I argued that theorizing contemporary childcare movements requires attention to the connected ways in which childcare labour and maternal work are differentially devalued forms of social reproduction. This entails putting marginalized mothers’ organizing firmly back at the centre of childcare politics. This chapter draws on research on the Big Steps Campaign (United Voice, 2018) and interviews with Australian early years educators who walked out over equal pay repeatedly in 2017/​18 and investigates the extent to which the campaign and walkouts are disconnected from earlier feminist attempts –​especially black and socialist feminist mobilizing –​to revalue and redistribute childcare. The discontent of educators who work in nurseries and crèches in Australia has been gaining momentum over the last five years, with a nationwide campaign and four nationwide days of action since March 2017, when 6,500 educators walked out of their jobs, affecting 30,000 families across Australia (United Voice, 2018). Despite a wave of mobilization among childcare workers in many post-​welfare states since 2015, at present, there are relatively few studies of early years educators’ strikes and industrial action (Ferree and Roth, 1998; Mooney and McCafferty, 2005; Reese, 2010; Black, 2018). The Australian Big Steps walkouts constitute an important case because up to 2018, childcare workers had rarely repeatedly withheld their labour in such large numbers in the context of low levels of unionization and anti-​ labour laws that limit industrial action. 42

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This chapter explores the extent to which the Australian walkouts, which focused on gaining professional pay, were disconnected from community grassroots childcare movements. Drawing on the accounts of union officials, early years advocacy leaders, long-​term activists and rank-​and-​file educators, I show that a movement focused on stepping up economic disruption and building a relational union were lines of tension amongst union members. Despite this, I argue that the walkouts constitute a turning point in the history of Australian ECE mobilizations that signals a shift towards modes of protest that privilege both economic disruption and relationality and highlight its implications for contemporary feminist divisions and solidarities. This chapter refines the concept of intimate unions and argues that it needs to better capture parent–​worker solidarity and the limited relationships between the stratified childcare workforces that are at stake in childcare struggles. Moreover, the concept of maternal workers’ attention to politicizing mothering from the margins sheds light on both the intimate ties that exist and the ones that are absent from this particular dispute, including with grassroots parents’ groups and migrant nannies’ unions. Finally, I show that it is social reproduction that can best make sense of the effects of the selfish–​selfless worker dichotomy in this dispute. The dominance of the selflessness–​selfishness dualism makes it difficult for activists and unionized educators to articulate that they could simultaneously be caring educators and withdraw their labour. In contrast, the maternal worker frame highlights how many childcare workers walked out to defend both individual workers’ rights and communities’ rights.

Context The early years educators’ union – then named United Voice – has successfully co-​ordinated a nationwide campaign and four nationwide days of action since March 2017 that have gained support from politicians and parents. On 5 September 2018, 7,000 educators (according to United Voice) walked out of their jobs, affecting 30,000 families across Australia. The walkouts have been attracting more educators each time, many describing the walkouts as a last resort to make the government listen to their demands. Given that the sector is overwhelmingly female dominated (97 per cent according to United Voice), the walkouts also protest against the devaluation of what has long been seen as low-​skilled women’s work. This ‘pink-​collar’ workforce is also largely working class (Williamson et al, 2011; Andrew and Newman, 2012). Importantly, even though the Australian press reported the educators’ walkouts as childcare strikes, these were strategically called walkouts by United Voice because Australian industrial relations law makes strike action outside of a bargaining period 43

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

unlawful, which could leave members and unions vulnerable to large fines and dismissal.1 I conducted 23 interviews with educators and union activists in New South Wales and Victoria in June 2018, as well as visits to three not-​for-profit daycare centres where union density was high. I also analysed United Voice’s social media campaigns. I initially made contact with United Voice officials to recruit participants for the research, as well as a centre manager who featured in an article about the walkouts in the Guardian Australia. Although United Voice acted as gatekeepers for the initial phase of the research, I also generated more interviewees through snowball sampling. The educators I spoke with ranged from their early 20s to their late 50s. In total 12 participants identified as white Australian, while two as Filipino Australian, one as Japanese and one as Australian Chilean. All were angry at the low wages they receive for educating the next generation of Australians, and directed this anger at successive governments’ refusal to fund a public system of early years education. They told me of the impact of income precarity on their personal lives, with some educators delaying having children, having to move back in with parents/​friends or not being able to afford to retire because of their low wages. I also contacted all childcare centres who had visibly taken part in the walkouts in Central Sydney on social media to recruit interviewees and to capture a variety of different settings. In the end, snowball sampling facilitated by two well-​connected activists’ introductions had a significant influence on my final sample: half of my interviewees currently worked as educators; while the other half were union activists, children’s centre managers and lobbyists for early years educators in Australia. This split sample meant that I could explore how different employment conditions shaped the political orientations of these two groups to the walkouts and striking more generally. In the centres I visited, having a union-​supporting manager who encouraged all staff to join was significant in workers feeling sufficiently protected, and managers’ close relationships with central organizers helped to sustain on the ground mobilization. The Australian ECEC sector comprises an extensive system of community cooperatives and non-​government, government and private organizations, but most of the interviewees in my research worked in the community sector, which, according to my sources, had higher rates of unionization. Australian feminists were more successful in demanding state-​funded childcare than those in the UK and North America, which was facilitated by a strong movement for community-​based childcare in the 1970s –​one that has now been largely marginalized by the opening up of childcare ‘markets’ to for-​profit multinational corporations. The increased unionization of early childhood educators from the 1980s secured important wage increases and led to many more workers becoming organized (Brennan, 1998). Founded in 1992 after the amalgamation of different unions, what was previously 44

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known as the Federated Miscellaneous Workers’ Union was renamed United Voice in 2011. It was one of the largest trade unions in Australia, representing 130,000 workers across the care, manufacturing and hospitality industries. Each state and territory had its own branch of the union, with roughly the same structure as the national office. United Voice had been one of the most powerful unions within the left-​wing faction of the Australian Labor Party and successfully recruited young and migrant workers where other unions struggled.2 Australia has seen significant reform in the ECEC sector, with the introduction of the National Quality Framework (NQF) in 2008 and the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) in 2009. This has resulted in increased qualification requirements for practitioners in early years settings, including having one degree-​level-​qualified early years teacher in all larger settings. This professionalization has resulted in employees being defined as ‘educators’, drawing attention both to their expertise and educational benefits of their work. As Cook et al (2017) argue, the framing of early years work as a skilled profession and the downplaying of its caring dimensions was strategically helpful to the union’s claim for better remuneration and to secure the government’s commitment to funding this wage increase within a neoliberal context. Aside from organizing a nationwide public media campaign and escalating the number of walkouts since 2017, United Voice has also attempted to increase educators’ pay through legal channels by filing an application for pay discrimination. Shortly before the interviews in February 2018, United Voice had heard that their application for an Equal Remuneration Order with the Fair Work Commission had been dismissed. Pursued on the grounds that the feminized nature of the sector has contributed to their stalled rates of pay, the application submitted back in 2013 sought to compare the work performed by mostly female childcare employees to the work performed by predominately male employees in the manufacturing sector. At the time of the interviews, there had been significant coverage of their last walkout in the national press, and some were hopeful that the election of a Labour government in the 2019 federal elections would bring change. At the same time as the walkouts were becoming larger, United Voice’s limited resources mean that they were choosing to strategically prioritize organizing within large-​scale private providers at that time.3 The dismissal of the Equal Remuneration Order by the Fair Work Commission was the second time that United Voice had been hopeful of reaching an agreement over a wage subsidy for early years educators. The Gillard–​Rudd Labor government had introduced a funding package known as the ‘early years quality fund’ to provide ECEC workers with a wage supplement without increasing costs for providers or parents. Following the defeat of the Labor Party in 2013, it became clear that the two-​year, 45

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

AU$300 million-​funded programme to lift the wages of early childhood educators was insufficient to provide all eligible centres with the subsidy. As a result, the fund operated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, with around 60 per cent of ECEC centres not being eligible to apply for this funding.4 The uneven distribution of the fund and the adoption of a ‘first come, first served’ policy were seen as an extremely poor deal that would pit childcare providers against each other and further entrench wage inequality across the for-​profit and not-​for-​profit sector (United Voice, 2013). The deal also received much hostility from the new Liberal government, for example, Assistant Minister for Education Sussan Ley argued that a AU$300 million fund established by the Labor Party for wages in the childcare sector was a strategy for workers to be tricked into joining the union.5 It has taken time for United Voice, who negotiated this deal, to win back trust, and interviewees who were active union members at that time were vocal that this funding package should not be seen as a win and emphasized the renewed necessity of walkouts.

The Big Steps campaign online The Big Steps campaign was established in 2008 with the aim to call on the Australian government to fund professional pay for all early childhood educators. Its online campaign page includes pictures of around 30 different educators, and it has active social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that are updated most days. The campaign website also has an ‘Educators Everywhere’ page that describes its plan to secure professional pay from politicians. As well as giving access to campaign resources such as banners and letter templates, the page offers access to a mailing list that shares regular suggestions on how to take action on social media. Two slogans are used on the campaign homepage: ‘To value every child, we need to value every educator and that means government funding of professional pay for the professional work educators do’; and ‘We’re done with asking nicely. It’s time for professional pay!’ In 2013, United Voice (2013) defined professional pay as that which allowed all 60,000 educators to be paid AU$26 an hour or more depending on qualifications, which they estimated would require the federal government to commit to AU$1.4 billion in recurrent funding. The main frames used to argue for fair wages are gender justice and professionalization, emphasizing the undervaluing of women’s paid work in a historically feminized profession. Other equal pay disputes in professions such as teaching in the 1970s and earlier suffragette campaigns are referenced in its video gallery to locate the campaign within the tradition of women’s struggles for fair wages, with educators chaining themselves to government buildings being a recurring strategy. There is little emphasis on the idea of care work being undervalued in the campaign itself, which reflects the transformation to professionalization in the sector that the term ‘educator’ cemented. Having 46

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said that, one Big Steps action back in 2016 was called ‘Love Doesn’t Pay the Bills’: ‘As educators, we love our jobs, but some politicians still think we do this job just “for the love of it”. But love doesn’t pay the bills!’ (United Voice, 2017). Big Steps uses irony to call out the naturalization of women as ‘loving’ being used as a justification for low wages. In the Big Steps ten-​year policy vision launched in 2018, its primary reform is demanding that government invests at least 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in ECEC, with a second being government-​funded equal pay for educators. Although the focus remains on equal pay and professional wages in order to improve pay and quality of work in a female-​dominated field, there are references to making sure families and communities have equal access to ECEC throughout Australia. Addressing the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ educators and children was a policy priority, which was also a focus of a series of tweets and Facebook posts by Indigenous United Voice Educators during National Reconciliation Week in 2019, including the launch of a scholarship scheme for educators to attend an Aboriginal STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) summit. Overall, the focus of the campaign is one of advocacy for professional wages; I found little reference to wage inequity between educators, including the over-​representation of racialized minority women in the group of lowest-​paid educators.

Selfless workers versus ‘natural strikers’ The social invention of selflessness has a distinctive classed, racialized and gendered history. The labour expropriated from working-​class, migrant and racialized minority women to look after other women’s children rather than their own has constituted an international labour force and limited some women’s abilities to mother their own children. Following the decline of domestic service, this orientation was further encouraged through, among other disciplining technologies, caring courses, which became the main form of education for working-​class women in Western Europe and, for some, a route to achieving respectability. In the UK, Beverley Skeggs (1997) has documented how caring courses became a tool to regulate working-​class women and to give them responsibility for civilizing the nation. In turn, selflessness’s long classifying, racializing and gendering history is founded on the denial of a separate and proper subject (Skeggs, 2013). In the Australian context, the development of kindergarten schools and training programmes as separate from day nurseries ensured that kindergarten teaching remained an occupation for middle-​class young women (Brennan, 1998). In addition to these continuities between the UK and Australia, there are significant differences in the ways the professionalization of care work and mothering were intertwined with the 47

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

project of civilizing marginalized mothers from the 19th century. In this Australian case, this legacy continues to strongly shape the discourses about early education today being white, lower-​middle-​class women’s work. While the growth of the care workforce and expert knowledges about children’s psychology have shaped the production of gendered workforces, the geographical specificities of kindergarten teaching in the Australian context initially produced a profession for middle-​and upper-​class women, with kindergartens being primarily a form of philanthropic social reform targeted at poor families (Brennan, 1998). This historical context, including middle-​class women’s construction as virtuous philanthropists, matters for understanding why early years educators’ selflessness was so central in this dispute. Non-​educator interviewees who were long-​time activists in this campaign identified educators’ selfless dispositions and their supposed reluctance to put themselves first as a significant barrier to more workers becoming politicized. Some of the educated, middle-​class activists I spoke with argued that the extent to which such strikes can create large-​scale mobilization depends on workers’ ability to deconstruct the idea(l) of the selfless carer. They described a conflict between being caring –​due to the naturalization of care as something women do out of love –​and believing in one’s labour rights as characterizing the early years workforce. The selfless habitus cultivated by workers is constructed as clashing with striking, which is seen as requiring educators to put themselves first. The construction of early years educators as selfless carers who are not natural strikers, I argue represents a dualistic and dangerous fallacy. In turn, this prevents childcare movements like this one from reconstructing striking and walking out as forms of collective care. Their accounts bemoan educators’ lack of desire to strike and imply that they have not reached full conscientization. Selflessness was represented as a problem that belongs to others and an orientation that had to be overcome. My research expands Cobbles’ (2010) argument that the factory paradigm still dominates within labour movements, in that care workers are assumed to lack worker consciousness, even within unionized childcare movements where large-​scale industrial action has taken place. The following three advocacy leaders held similar views about why it had taken so long to get to the stage of walking out: ‘The feedback that we get is that you try and get these people together to make a stand but it’s just not their disposition, and that’s why they are very good at their jobs, but its why they are also very bad at advocating and being assertive because they do put other people first, and there is also this stigma, I think, in the sector where you should do it because you love it, you know, why don’t you just love looking after children, you’re so lucky, you know, and if all of a sudden you put up your hand 48

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and say, “Well, actually, it’s a profession and a job and it’s there to pay my mortgage”, that’s absolutely frowned upon.’ (Anna) ‘I feel very strong about it, but because most people in this industry are very caring, they don’t really want to strike, they are not strikers, we are childcare workers, which is why you find it so rare and, in that way, I think, building that solidary that will get it together.’ (Ashley) ‘The early childhood people have been too scared over the years to strike because, “What about the parents? What about the children? We can’t put the parents out,” well schools do. You know, what if we were wharfies and we weren’t getting what we wanted, we would shut down the port and nobody would be eating, I don’t know, whatever they import these days, we wouldn’t be eating.’ (Lisa) These interviewees were deeply critical of the undervaluing of the naturalization of childcare as something women do out of love, yet their comments also reinforce childcare workers as selfless and depoliticized. Clearly, deconstructing how the affective discourse of selflessness functions to keep a female workforce docile and how some women are socialized to think of themselves last remains a key issue for activists, who were all too aware of how accusations of workers’ selfishness are mobilized to shift attention away from the selfishness of governments, childcare companies or parents. Yet, I suggest that this was a repeated narrative that leading activists and advocates constructed about rank-​and-​file educators rather than one with which the educators I met identified with. The educators I spoke with were highly motivated to walk out and did not fear ‘putting parents out’. Beyond the specificities of this particular sample, the repetition that educators are selfless and not natural strikers has significant implications for the future of the campaign and for childcare workers’ movements more broadly. First, this repetition reinforces the perception of a not yet fully politicized workforce. Furthermore, if workers continue to be perceived as not being ‘natural strikers’, this entrenches the fallacy that women’s ties to others are impediments to successful workplace-​ based organizing. This sense of disconnection between movement leaders and workers also came to the fore in relation to the decisions made by United Voice in New South Wales about the timing and length of the walkouts. The discourse of centres not being strong enough to sustain a full-​day walkout was the official rationale for this decision. This meant that the action went from a full-​day walkout being planned in March to encouraging centres to shut down from 1 pm to join the rally in Central Sydney; the centre managers and workers I spoke with all felt that this did not cause significant enough disruption 49

CHILDCARE STRUGGLES, MATERNAL WORKERS AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

since parents could easily leave work early, as compared to workers being late to start their day’s work. The perspectives of one union organizer and one educator were at odds: ‘Our members need to have an ongoing dialogue with both the centre directors and the parents to talk about why it is mission critical to close for the whole day and why we’re asking parents, you know, why parents need to keep their children at home, it’s really quite a difficult part of, you have identified a really significant challenge for us in terms of the walk-​off and being able to close down for the whole day and really create that kind of economic disruption that we need to do in order for these walk-​offs to be really successful.’ (Jackie) ‘We said, “You have to walk off early in the morning as a whole day, not only for three hours, so that the government wakes up and also that parents realize how difficult it is if nobody can look after the child.” So, in that sense, if you just do three hours, it doesn’t really work well because it’s time to go home anyway, if you are parents, I can work earlier than that so that I can finish early, I can go home to look after my kids, but if you do like a whole day, probably a bit more impact for the parents. We did the three hours because we were not organized enough. The organizer said, “You can’t do the whole day because you are not strong enough at the moment.” ’ (Emily) Some of the centre managers and educators I met were frustrated by the ‘gentle’, escalating approach they perceived the union was taking that resulted in shorter walkouts, with their centres being seen as unusually mobilized and having an ‘activist spirit’ that was not representative of union members elsewhere in the state.

‘Everything would stop’: writing letters versus economic disruption In Chapter 1, we saw that the childcare movements in English-​speaking (neo)liberal welfare states have predominantly been and remain advocacy-​ based movements, despite their workforce’s increased unionization. Within the context of the walkouts, two types of repertoire ran through activists’ accounts. One was focused on writing letters to politicians, raising the profile of the dispute through the media, canvassing parents to garner their support, lobbying and publicly shaming governments’ refusal to recognize the value of early years educators on social media and elsewhere. One of the recurring stories I heard was the reaction caused by Australian Senator David Leyonheljm comment that early years educators’ work consisted of 50

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‘wiping children’s noses and stopping kids from killing each other’ (Daily Mail Australia, 2017) shortly before the walkouts. Participants spoke about the hurt and anger that this comment caused, and how the overt contempt for their work motivated them to take part in the walkouts. Leyonheljm’s insults provided a well-​timed opportunity for the sector –​including two of my participants –​to contest the devaluation of their work: they used social media videos and open letters to call him a ‘clueless dinosaur’, pointing out his lack of knowledge about the extensive bodies of research that show how state-​sponsored, quality early years education results in more equal societies and contributes to children’s well-​being. The second repertoire was foregrounded in Maria’s account. She saw the withdrawing of one’s labour as a last resort when other strategies –​including advocacy –​had failed. Due to the reliance of a large proportion of the workforce on formal childcare, some educators saw such a strike as having the potential to cause significant disruption to the economy, especially for those respondents who favoured escalating the walkouts: ‘I think probably we have done everything else; I don’t think we have a choice. I used to think, “Oh, it’s not very fair to close a centre down for a day for the parents”, and that’s what most educators feel, you know, they are very supportive of their parents, but we have tried everything, there is nothing left to try. You know, we have to do something more radical to make them listen basically.’ (Maria) ‘If we shut down as a majority of a profession, then, a saying that we had back in 2011 was, “If childcare stops, Australia stops”, and that’s because businesses will have to make allowances or office buildings would have to make allowances, and they would notice that, you know: “Oh, my childcare centre is shutting down for the day, the educators are advocating for professional wages, I have got to stay at home”, and then the person goes “Well, why is that person not here today.” ’ (Elsa) ‘The union and the members, they need to coordinate. If one’s going to happen here one weekend, maybe one can happen over there, so the people do get allocated different times to do things, so it’s not every week you are expected to do this. I think communication is a big thing, and we need to build relationships with other services that are doing it, start to network, you know, so they can put ideas out there and coordinate different events to happen.’ (Jack) Jack was a recently qualified early years teacher who had worked as an educator for ten years and had recently spoken at a large union rally about 51

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his experience. For him, letter writing, door knocking, increasing union membership and organizing longer walkouts were all priorities, so he did not see industrial action as necessarily above other strategies. The educators were highly articulate, but there was disagreement over whether walkouts/​ strikes remained a last resort. The costs of maintaining these two repertoires of mobilization within an already-​stretched union and a conservative labour landscape were visible. In turn, the accounts of especially older activists suggest that they go between moments of doubt over whether any progress has actually been achieved through the Big Step campaign and more hopeful times as they witness educators’ voices getting louder and walkouts becoming larger. As it became clear that the strength of the educators’ appetite for walkouts was difficult to convert into wins over pay, partly because of the industrial relations landscape, the Big Steps campaign teetered on the edge of becoming a childcare movement centred around withdrawing one’s labour. The history of the childcare profession as prioritizing white professional women’s needs constrained the extent to which it could become a workers’ movement –​a legacy that activists were well aware of, as Tania put it: “The roots of the profession are incredibly conservative. It is white, middle-​class women’s job to save all the children.” She was one of the few activists who talked about the importance of confronting the legacy of a white professional women’s movement for building a more broad-​based childcare movement. This tension was further visible in the ways one participant felt about performances of protest in the walkouts and rallies. For one long-​time leader in early years activism, a professional movement was paramount –​a view that she recounts had got her expelled from United Voice several times: ‘Our union is member led and they have this honking on the side of the road and I raised it so many times with people just to say, “I have never seen a dentist honk on the side of the road. I have never seen a medical doctor honk on the side of the road. I have never seen a pilot honk on the side of the road. I have never seen a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist –​if we are calling ourselves professionals, standing on the side of the road in ugly T-​shirts that don’t fit our bodies with a big sign that says ‘Honk for equality’ really just makes us look like idiots.” This is a contested thing because the union will say. “A lot of people really love it, and if they feel that they are participating, then better to do something than nothing”, and the thing is, I mean, I understand all the different perspectives and I can see that people would enjoy that, I just think in a profession, you have to draw lines to go, “If I want to be called a professional and I am the most highly qualified teacher in this country, I don’t honk on the side of the road, I write a letter to a politician, I have a debate with a politician, I do my research, I know 52

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my stuff and honking on the side of the road isn’t going to get me anything but potentially assaulted.” ’ (Lisa) The desire for professional recognition and wages, and its prioritizing of early years as education over care, means that Lisa sees the strategies used by the union for garnering support from the public as undermining these aims. For other educators who attended the walkouts, what mattered was the sense of solidarity with co-​workers beyond their centres that it provided, the opportunity for public visibility of the value of their work and, not least, taking part in a joyous social with co-​workers and families: ‘I find people like sausages here, and it’s always nice to give them something, it’s more of an incentive for them to walk with us as well, so we all walked down to the park and it went beautifully. We had sausages down there and everyone hung around until about 3 o’clock until they had to go and pick up their children from school, and because it was a park too, they were able to play, and it was a really uplifting experience. It was really interesting for the educators to actually see that they had the parents’ support, they were a bit unsure to start with, and they didn’t think that they would get the parents’ support. Because we had done lots of canvassing with the families beforehand too, I knew that they would support us wholeheartedly, and they would turn up.’ (Elsa) These contrasting descriptions of the walkouts and rallies highlight that they have different meanings for rank-​and-​file educators, some of whom are less likely to have their voices publicly heard. For Elsa, for example, a sense of solidarity seemed just as, if not more, important than being respected as well informed by politicians. The differences across the educators, centre managers and union officials I spoke with about the best strategy for escalating walkouts, shows the importance of establishing deep relationships between ‘leaders’, champions and parents for successful coalition building (Tattersall, 2018).

Parent–​worker solidarities Childcare workers’ movements that have been able to mobilize the relational bond between parents and workers into powerful coalitions are few and require distinctive local political climates to make gains (Reese, 2010; Black, 2020). Much of educators’ labour went into facilitating the walkouts by convincing parents to pick up their children. Taking part in the walkouts and exercising one’s labour rights involved the emotional labour of reassuring and convincing parents to pick up their children and to join the march and rallies. While the educators in the Sydney community-​based centres I visited 53

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talked about the overwhelming support they had received from parents, in Elsa’s centre in Victoria, the pickups were framed as ‘parents’ choice’: ‘So, the centre that I am at, I pretty much can do what I need to do in the centre, so it was just a matter of talking to the parents –​the parents have been actively supporting this campaign since 2011 –​it was talking to the educators and getting the educators to make the decision to walk out as well. So, we supported it in a massive way, we were on Facebook and we had signs up at the centre, we do that a lot, and then the second time that they walked out, I was able to talk to our management committee and just confirm that there would be no backlash from it and that it would be a parent’s decision to choose to come and pick up their children at a specific time, and that is how we had to word it. It had to be the parents’ choice to come and pick up the children rather than us telling the parents that we won’t be here after 1 pm.’ (Elsa) In Jack’s centre, the length and strength of the existing relationships with parents meant that almost all of the staff and parents took part in the walkouts together. Significantly, he saw this sort of solidarity as linked to the lifelong relationships educators had with families, who they often still saw in the neighbourhood, which could only exist in a context of educators’ employment retention and being able to live in the area where they worked:6 ‘I think maybe the first walkout we had, I think there was only two children left. Everyone had picked them up and most of them came on the walk with us, you know, and rallied with us, and so I mean to have that support, and we are lucky in this community that we have built such great relationships with the parents and the children, and, you know, they last a lifetime, you see them around the area if you live in the area, and I see some now when I started in 1999, I mean, they have finished school and are walking around 6ft 7 and you’re like, “What, is that so and so?” Parents still say “Hello” to you and, yep, it’s nice.’ (Jack) While educators described parent solidarity as paramount to the success of the campaign and the walkouts, one activist was atypical in emphasizing the divergent interests between educators and middle-​class mothers as most likely to jeopardize this emerging solidarity, as it had in earlier campaigns: ‘I still get the very strong sense from feminists in the area that they think that, you know, the payment that they perceive themselves as having 54

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to make for this service has to always be less than what they then go out to earn. So, you know, that has always stuck in my throat since I was a very young educator. We actually struck up some great alliances, especially with, you know, shift-​working, nursing mothers, etc. I was both really, really drawn to them and what they were fighting for in terms of a collective approach to child rearing, but then there was also this other side, which was, well, “Yeah, but you can’t be asking for money that I can’t afford”, so the nexus of my wages and your wage claims affecting my income was just really strong and it’s only recently I think it’s been undone by this sort of alliance that we are trying to make more public with parents.’ (Paula) For Paula, building solidarity means confronting divisions between low and middle-​income women. Solidarity, for Paula, needs to translate not only into parents being willing to be inconvenienced by the walkouts, but also into smaller income gaps between the middle and working classes. One of the barriers Paula identifies are some women’s unwillingness to give up some of this privilege. Relationships outside of daycare centres and the union played an equally significant role in the success of the campaign. Many educators were fervent supporters of a more intimate union in which parent–​worker relationships take centre stage, including not downplaying the difficulties and time needed to establish these forms of solidarity. Many of the advocates and union organizers I spoke with prefaced their accounts by emphasizing that although they had started their careers as educators, they were no longer speaking from that position, and they talked about the importance of educators representing themselves. According to one source, the relational approach that had helped secure parents’ support in many centres during the period of the walkouts was not necessarily one that applied to the union’s own organizing strategy: ‘I have met some amazing people through this campaign too. I have friends in Darwin and Perth and Tasmania because of going down and lobbying with the politicians and connecting with them because of this campaign, and we have been friends for about six or seven years now, and there were organizers in there that I have known for six or seven years. One of them actually is now an organizer up in Northern Territory, and there was a few other organizers that have been on this campaign for a while too, and I was talking about how they need to be relational with educators when they walk into their centre because we are such a relationship-​based profession, because those connections with families and with the children that they need to be relational with us when they walk into our centres as well, so it’s not all about, “We are going to do this campaign and this is how 55

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we are going to do it and we need you to do this and this and this.” They need to actually understand the educators within each centre and work out how to connect with them, so then they want to come so they feel like they are part of this campaign rather than telling them what to do.’ (Elsa) According to this interviewee, national strategies do not reflect educators’ desire for a relational approach to organizing. One of the reasons why intimacy may be far from United Voice’s organizing repertoire is its history as a union representing workers in vastly different sectors. Given the successes that United Voice has attained in terms of membership and scale of action, building from the margins could mean further developing community–​ union coalitions that have proved powerful for childcare labour movements elsewhere. Based on ten years of work on union–​community coalitions and the development of a Sydney-​based community–​union coalition, Amanda Tattersall demonstrates that one of the strategies for building what she coins a ‘deep’ coalition is a commitment to practising relational meetings and building a relationship-​r ich culture. These conditions made effective and mutually interested coalitions between communities and unions more able to thrive (Tattersall, 2018). Building such community relationships with parents necessitates challenging the discourse of parents’ choice, as well as addressing divergent class interests between parents and workers. Time was a key constraint for many educators, both the everyday time needed to establish alliances between parents and workers, and the lifelong time needed to sustain community relationships, as Luke’s description of knowing children over their life course illustrated.

Migrant educators’ political subjectivities and the whiteness of early years’ movements in Australia The leadership of the Big Steps campaign was, in some ways, disconnected from the concerns and preferences of some working educators I spoke with. I found that workers’ migration status also played a key role in their perspectives on work-​based organizing. Over the last 30 years, Australia has adopted migration policies intent on filling designated skill gaps in the labour market through permanent skilled migration, which has prohibited the development of temporary migration pathways into so-​called low-​skilled occupations (Hamilton et al, 2019). Many migrants may enter Australia because of their skills in a different field but later transition into low paid care work. However, this policy focus has started to shift, partly as a result of pressure from industries about access to low-​skilled workers and the labour shortages in care work. Migrants to Australia experience considerable constraints on their employment pathways because of structural racism, 56

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limited labour market opportunities and deskilling. The migrant educators I interviewed were all Australian citizens or permanent residents who had arrived in Australia between ten and 20 years ago, which shaped their experience in the sector, and all had worked in early years or education in their home countries prior to arriving in Australia. The political subjectivities of migrant interviewees shaped their perspectives on where the union should prioritize its energies and why it was important for all workers to become involved in the Big Steps campaign. On the whole, the migrant workers I spoke with were more frustrated by other educators’ unwillingness to join the walkouts or the union. For Rita, who arrived in Australia from Chile 20 years ago, her knowledge not only of the violence of neoliberal reforms, but also of the power of unions in Chile, meant that she thought a focus on struggling for public education was paramount. For Erika, her experience of working as a kindergarten teacher in Japan, as well as in for-​profit centres in Sydney, where joining a union was heavily frowned upon by management, also led her to seek out work in a community setting with better working conditions and where professional activism was encouraged. She perceived early years educators in Japan as less able to be vocal about their rights: ‘I feel like we have much more right to speak up here, even though like, yeah, like we are speaking up for our pay rise, like equal pay, we are given opportunity to do that, and sure, like, we should, and then society should know that as well, but in Japan, we are not given the opportunity or no one would, they are basically too tired to do anything extra or something, I don’t know, just work was hectic and just you can’t really, I didn’t really have time or capacity to think about anything else after work.’ (Erika) One of the centre managers talked at length about her activism as a teacher in South Africa and her commitment to education as an anti-​racist and social justice struggle. She emphasized the difficulties of adjusting to unionism in the Australian context: ‘Here, I have noticed that the unions really protect workers and come in from that perspective that it is, and the negative side to unions is that people get very union oriented and the workers just become quite limited because they have the protection of unions instead of the love of the work. I just find it different because in South Africa, I was just passionate about the work and I wasn’t concerned about, “Oh, I have been here eight hours and I get paid overtime for this”, the rights of a worker, because they were rights of life and rights to education and rights, you know, on so many levels in South Africa, whereas here we 57

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are quite in a privileged society where you can just talk about hours of work.’ (Ashleigh) Alongside the significance of migration accounts, there was recognition among some of the white Australian full time activists and managers that the whiteness of the movement needed addressing and that there needed to be a conversation involving less privileged voices, as Paula explains: ‘I think I was most involved as an educator when I was working on the floor, and, you know, I now feel like I am slightly removed from the sector. Not in heart and soul, but just in the reality for me. So, I wouldn’t step into, you know, a public role and speak for educators because I feel like I am not working as one. Even though I visit centres every day because I am there with students, etc.’ (Paula) There was little discussion by either unions or interviewees I spoke with that joining a union or taking part in walkouts may be experienced by non-​ permanent migrants as riskier and of potential fears of jeopardizing one’s settled status or employment rights for non-​citizens. Migrant educators I interviewed all had formal residency, yet their involvement in the campaign and walkouts was strongly informed by these experiences. These political subjectivities are at best invisible in the campaign, and the whiteness of both the current movement’s leadership and its history as a white middle-​ class movement is not foregrounded in the official campaign. Migrant educators’ distinctive experiences of politicization were sidelined and yet could connect Big Steps to migrant communities and migrant educators who have distinctive histories of care organizing and unionism.

Conclusions The construction of striking educators as either selfish or selfless still remains dominant: there is a lack of conceptual frames for thinking about worker power beyond this dichotomy. The inequalities between different educators, the wage inequity between parents and educators, and the absence of attention to migrant workers show that thinking about solidarity needs to be done more carefully. While the campaign did not feature explicit connections with marginalized mothers’ grassroots movements for community childcare or workers in the informal sector, many parents actively supported the walkouts. Big Steps’ focus on demands for better wages for one particular group –​due to the ways in which it is structured into both government and union organizing –​limits this particular childcare struggle. At the same time, some educators saw themselves as engaged in struggles against state withdrawal. Educators’ demands on the state for better remuneration over 58

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more than 15 years in Australia illustrate how resistance to the devaluation of their labour is alive among early years educators, who articulated a hope for a world where children, educators and parents are valued collectively as many walked out for the first time in their careers. In this sense, the walkouts suggest a turning point in the history of Australian childcare struggles that signals a clear shift towards economic disruption, struggle for state resources and solidarity building between care workers and communities. In this case study a more relational repertoire of mobilization was already apparent through the long-​lasting relationships and support from families that were crucial to the walkouts. Yet, these forms of solidarity remained at the individual or centre level because of the absence of organizing infrastructure, especially for organizing across the most disadvantaged communities and with workers employed in private nurseries or the informal sector. The dominant construction of educators as needing to grow out of a selfless disposition suggests that models of worker power that can hold both selfishness and selflessness together are much needed. Regardless of the framing of the dispute as one of professional wages, workers I spoke with articulated walking out as about both individual rights to fair pay and communities’ rights to quality care, suggesting a solidaristic conceptualization of childcare justice. There was divergence between union leaders and childcare workers in terms of how much and how long they wanted to walk out. The ubiquitousness of childcare advocacy as a dominant mode of politicization sometimes conflicted with an increased appetite for collectively withdrawing one’s labour. For example, many interviewees made parallels with the Victoria nurses strike in 1986 –​one of the longest Australian women-​led strike –​and cited its eventual success as a reason to remain hopeful. At the same time, the discourse that inconveniencing parents’ employers and disrupting the economy was essential to asserting their voice as a workforce was gaining ground among educators. A movement focused on economic disruption, relationships of solidarity and broad-​based alliances offers renewal at a time when educators are exhausted with using the formal political channels. The invisibilization of migrant workers within this movement-​both inside and outside centre based early education-​have significant implications. The lack of visible coalitions with other informal and home childcare workers illustrates the difficulties of establishing solidarity when campaigns focus on gaining professional wages. Such alliances with other feminist organizations are developing, as the supportive reporting and discussion of the Big Steps walkouts on the Sydney Women’s Strike and the Radical Women of Australia websites suggest.7 This might be the start of United Voice establishing community–​union coalitions that have proved powerful in Australia, such as the Public Education Alliance in 2018. Elsewhere, there are attempts to unionize childcare workers in regulated centres, and in-​home childcare workers are also attempting to create such coalitions (Yates, 2010). This 59

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means refusing to see informal home childcare work as a separate struggle. As Bhattacharyya (2018) argues, foregrounding the chains of supplementarity between workers is crucial for an analysis of racial capitalism that can make sense of how people become divided from one another in the name of economic well-​being. This campaign reflects a simultaneous drawing on and sidelining of marginalized women’s histories of community and labour organizing. There are historical reasons for these absences, not least the ways in which the philanthropy paradigm dominated early years education in the first half the 20th century in Australia, and the ways in which much of childcare movements from the 1970s centred the interests of educated white women. The relatively privileged space of regulated employment in centre based childcare means that unionized migrant workers negotiate a white-​majority political and labour culture. At the same time, the resurgent militantism of educators and their discontent that the state is failing children suggests that reconnecting with alternative histories of childcare mobilizations requires urgent consideration. The threat of centres closing for days was felt keenly by the public and political elites, and it was in centres that abandoned the language of choice that walkouts and deep relationships were most successful according to my interviewees. The study of childcare struggles needs to shift focus from union meetings, walkouts and rallies, which continue to be imagined as primary spaces of political action. Sociologists need to pay more attention to relationships between parents and unions, and to conversations in the staffroom and at pickup times between children, workers and their parents. These need to be seen as primary rather than secondary sites of observation and theorizing. The accounts of educators and activists demonstrate their skills at having difficult conversations about wage disparities with parents and co-​workers, and with articulating their reasons for walking out to parents, the press and politicians, which all constitute a rich maternal worker praxis. The extent to which the maternal worker frame can encompass migrants’ differential vulnerabilities and insights as workers, and confront childcare movements’ history and present as predominantly a white women’s movement, is explored in the following chapters. The maternal worker frame adds complexity to concepts that focus exclusively on unions being more relational organizations (Cobble, 2010). A more intimate labour movement, Dorothy Cobble argues, involves unions organizing differently, such as having dedicated training programmes on negotiating relationships, and emphasizes that intimate unionism benefits both workers and care recipients, and heightens the quality of care. In contrast, I have shown the need to attend to the absence of intimate relationships between formal and informal childcare workforces, and to the limited language available to articulate worker power that avoids the 60

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selfless–​selfish dichotomy. In this particular dispute the connections between work-​based and community organizing were evident in terms of parent’s support but I witnessed little evidence of coalition building with other local community organizations. Those connections, I argue, are in need of more careful consideration in theorizing childcare labour movements. It is to community-​based childcare organizing that I turn to in the next chapter.

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3

Mothering the Mothers: Stratified Depletion and Austerity in Bristol, United Kingdom

Introduction This chapter investigates the effects of the reorganization of maternal care under austerity through the lens of depletion. The marketization of maternal care, socio-​spatial urban inequalities and the cuts facing the third sector interacted as limiting structures that, I argue, constitute stratified forms of depletion. In contrast to the other two case studies that foreground worker-​ based activism, I show that third sector organizations, social enterprises and businesses that seek to improve mothers’ physical, psychological and social well-​being play a significant role in shaping contemporary childcare struggles. Most discussions of transformations of the organization of social reproduction have tended to neglect how civil society organizations currently provide ad hoc childcare and advocacy to parents living in the most deprived neighbourhoods. Through a comparative discussion of two groups of workers –​one group employed in charities, social enterprises and local authorities to support disadvantaged parents, and another self-​employed group who offer care services to women in wealthy and gentrifying areas of the city –​I demonstrate how the deepening crisis of social reproduction in Bristol shapes the possibilities for building a citywide maternal workers’ movement. Many of the maternal support workers I spoke with have politicized understandings of the sort of societies best able to sustain mothers. I argue that this maternal worker praxis explicitly confronts neoliberalism’s tendency to individualize self-​care. The ways that charitable funding prioritizes mothers’ individual well-​being, as well as the spatial socio-​economic inequalities in the city, strongly constrain the possibilities for broad-​based organizing 62

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around childcare and maternal support work. In turn, it is the lack of civic infrastructure, common language and spatial divisions in the city that make it difficult for deep organizing for universal state-​funded childcare and maternal support to emerge. While some interviewees and organizations desired more radical transformations to childcare and maternal work, there was little political infrastructure to build worker power, as much had been hollowed out by neoliberalism (Layton, 2010). As well as showing the ways in which scholars of childcare struggles need to foreground the role of civil society and the women’s NGO sector in their analyses, this chapter makes a theoretical contribution to discussions of depletion. The concept of depletion captures the effects of neoliberalism’s privatization of social reproduction on women’s bodies and psyches. While exhaustion has been dubbed the quintessential neoliberal affect, depletion engages a structural analysis of affect. As Emma Dowling (2016: 5) writes: This exhaustion is core to what is understood as a crisis of social reproduction, that is, the inability of people to adequately reproduce their livelihoods. This is not an abstract macro-​economic concept but a very real lived experience that carries the consequence of physical exhaustion and stress or mental ill-​health that can manifest for example in symptoms of burnout or depression. Feminist political economy theorizes transformations of the organization of social reproduction. Depletion provides a systematic frame to document the embodied dimensions of social reproduction crises that much traditional political economy neglects, while resisting individualistic accounts of harm. Unlike terms like ‘stress’ or ‘work–​life balance’, depletion has yet to be technologized by policymakers, though it is increasingly present in international law (Perrier and Swan, 2018). I argue that more attention needs to be paid to the gendered, classed and racialized distribution and effects of depletion in relation to the conditions of paid and unpaid labour (Ahmed, 2013; Rai et al, 2014; Dowling, 2016; Grugel et al, 2020). Sara Ahmed (2013) argues that material and somatic depletion is allocated by race, gender, sexuality and able-​bodiedness: ‘If social privilege is like an energy saving device, no wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so trying. There is a politics to exhaustion. Feeling depleted can be a measure of just what we are up against’ (emphasis in original). While the concept was initially developed to document the depletion of social reproductive capacities, I show that a neglected dimension is the depletion of women’s collective capacities for organizing. In turn, techniques to survive depletion have become an important dimension of some maternal support workers’ praxis. I start with a discussion of how austerity cuts have affected maternal care in Bristol and the UK. 63

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The marketization of maternal care The restructuring of welfare states has seen key aspects of social reproduction offloaded via processes of privatization to families/​households, markets and the third sector (Black, 2018). The effects of these processes of privatization are differential. While women in middle-​and upper-​class households can typically purchase social reproduction on the market, poor households are left with the choice to either intensify their paid labour or rely more on extended kinship and community networks in the absence of services. Given the limited availability of affordable childcare in the private sector, the cuts to the city council’s children’s services and the intersectional inequalities that structure the labour market and education system in Bristol, the organizations that support parents today are at the coalface of this social reproduction crisis. Research has paid attention to either the privatization of maternal health services or the effects of privatized childcare markets (Richardson, 2017), missing from the picture is how civil society and third sector organizations who sustain parents with preschool children post-​austerity are surviving. The growth of private services for new mothers in the wealthier parts of Bristol attests to the classed effects of these transformations –​there is now a market of support available for mothers provided by small businesses, often run by mothers themselves.1 The exponential growth of classes, services and products associated with pregnancy, birth and parenting is evidence of how contemporary motherhood is increasingly commercialized in ways that resource and reproduce white, middle-​class women’s privilege. The mumpreneur –​a self-​employed mother who sells services and products to new mothers –​is a historically specific cultural formation. Jo Littler (2017: 16) describes her relationship to capitalism as a fault line: ‘The mumpreneur promises a meritocratic solution to the overwork culture, the inflexibility of institutionalised labour, inadequately funded and socialised childcare, and the costs of recession within neoliberalism, all wrapped up in a package of glamour and self-​realisation.’ The mumpreneurs I spoke with worked as yoga teachers, art teachers and fitness instructors in gentrifying areas of the city, and their businesses relied on upper-​middle-​class mothers’ access to longer maternity leaves, isolation from other women and public life and their access to disposable income to purchase such services. Most of these self-​employed women rejected the label because they saw entrepreneurship as prioritizing profit making when few of them made a large enough income to sustain their families (Perrier and Fannin, 2016). In addition to these services targeted at wealthy mothers, there are services provided in local National Health Service (NHS) surgeries, in the city council’s children’s centres and by small, volunteer-​run community organizations that operate ‘stay and play’ and specialist groups throughout the city, often in community and church halls or other places offering cheap 64

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hourly rent. Access to some of the groups run within children’s centres has become more limited due to cuts to children and family services, which were some of the services most severely hit during the pandemic. These divided architectures of maternal support constitute a stratified workforce of often unpaid and low-​paid female workforce, with the professional language of therapeutic empowerment being common across both groups. The support available to disadvantaged mothers in Bristol today via charities and the city council –​some of which target single mothers, migrant mothers and up to the mid 2010s young mothers –​reflects and sometimes disrupt the long history of philanthropic organizations that sought to educate ‘disadvantaged’ mothers. As Carol Smart (1996) argues, the ‘help’ of these philanthropic health and psychological organizations, which sought to impose specific standards of motherhood through health education, child protection legislation and poor relief for destitute mothers, would always come with strings attached for poor mothers. Bristol also has a significant number of long-​established grassroots community development organizations –​often founded by parents in the 1980s –​in the most disadvantaged parts of the city. These were distinctive in making demands on the state for resources for low-​income families and rejecting a deficiency model of single parenthood in favour of a strength-​based model. As black and working-​class mothers continue to be differentially produced as consumers, patients or recipients of services rather than as political subjects, the potential for mothering as a space for collective organizing has shrunk. These anti-​poverty and minority women’s community organizations, which played a central role in the 1970s and 1980s, have been depleted by successive rounds of austerity cuts and replaced, to some extent, by newer social enterprises that often have to strategically use the language of ‘entrepreneurialism’ to keep afloat (Bassel and Emejulu, 2015). This means that grassroots organizations constitute only one dimension of social reproduction struggles, with more actors now operating under the constraints of social enterprises. At the same time, some of these organizations had long traditions of community empowerment that continue to be sources of local resistance to austerity cuts. Social reproduction movements have historically played a significant role in forcing national and local states to redistribute power and economic resources (Abramovitz, 2010), and in more favourably mediating the contradiction between social reproduction and capital accumulation. The effects of these dual processes of transformation to the organization of maternal care –​the simultaneous withdrawal of resources from civil society organizations and local government, and the growth of privatized services for mothers –​have severely shaped the landscape on which a maternal workers’ movement can be imagined. These three types of civil society organizations and businesses, I argue, play a contradictory role in the future of maternal workers’ movements. 65

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Context and methodology Bristol is a medium-​sized city in the south-​west of England that has a long history of feminist, anti-​poverty and anti-​racist activism. In contrast to this image as a multicultural and progressive city, Bristol was ranked the seventh most unequal UK local authority out of 348 on an index of multiple inequality (Elahi et al, 2017), with minority ethnic disadvantage being particularly starker for educational and employment outcomes. Bristol’s story has been shaped by successive waves of migration, most significantly, of West Indians in the 1960s and of Somalians in the 1980s and 1990s, whose communities are located in inner-​city areas. In the 2011 census, 16 per cent of Bristol’s population identified as belonging to a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) group (Infomigrants, 2019). During the women’s liberation movement, some of the first cooperatively run crèches in the country were set up in Bristol, one of which later became the University of Bristol’s student and staff nursery. Bristol is unusual in having escaped the worse impacts of austerity measures on children’s centres,2 as compared with the rest of the UK, where a £1 billion cut since 2010 has resulted in the loss of one in six locally funded children’s centres, with the cuts taking place to a greater extent in the most deprived local authorities.3 In 2018, Bristol City Council oversaw cuts of £2.4 million to children’s services, yet all children’s centres were kept open, partly because Labour Mayor Marvin Rees was elected on the promise of keeping children’s centres open4 and partly as a result of local campaigns by children’s centre staff and parents. Despite the children’s centres being kept open, the cuts to children’s services that were voted in by city councillors in 2018 still resulted in restructurings that amounted to the loss of 40 staff. The most hit were family support workers, who provide one-​to-​one support to families and more targeted groups within children’s centres. On the other hand, Bristol has gained a reputation in the UK for having some of the best outcomes for maternal and infant health. In 2010, Bristol was the first city in England to be awarded Baby Friendly status by the World Health Organization in recognition of NHS and community work in promoting breastfeeding. Despite its family-​friendly image, childcare in Bristol today is the most expensive in the country, meaning that an average earner would not earn enough to cover the costs of full-​time nursery. Consistent with the rest of the UK, there is a mixture of public, for-​profit and charity-​run childcare providers. In the UK, public provision makes up only 12 per cent of all under-​five education nationally (Department for Education, 2019), and pre-​pandemic, 17 per cent of childcare providers in England’s poorest areas were facing closure (Hall and Stephens, 2019). Bristol has a strong civil society and a thriving third sector, with roots dating back to 19th-​century philanthropic merchants. Recent research found that 66

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the 1,428 registered voluntary sector organizations operating in Bristol tend to be less reliant (at 41 per cent) on public funding than those operating in the rest of the UK (Jones et al, 2016). The voluntary sector organizations located in more deprived local authorities in Bristol suffered most due to the combined effect of cuts in government funding in these areas and their greater dependency on statutory funding (Jones et al, 2016). Bristol is home to several third sector organizations who work with parents and families. One of the most influential nationally was the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN), founded in 1991, which became a UK-​wide network in 2003 and merged with Barton Hill Settlement in 2016. The number of long-​running and newer organizations who campaign for and work with single, migrant mothers in the poorest parts of the city attest to an infrastructure developed through grassroots activism. As a city well known for its thriving social justice activism and its history of civil rights protest, Bristol makes a unique case to study how social reproduction struggles are reconfigured post austerity. The first group of maternal support workers were employed in charities, social enterprises and local authorities in mostly city areas of medium and high deprivation. The self-​employed workers mostly provided services to improve – or nourish to use their language –​the physical and mental health of new mothers through alternative practices, such as art therapy, counselling, shiatsu and yoga. Most of these interviews were carried out in cafes and participants’ homes in Easton, Montpellier (both inner-​city areas where urban poverty is located next to fast-​gentrifying neighbourhoods) and in Clifton and Cotham (two of the wealthiest districts of the city). The first group of ten women were interviewed in 2016–​17 as part of a project on maternal entrepreneurs. The second phase of the research took place between 2017 and 2019, with interviews with 12 women employed or working as volunteers in charities, community groups, the city council and third sector organizations in Bristol. Out of this second groups four identified as BAME and out of the white participants three described themselves as coming from working-​class backgrounds. My interviewees worked in organizations in Knowle West, Brentry, Hillfields, Barton Hill, Easton and Saint Pauls, and most of the time, the interviews were carried out at their place of work. These two groups –​which I call the ‘self-​employed maternal support workers’ and ‘community maternal support workers’ –​provide distinctive windows into the effects of austerity on maternal care, as their locations within geographies of inequality and differential ability to access other sources of personal income left some workers more vulnerable than others. By comparatively researching workers across different parts of the city, I show how the deepening of unequal access to resources for social reproduction in one city constitutes a significant impediment to building a maternal workers’ 67

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movement. I argue that we need to foreground the unequal relations between these groups in discussions of social movement building.

Activist community mothering in the neoliberal city In Chapter 1, I argued that starting from the maternal margins is crucial to the project of building a maternal workers’ movement that sees mothers as political agents struggling for the reorganization of social reproduction. Community mothering was a crucial practice that facilitated the emergence of distinctive forms of politicization that crossed paid work, communities and households, and shaped the politics of social reproduction from below (Naples, 1998; Brenner, 2014). Such a vision of maternal community power was evident in the voices of two white, working-​class community activists in their 50s recalling how they became activists in the 1990s: ‘I think what it actually did, it helped cement some of the relationships, the attachments, the bonding, for whatever word that we had with the women. Both Anna and I were motherless young people in our own past, I had a mother, Anna didn’t. Some of the things that are cropping up is, with young mothers, seems to be very similar to our own experiences, and because some of the women, and not all of them, but some of the women had, they may have had mothers, but they hadn’t had mothering, and you know, that was very different, and I think that, to a lesser or a higher degree, depending on the circumstances, we kind of fitted that role for some of the women that we had. My feelings about working with the women have always been feelings of empowerment, and the change I was just telling you about was a kind of leap forward with that because what we don’t say, is “I’ve done it; you can do it too”, we don’t say that, in fact, lots of women we’ve worked with don’t even know, they knew at the beginning, and then there was this whole group of women, over this period of time, and I realized that they didn’t know, they actually didn’t know at all, one of them walked into the office and had a picture of myself at 15 on the board over the playing fields at school with a red jumper on, Rebel as Always, with a fag in my hand, and she said, “Who’s that?”, and I said it’s me, and she went “Oh no!” And I said, “I was about two months pregnant there, maybe, about nine weeks, ten weeks, pregnant, over at school”, and I said, “That skirt just fitted me!” And she said, “Did you have a baby?” So, they didn’t know.’ (Susan) ‘I went along and I was probably quite cross about it. And there was a couple of women there, S. who was the founding member of SPAN, and K. who was the finance officer, and I think they saw something 68

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in me and they said instead of –​I think they thought that instead of saying, “You need help”, they asked me what I, where I’d come from and I said, “Well, I lived in London and I was a PA. I’m a speed typist, audio typist, I use computers, I do finance spreadsheets, I take shorthand”, and they said, “Oh, you can type and use computers and things?”, and I was like, “Yeah”, and they asked me to help them. So, I said, “Yes, of course I can”, and immediately I felt quite comfortable about this dynamic. This suited me. I think, looking back, they were really clever. I think I was empowered as a young single mum. I think some very clever people sort of empowered me. Made me realize I had power. And that’s how I think of empowerment ... . Lately, when I’ve been doing community organizer training, the people that are delivering that are challenging the notion that anybody can give anybody else power. And I kind of understand that, but what I haven’t got to is: what language do we use? Or, do we just say, “community organizing people have power”? Which is fine.’ (Anna) Here, community activists call upon and reconstruct the concept of empowerment. As attested to by the rest of their accounts, this process of politicization took place across paid and unpaid work where kin, colleagues and wider community overlapped. These accounts are generationally distinctive, as both are women who grew up during the 1960s and became politically active within grassroots community organizations in the 1990s. In contrast, most younger interviewees who worked in charities, social enterprises and small businesses spoke of increased economic inequality and punitive migration policies as leaving some mothers even more vulnerable, with their accounts relying on the framework of ‘self-​care’ and ‘prevention’. Susan’s and Anna’s accounts of empowerment illustrate the transformations facing community activism in the neoliberal city, including the fact that the strength-​based model they developed was less explicitly referred to by the younger women I interviewed, especially those running social enterprises. In the remainder of the chapter, I want to explore why the conditions for such a distinct praxis of maternal community power have become more limited.

Depletion: a tale of two cities Differential forms of depletion characterized the experiences of grass-​ roots maternal support workers. Exposure to funding cuts particularly left workers in community organizations and small-​and medium-​sized charities vulnerable to physical and emotional depletion. To a lesser extent, cuts to arts councils also affected some of the self-​employed mothers who funded part of their work this way. 69

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Shirin M. Rai, Catherine Hoskyns and Dania Thomas (2014) identify depletion as a way to recognize how society produces gendered harms through a lack of recognition for care work. They suggest a methodology to identify quantitatively at what level social reproduction becomes harmful to individuals and communities. Their main argument is that what causes harm is a lack of resources that enable individuals (especially women of colour), households and communities to replenish themselves. Such resources include activities that enable people to be mentally and physically healthy, earnings, and social networks. They also highlight that there is measurable deterioration in the condition of the social sustainability of social reproduction and identify three gendered sites where social reproduction can lead to harm: the embodied individual engaged in social reproduction; the household; and the community. At the level of the individual, women can feel physically exhausted, experience long-​term sickness or suffer sleeplessness. Social reproduction becomes unsustainable if individuals, households and communities do not have the resources they need to support the energies, skills and capacities needed. Underpinning their argument is a model of inflows and outflows to and from households and communities that deplete or repair their health and well-​being. Cuts left participants in community organizations and medium-​sized charities vulnerable to the physical and emotional depletion following failed funding applications, organizational restructurings and job threats. I heard accounts of a co-​worker’s death caused by stress following the restructuring and eventual closure of one organization. Here, Allie, a family support worker in a children’s centre, recounts how austerity cuts result in providing services for individual families perceived as ‘high risk’ and individual mothers with mental ill-​health, rather than long-​term group support: ‘Like I said, when I started eight years ago, I was just like, “Oh, God, imagine the amount of money.” It was just so much money; it was just like you just had it, you put all these groups in, you could do so much work, and now it’s just cut back, cut back. And not just within us, but you see it like other organizations like, “Oh, that doesn’t exist anymore. Oh, that’s gone now.” So, the stuff that you could rely on, they’re all seriously cutting back and cutting back. And like I said earlier about social care, the thresholds are much higher, they’re under a lot of pressure, so it’s frustrating for us when you think, “God, this family needs some more.” And then, it doesn’t meet their threshold. You sort of see a cycle where the families aren’t getting what they need to, I don’t think, as well. I think over the years, we’ve found more leaning towards that high-​end stuff and I think because the thresholds are so high, that a lot of stuff now, we’re doing a lot more work with that kind of high end, the families where they just won’t reach that 70

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threshold. So, I think that’s kind of, that’s definitely changed from when I started: less groups and more of the targeted work.’ (Allie) Similarly, Anna describes the destruction of welfare services as an attack that leaves parents unmoored from social structures: ‘I think their political will had changed. I think that the emphasis now is on mental health, but I also, in some senses, when I heard that we haven’t been funded, there was a relief in it. I think that wedge that the government, by not providing that kind of support, the government drives a wedge into relationships because, very often, the accommodation, if they’ve got a duty to house you, even if it’s a hostel, they very often separate the men from the women even further. So, you’ve got somebody, you know, there’s talk of like absent fathers and stuff, well, very often, they’re absent right from the beginning. It’s really difficult to become a partnership if you’re young anyway, so you haven’t got that on your side, and then when you get all the other changes that take place, that you’re actually forced to part, you can’t be a partner, a father. So, it’s that culture of blame that we live in as well, about absent fathers; well, the actual structure, the lack of support, exacerbates that.’ (Anna) Finally, combined cuts to charity budgets such as Big Lottery funding and city council cuts resulted in restructurings that meant some interviewees were faced with a choice of permanently shutting their services or working for free for significant periods of time. Here, Ann recounts how the community asset transfer resulted in both community managers being forced to accept a 50 per cent pay cut: Ann:

Linda: Ann:

So, a few years ago, this building, I don’t know whether you know what happened here, but the council are giving away all their community buildings because they don’t want them, because they’re liabilities, they’re falling apart, they’re very expensive to keep, £42,000 a year to keep this building. They call them community assets, Maud, but they are liabilities. They kept coming back and, in the end, they said to us, ‘Will you manage it on our behalf?’ So, we went away and we talked to our chair about that, and we talked about it amongst ourselves, and we decided, ‘Ok, we’ll do that. If you pay the bills and you pay the cleaning of the building, we’ll manage it for you.’ So, we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for. So we were working half-​time, managing the 71

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project and managing the building, and then they came to us and said, ‘Oh, please take the cut; otherwise, we’re going to board it up’, and we could not allow that to happen, we just couldn’t in all conscience. So, we did eventually agree to take on the community asset transfer. And at the same time, so, going back last November, our lottery funding came to an end, Jane and I took a 50 per cent pay cut, so we’re now, I’m working nine-​and-​a-​quarter hours a week. These forms of financial and emotional depletion leave workers faced with impossible choices. A third effect of the funding cuts to children’s centres was the loss of provision of an on-​site crèche that enabled lower-​income mothers to attend postnatal depression support groups, art therapy and other services in three of the organizations I researched and was match funded by the city council. Funding applications also had to budget for childcare separately, which would result in even more reduced provision and numbers of spaces. For the community-​run organizations, the cost of running an on-​ site crèche was one of the first places identified for strategic cost cutting. Despite my interviewees describing it as essential for children and mothers to thrive, it was perceived as disposable: ‘Even with partnering with children’s centres, we’ve found over the last two years that they’re less and less able to pay for the crèche because of their own funding cuts, and so we may have to look at a model where the funder also pays for the crèche, which is likely that they will be able to fund less groups because they’re paying for the crèche as well, whereas it used to be match funded through the children’s centre. Yeah, and I guess it’s an expensive thing to provide, you know, hugely necessary but expensive.’ (Katie) This process of ‘passing the buck’ of childcare illustrates how its cost is constructed as disposable. In turn, it becomes externalizable to individual organizations to compete for resources from an external funder. The closure and subsequent restructurings of two of the organizations I spoke with during the period of this research –​SPAN in 2016 and Hillfields Young Mothers Group in 2017 –​illustrate these processes as well as the resilience of these organizations post-​austerity. For Sada, a Somali Bristolian childminder and one of the founders of a volunteer-​run children’s activity club in an inner-​ city area, depletion was experienced in relation to the charitable funding her group could apply for: ‘Everyone keeps asking us to expand, the problem is there’s not enough space in this area –​we barely can hire that hall once a week 72

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because there’s no space, we had to renew it so many times because it’s free and they have to generate income for it, you know. So, the next step is to get funding, funding is the biggest issue because in case we’ve been told you have to pay the hall tomorrow, we haven’t got nothing to pay for it. So, funding is the biggest thing on the list now, so we’re just –​we’re getting our account sorted next few weeks, because now, with stay and play, we have people coming in and do activity with the kids, but we want something like structured, you know, like every week what’s running on the day –​and secure as well, yeah. We don’t want to be in a limbo and say, “Oh, are we going to close tomorrow?” Because it’s a great thing that is going on, and to be honest with you, we’re saving a lot of money for the police, for the council, for everyone, because these things cost and we’ve been doing it for one year for free.’ (Sada) Here, Sada articulates that her and her group’s free labour has been sustaining the community and that the time it takes to apply for funds is a full-​time job in itself. For this group relying on volunteers was the only option once their funding bid had been refused. The familiar story of women’s unpaid community work filling in the cracks between unpaid work done in households and that delivered on the market was typical of this group of interviewees. Some interviewees like Sada mediate the familialization of social reproduction by sustaining mothers, families and children for free. Studies have typically documented the externalization of the cost of social reproduction to individual households, but my research shows the toll of depletion is especially visible on small and volunteer-​run organizations in the most economically deprived areas. As Sada incisively articulates, their work generates considerable savings for the state. Participants were really aware that their capacities for community resilience and self-​reliance could be used by local states to justify and continue limited resources and infrastructure. My interviewees continued to do this unpaid or underpaid work out of a lack of alternatives. While some of these trends are well documented, including the disproportionate effects of austerity on minority racialized women’s organizations (Vacchelli et al, 2015), what they also signal is the depletion of small organizations’ scope for campaigning work since their capacities are mobilized to prioritize service provision and secure the next round of funding. In Bristol, the hollowing out of public infrastructure happened in incremental steps so that reaching a turning point that would provide the impetus for organizing collectively for jointly state-​funded maternal and childcare services was more difficult, in contrast to other cities, where neoliberal policies were rolled out more aggressively (Lonergan, 2015; Black, 2020). The depletion to women’s capacities to organize collectively to make claims on the state at the local level is undertheorized. Next, 73

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I explore how the maternal entrepreneurs working on the other side of the city experienced depletion.

Maternal entrepreneurs’ depletion The second group of workers that Maria Fannin and I interviewed were self-​employed women (all of whom except one were mothers) who sell self-​care services to new mothers in wealthy and gentrifying areas of the city. Some provided fitness services, yoga, art therapy and various alternative therapies that constitute and reproduce classed mothering cultures (Perrier and Fannin, 2016). While it would be easy to dismiss these privileged women’s perspectives when mapping the landscape of social reproduction in the city, their accounts illustrates how gender and wealth simultaneously divides and connect these workers. In both cases, their experiences of employment precarity and low pay were shaped by a gendered labour market and the under-​valorization of their care work, albeit with much less severe consequences than those for the group discussed earlier. Their access to other sources of personal income and to a market of wealthy mothers meant that they were much less vulnerable to the injuries of austerity. Some interviewees’ passion for ‘mothering the mothers’ was similar to a form of community mothering that explicitly politicized community. Julia (a group therapist for mothers suffering from postnatal depression) and Alison (a community yoga teacher) illustrate this vision: ‘In a way, at the moment, that’s what I’m most interested in, is postnatal because being a mum, like you, I just know that we are knackered. We need support. Women/​mothers are amazing and nothing would happen in the world [laughter] without mothers. We need to value them and we need to look after them. I think my main passion will be to focus on just helping mothers regain their energy and everything that they need in order to feel strong. Yes, that’s kind of really amazing and that’s a really good way of having contact with women and creating a relationship with people. For me, having a business isn’t just about making money, it’s about supporting women, supporting mums, supporting pregnant women, creating a network, creating a community.’ (Julia) ‘Something magical happens in groups, like in the breastfeeding drop-​ in we do on a Monday at Hampton House. Women who are sitting on their own in their lovely houses, or horrible houses or whatever houses they’ve got [laughter], they’re struggling, struggling. They come to this group. There’s five or six other women there. They have a cup of tea and a biscuit and a chat and they go, “Ooh, my baby doesn’t do 74

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this at home.” I just think it’s because we’re not supposed to be on our own. We’re supposed to be chatting and not giving all this attention to this baby like that. It’s a bit weird.’ (Alison) The vision of community mothering described by Jane and Anna earlier echoes. Alison and Julia’s philosophies, who were in their late thirties. A key difference between the two generations is the politicizing effect of experiences of injustice. These workers provides resources for a small number of similar middle and upper-​middle class mothers. The networks these women worked to produce –​such as the Positive Birth Group or the Group of Artist Mothers –​segregated them within distinctive maternal geographies. At the same time, these workers’ ‘resourcing’ work and its location within middle-​class cultures of self-​care meant that it sometimes overlapped with a grassroots tradition of empowering mothers. Interviewees were also struggling to combine self-​employment and care for young children, with many stating that the survival of their business was reliant on their partner’s income. In response, some of the women talked about forming childcare collectives and childcare swaps with other working mothers in their circles. The lack of affordable childcare even for these middle-​class mothers is a reminder that this is a point of potential connection. Nevertheless, the geographical and class divisions between them limited the ways in which these women could imagine organizing together. A significant factor in the continuation of these divisions is the resilience of the model of philanthropic support. A model that privileges ‘help’ continued to inform how many of these workers perceived their relationship with less privileged mothers. Some participants discussed the accessibility of their services to all mothers and especially their attempts to provide reduced-​cost classes or to secure funding to provide them through local NHS clinics. Gaya embodies this when she describes the charity she recently worked with that provides services to migrant mothers: ‘They have opened the Baby Bank Network and they are doing amazing, amazing work. I was reading the other day on Facebook that a midwife had been in touch with them with the Baby Bank Network because she had just had this woman giving birth and didn’t have anything for her baby, you know, like on a very –​How do you say? –​low income. And the team at the Baby Bank Network, which is all these volunteers, they put together a kit, you know, like a hospital bag, and it was delivered. And that made it possible for that woman to have everything she needed, which is great.’ (Gaya) Underpinning these interviewees’ attempts to think beyond the groups of middle-​class white mothers who constituted their clients was a model 75

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of maternal support as charity. Their concept of sisterly solidarity, then, was founded on liberal assumptions about charitable work, in contrast to the empowerment model evoked by Jane and Anna. The dominance of (neo)liberal philanthropy is one of the reasons why grassroots versions of community mothering have remained marginal today, and its resilience –​ both materially and discursively –​continues to hamper the formation of a more broad-​based maternal workers’ movement. Self-​employed workers and community workers experienced depletion to different levels. The withdrawal of city council services forced workers into ‘doing more with less’ and, in turn, this hollowed out the civic and political structures for maternal support in the city. The withdrawal of support for social reproduction produces classed and racialized harms, including leaving organizations vulnerable to closure and individuals exposed to unemployment and ill health. Self-​employed workers also included stories of exhaustion, which they attributed to clients and friends’ perception that their resources for care were bottomless. Helen recounts how offering discounts to her clients left her financially and emotionally depleted: ‘Anyway, that’s why I want it to be affordable. Basically, I’m not interested in rich, alternative middle-​class people or rich, conventional middle-​class people. That’s why I want to charge less. I want it to be affordable for everyone as a mum, providing those kinds of services, it’s too much now because it’s taking too much of my time. Because of that, it’s hard to give discounts because then I feel I’m giving everything and I’ve got nothing left for myself, and so you don’t want to do that either. I think as a therapist, you need to be able to give from a place that is comfortable and sustainable. I used to do that. I used to give discounts to people, but then I would just literally barely earn anything. Now, especially with the childcare issue, it’s not possible, so working from home is amazing. I can give discounts without feeling like I’m bleeding to death.’ (Helen) Quite a few self-​employed mothers like Helen felt cheated out of the expectation that self-​employment was going to be a solution to combining work and mothering. Yet, in contrast to earlier respondents who experienced more severe depletion, their experiences of depletion remained disconnected from their class advantage. Left out of their accounts, at least when we spoke, was a structural and differentiated analysis of the unsustainability of social reproduction. In the concluding section, I show that it is the language of ‘social reproduction’ that can make connections and stratification between these two groups visible.

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Conclusions The transformations to the organization of maternal care I observed produced classed and racialized depletions that limit the establishment of broad-​based maternal worker power in the city. I tracked processes of depletion on three different levels: first, the externalization of childcare provision to not-​for-​profit organizations; second, the increased marketization of maternal support services; and, finally, interviewees working for ‘free’ to keep these organizations afloat. The entrepreneurship of white, middle-​class women focused on resourcing mothers as individuals and small groups, and they were less likely to work for free. In turn, this left organizations run for and by working-​class and racialized minority women as more vulnerable, both to the erosion in services and to bearing the brunt of the task of opposing these restructurings. The possibility of a maternal workers’ movement across these categories needs to start from the recognition of the growing inequalities between groups of mothers and workers in the city. My analysis, by emphasizing the stratified nature of depletion, locates points of connection and division between these two groups of workers and emphasizes the conditions necessary for building solidarity. The privatization and familialization of social reproduction to individual households differentially affects poor and racialized minority mothers. Maternal entrepreneurs and ‘grassroots’ maternal support workers are on the frontline of crises of social reproduction that unequally deplete gendered workers. The wage cuts and unpaid ‘voluntary’ work undertaken by my interviewees to keep some of these small organizations running attest to these dynamics. These are mirrored to a lesser extent by the ways middle-​ class white maternal entrepreneurs whose businesses were not making enough money often continued working for free. My comparison of these two groups shows that tackling the divisions between poorer and wealthier communities is central to building a broader-​based movement with allies within and outside of these organizations that can have a voice in the city’s family and childcare policies. Although workers on both sides of the city had differentiated working conditions, all experienced the gendered devaluation of their care work in terms of how precarious and low their wages were in relative terms, alongside their conviction of the value of mothering the mothers to their respective communities. Bristol’s history and present as a city politicized about racialized and class inequalities has yet to translate into these groups of workers having sufficient power to create a local political infrastructure through which their voices can be legitimated. As some of the organizations I researched are filling in the cracks of the neoliberal childcare system by providing parenting groups and

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afterschool and holiday childcare for free or on the cheap, they constitute key infrastructure for building childcare struggles rooted in community grassroots organizing. My research shows that social reproduction scholars should pay more attention to the role of civil society in addition to the categories of market, household and state (Luxton and Bezanson, 2006). The precariousness of the community spaces shows that even long-​and hard-​won resources are not secure. Yet, neoliberal restructurings also produce contradictions that open up space for social movement building. In this particular case, despite the erosion of many interviewees’ collective and individual capacities to resist, their insistence that the sustenance of mothers, children and caregivers is a matter for the state endured. Analysing the depletion of social reproduction as stratified is an important way of holding local and national states accountable for long-​term harm. There were stark generational differences between women working in grassroots organizations: younger women born in the 1980s and after were more likely to work in social enterprises and to favour a clearer separation between their private and work lives as a strategy to cope with the risk of depletion, in contrast to the disruption of kinship ties that typified the community mothering of women in their 50s and 60s. The cross-​generational transmission of knowledge is urgent for these movements to continue, especially given the increasing share of social enterprises that emerged over the last ten years. For example, Bristol has a history of black and working-​class women’s welfare activism that is only recently attracting the attention of academics and local policymakers. In Bristol, the Single Parent Action Network project recently involved a group of community researchers to archive the organization’s documents into the Feminist Archive South and included public events and a mural to commemorate its legacies. Such cross-​generational projects play a central part in the survival of social reproduction feminism at a time of acute threats for the women’s voluntary sector organizations in the UK today (SPAN, 2020). The building of a broader maternal workers’ movement that can shape welfare regimes and childcare policies from below also requires the abandonment of a philanthropic model of maternal support. Compared to other parts of third sector women’s organizations such as Violence against Women and Girls, strength-​based models are less well established in organizations that support parents. Second, it requires adopting the language of social reproduction in everyday life: terms such as ‘depletion’, ‘community mothering’ and ‘public childcare’ need to become part of our everyday vocabulary and replace those of ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘work–​life balance’ that pit groups of mothers and workers against one another. As Catherine Rottenberg (2018: 104) writes: ‘neoliberal feminism is not only shorn of all obligations to less privileged women while actually producing new classes of disempowered women, it is also making alternative 78

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futures difficult to envision, since it leaves us stunned in the face of a fading lexicon of critique’. The analytics of social reproduction not only sustain our capacities to critique neoliberalism, but also help create the possibility of relationships of solidarity across divisions that are critical to wresting resources from capitalist states. As I discuss in Chapter 5, the praxis of maternal worker power involves both unlearning neoliberalism’s lexicon and relearning the language of social reproduction. The concept of depletion captures the structural embodied consequences of crises of social reproduction, and my research suggests two ways in which it needs refining. First, we need a concept of stratified depletion to capture how women are connected to and disconnected from one another in the sense that they are depleted differentially: while some experienced burnout across both the self-​employed and the charity/​NGO sector, it was more severe for those working in organizations facing cuts. Second, the concept of depletion also needs to reflect the ways in which women’s capacities to organize form part of this. This was especially apparent among organizations led by racialized minority women, who articulated being left out of citywide conversations and funding but having little time or sufficient political networks to tackle this. Many of the organizations in this chapter rely on convincing funders that they improve women’s and children’s economic, physical and mental well-​being. The shift away from campaigns to gain resources from local and central governments, and towards resourcing individual women, is one that some of these workers found increasingly difficult to reconcile. As a result, some of my interviewees in the not-​for-​profit sector talked about choosing to approach their work in a less emotionally and politically engaged way in order to survive. Surviving depletion is a significant part of the praxis of maternal worker power, which I discuss in Chapter 5.

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At the Table or Thrown under the Bus: Migrant Nannies’ Organizing and Childcare Coalitions during the COVID-​19 Pandemic

Introduction This chapter addresses the sidelining of organizing among migrant nannies in discussions of childcare struggles. There is wide variety in the make-​up of the informal childcare workforce, including babysitters, childminders, nannies and domestic workers. In the UK, nannying is historically associated with the employment of British women by upper-​middle-​class families, and some type of childcare labour continues to be constructed as more respectable than domestic labour. In the USA, nannying is more common and, as an example of the ongoing impact of these hierarchies, the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definitions of domestic worker omitted care work until recently (Anderson, 2000). There are complexities in defining what counts as in-​home childcare. The lack of data means that we know little about the composition of the nanny workforce in the UK and USA. In 2009, it was estimated that there were 63,000 nannies working in the UK (Adamson and Brennan, 2017). It is thought that the influx to the UK of migrants from European Union (EU) accession states after 2004 constituted a large proportion of women employed to care for children in private homes at a lower cost than the resident workforce (Anderson et al, 2006). Whereas the term ‘nanny’ used to be associated with a qualified childcare professional (Gregson and Lowe, 1994), more recently, it has shifted to refer to informally employed, low-​paid childcare/​domestic workers (Busch, 2012; Cox and Busch, 2016). In terms of organizing, nannies occupy a distinctive location as both on the margins of domestic workers’ struggles, as they have been 80

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perceived as professionalized until recently, and on the margins of childcare struggles led by workers in the formal sector and in centre-​based care. In this context, this chapter asks how migrant nannies’ organizing during the pandemic shift the conceptualization of childcare struggles and the possibility of establishing solidarities between stratified workers. I start this chapter with a discussion of how nannies’ relationships with their employers have been framed through the lens of intimate exploitation to illustrate their differential access to the categories of mother and worker. In the second part of the chapter, I use the lens of stratified reproduction (Colen, 1995) to show the hypervisibility of middle-​class women’s reproductive work and invisibilization of nannies and home childcare workers in media coverage during the pandemic. The centring of middle-​class mothers’ experiences of exhaustion hampers a much-​needed discussion about the potential connections between parents, nannies and other care workers. In the last part of the chapter, I draw on interviews with two worker-​led, grassroots organizations during the pandemic in the UK and the US to show how they challenge current conceptualizions of childcare struggles. This chapter also makes a theoretical intervention into the study of care workers’ organizing. I first argue that the ways in which nannies experience relationships with employers as adversarial has been undertheorized by literature which assumes that, on the whole, personal encounters with parents, communities and the public are ‘the ace up the sleeves’ that distinguishes care workforces (Cobble, 2010; McAlevey, 2016). While this characterization resonated with the Sydney childcare workers’ alliances with parents, it contrasted with nanny organizers, who perceived employers predominantly as sources of fear and economic vulnerability. Dorothy Cobble’s definition of intimate unions as emphasizing relationships between co-​workers, care recipients and communities has helped to unsettle a conception of worker power that privileges adversariality and of worker conscientization that centres individual rights; yet, I show that more nuance with regard to how we characterize this intimacy is needed. For example, the accounts of childcare workers in Sydney emphasized wage disparity with parents as a divisive issue, and some of the NGO workers in Bristol used a clear separation between themselves and their communities as coping mechanisms for depletion. Second, I show that dur ing the pandemic, the high levels of unemployment and homelessness experienced by migrant nannies, shifted the terrain of organizing. As the demand for aid intensified, my interviewees described their role in delivering aid as competing with long-​term goals of employment legislation reform and building worker power in their respective organizations. Mutual aid was central to their definitions of building worker power but perceived as less radical by some participants. Even though their praxis centred both community and 81

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work-​based approaches to organizing, there is still a tendency to hierarchize the two terrains in sociological discussions. Third, I show the ways in which nanny organizers entered cautiously into childcare coalitions with low-​waged parents and other childcare workers, as they anticipated that their perspectives would be sidelined. Discussions of childcare movements tend to emphasize the importance of fostering more intimate unions, where strong alliances between co-​workers, communities and parents are mobilized to generate wide public support. In turn, I argue that affects such as fear, vulnerability and cautiousness need to inform discussions of worker-​led childcare movements if they are to reflect the specificities of migrant home workers.

Context As lockdowns were imposed in many Global North countries in March 2020, it was low-​paid migrant and working-​class women who kept not only caring for the sick, children and elderly, but also working in supermarkets, driving buses and organizing mutual food aid. In the UK, the majority of women under 65 who died of COVID-​19 in 2020 worked in social care or were home care workers (Bear et al, 2020). The nannies looking after the children of the middle and upper-​middle classes during the pandemic not only faced increased risks because their employers refused to adhere to lockdown rules, but many also lost their jobs and became homeless or stranded in between national borders at the mercy of their employers. At the same time as lip service was being paid to the importance of key workers, including migrant nannies, their economic and symbolic devaluation continued. The trope of ‘angels’, ‘heroes’ and ‘sacrifice’ deployed to glorify key workers is consistent with a long history of women’s work being naturalized as virtuous in order to displace the question of its economic value. In the US, more than 90 per cent of domestic workers had lost their jobs by late March 2020 (NDWA, 2020). In the US, the Coronavirus Care Fund was established by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and distributed emergency financial aid to more than 40,000 nannies and domestic workers of up to US$400 one-​off payments. In the UK, organizations such as Kalaayan and Voice of Domestic Workers set up their own emergency relief funds in the face of migrant informal sector workers being excluded from UK government relief packages. Nannies’ and nanny organizers’ accounts challenge the assumptions about solidarity building made from the perspectives of workers in the formal sector. Their location as working in their employers’ homes, migrant status and distinctive relations with parents as employers challenges some of the assumptions about solidarities. As the fastest growing group of childcare workers in the Global North, as well as those who have the least 82

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employment protections, transforming migration laws and access to visas have been a key target of their organizing. Hiring nannies was described as a form of hypocrisy by working-​class feminists in a Californian feminist magazine in 1971 (Dinner, 2010), calling out the ways in which upper-​ middle-​class women could buy themselves out of the work of organizing for public childcare. Middle-​class women’s economic privilege not only removes them from debates around the affordability of childcare this group argued, but also means that they are least likely to be politicized regarding the work conditions of nannies. Given the larger numbers of nannies being employed today and the changing class and ethnic differences between employers and employees (Cox and Busch, 2018), there is a continuing demand for domestic workers to be included in some employment legislation, especially in the US. Notwithstanding these transformations, I show how the lens of ‘intimate exploitation’ highlights the enduring significance of the reproduction of classed and racialized hierarchies in the hiring of nannies.

Nanny–​employer relationships: intimate exploitation Scholars of domestic work have long argued that domestic workers have a privileged perspective on the ways capitalistic thinking tries to conceal the family as a space of economic relations because of their employment in the home. This is precisely why their own kinship ties are invisibilized and why their intimate status with their employers is deployed to mask these contradictions. Mary Romero (1988: 341) describes this as ‘the dialectic of intimacy and domination’, whereby employers often try to play down power relations through gift giving and referring to domestic workers as members of the family or friends. Nannies and domestic workers have variously sought to resist these forms of oppression by seeking control over the work process (including how they care for children), seeking family reunification rights, organizing for better pay and conditions, and withholding emotional labour. Studies of migrant and racialized minority nannies highlight that their location within their employers’ homes and outside employment legislation, coupled with classed and ‘racialized’ international divisions of labour, are key dimensions in analysing processes of exploitation. These are rich archives from which to reconsider whether maternal worker power should centre interdependence. The specific national cultures of home working, hiring and employment legislation, as well as histories of domestic workers’ organizing, shape nannies’ and domestic workers’ agency to negotiate better conditions. Even when nannies struggle to have autonomy over their work, the fact that some often refuse to carry out domestic labour against employers’ expectations that they will do housework, laundry and cooking alongside looking after children 83

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is a consistent finding across studies (Le Petitcorps, 2018; Cox and Busch, 2018). The lack of recognition for domestic workers’ employment rights is also apparent by the fact that most employers express a strong preference for hiring employees who do not belong to a union (Anderson, 2000). Hiring practices based on essentialist ethnic, racial and religious stereotypes reproduce hierarchies within the international division of childcare labour, where certain groups are constructed as better employees because of their imagined patient, loving or submissive qualities (Hondagneu-​Sotelo and Avila, 1997). Parreñas’ (2005) suggests that in the US Filipinos are especially sought after by employers because of their perceived docility, acceptance of lower wages and higher qualifications than Latina workers. Third, migrant nannies are also constructed as ideal live-​in workers who can work long, unsociable hours because they are ‘freed’ from the constraints of their own family responsibilities (Arat Koç and Villasin, 2001). It is nannies’ migration status that produces their economic vulnerability and disposability as a workforce, as Nicky Busch (2012: 541) writes: Low pay, low status, and ethnic and social class stratification have, then, been identified as contributing to in-​home childcare becoming a ‘migrant’ sector in the UK and elsewhere around the world. Migrants are seen as suitable workers to perform childcare in private homes because of perceptions that they have fewer options than native-​ born workers. Second, scholars of transnational nannying and mothering highlight that nannies’ and domestic workers’ own kin relationships and mothering are both invisibilized and sacrificed in favour of their care for their employers’ children. Jackie Cock’s (1980) classic study of South African domestic workers highlighted how employers were often unaware of their employees also being mothers of small children. The consequences of this invisibility are that ‘The tension between the domestic workers’ roles of mother and wage-​earner are aggravated by the fact that blacks are in the worst position as regards the provision of day-​care facilities for the pre-​school child’ (Cock, 1980: 54). The occlusion of domestic workers’ mothering is explicitly tackled by research that focuses on migrant nannies’ identities as transnational mothers, including the distinctive practices they develop to nurture children and maintain intimacy with their kin at a distance. They reframe loving mothering as wage earning, as their remittances can help pay tuition fees and hope to secure children’s educational future (Parreñas, 2005). Some authors draw attention to the ways in which children and mothers suffer from this separation, including its effects on mental and physical health, and long-​lasting feelings of loss and abandonment (Hochschild, 2003; Parreñas, 2003; Arat-​Koç, 2006). In contrast, some see the separation of children in 84

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Global South countries from their mothers who work in affluent households in the Global North in less deterministic terms, emphasizing the extent to which women can make choices to work and mother from a distance even within these unequal geopolitical relations. They contend that family reunification policies and depictions of painful separations between women migrants and their children often reproduce Eurocentric, middle-​class and heterosexist constructions of mothering and families. For example, Bloch (2017) theorizes her Moldovan interviewees’ reliance on othermothers back home to take care of their children as shaped, but not fully explained, by global transformations of labour markets and migration flows. She draws attention to the continuities of these kin practices with earlier practices related to economic hardship already widespread in Southern Moldova (Bloch, 2017). The argument that transnational mothering transforms earlier kin practices that resemble othermothering suggests that there are important commonalities between community mothering described in the US by Collins (1994) and transnational mothering. Lynne Macdonald’s (2011) conceptualization of nannies as ‘shock absorbers’ for middle-​class, working mothers in the Boston area, while drawing attention to the power inequities between them, places too much emphasis on the establishment of a working partnership –​such as mutual recognition, respect and valuing the impact of the nannies on their children’s lives –​as a solution. By locating the establishments of more ‘equitable’ relationships within individuals’ capacities, we lose sight of the ways in which they are overdetermined by immigration frameworks, labour laws and overlapping systems of class and ‘race’ oppression. The enhancement of their employers’ class status is central to understanding this dynamic: The employment as a paid domestic worker … facilitates status reproduction, not only by maintaining status objects, enabling the silver to be polished and the clothes to be ironed, but also by serving as a foil to the lady of the house. The hired productive worker is reproducing social beings and sets of relationships that are not merely her own but also deeply antagonistic to her own interests. Her presence emphasizes and reinforces her employer’s identity –​as a competent household manager, as middle-​class, as white –​and her own as its opposite. (Anderson, 2000: 19–​20) It is both racialized hierarchies and migration status that curtails these women’s rights as mothers and workers. Such analysis supports struggles to transform labour laws and citizenship and immigration systems that perpetuate exploitation. One important example has been attempts to make the employer’s home –​the employee’s work site –​come under the domain of labour regulation. At the time of writing, neither the UK nor 85

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the US has ratified the ILO’s convention C-​189 on the rights of domestic workers that would formalize access to sick pay, time off and minimum wages (WIEGO, 2020). This body of literature strongly calls into question the grounds on which parents and home workers might come together in addressing the privatization of social reproduction. While it may be possible to connect the struggles of low-​income mothers with early years educators and third sector maternal support workers, migrant workers’ curtailed access to the categories of mother and worker poses a vast set of challenges to establish commonality. Next, I turn to the invisibilization of migrant and home workers in media coverage of the childcare crisis during the pandemic.

Whose childcare crisis? The coverage of the childcare crisis during the pandemic across UK broadsheets and beyond was dominated by stories of middle-​class working mothers’ struggles to manage working and caring full-​time. The unequal division of labour between men and women, and fears about middle-​class women’s stalled careers and promotion gaps in the near future, were the main sources of middle-​class feminist anxiety. The ways in which the childcare crisis was characterized as the ‘death of the working mother’ and a ‘disaster for feminism’ (Lewis, 2020) reproduced a white, liberal, middle-​class feminism that centres individual professional success and equality with men. The mainstream media coverage and numerous testimonies about the challenges of working from home were disconnected from the lesser reportage about those who work in other people’s homes, thus missing the opportunity for reflecting on the pandemic childcare crisis from contrasting perspectives. The centring of gender inequalities in household labour, home schooling and childcare reproduced a story of lockdown told from dual-​earner, heterosexual couples’ perspectives. The frame of stratified reproduction explains this simultaneous invisibilization of waged home workers and hypervisibility of middle-​class women’s reproductive labour, highlighting how the devaluation of reproductive labour is differentiated across class, migration and ‘race’. In turn, middle-​class women’s experiences of exhaustion remained disconnected from waged childcare workers’ experiences of pre-​pandemic exhaustion and their heightened health risks during the pandemic. The intensification of reporting on middle-​class mothers working and caring from home during the pandemic shows a turning point when the care crisis reached higher levels of public visibility. One blog hosted by UK organization Feminist Fight Back made precisely these connections: The pandemic has also meant that people (usually men) who would normally get someone else (usually a woman) to do their housework, 86

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cooking and childcare for them are suddenly having to experience what it is like to do this work themselves. I hope that the sudden realisation that this is skilled, difficult and tiring work will generate greater respect for the people who do it day in, day out. I also hope that it prompts us to rethink even more fundamentally how work is shared out and our society is organised. Do we really want to live in a world where some people spend all day looking after children, and other people spend all day staring at a computer screen? There were few discussions of how lockdown measures assumed that members of the same family shared national borders, and there was neglect of the household as a space of paid work for nannies and other workers (Grewal et al, 2020). Even in reports that explicitly analysed how the privatization of childcare is not in the interests of children and parents,1 there was no consideration of the impact of COVID-​19 on informal childcare workers.2 A Trades Union Congress blog discussing the impact of the COVID-​19 childcare crisis on working mothers,3 while stressing how single mothers are particularly economically vulnerable if they reduce hours or lose their jobs, showed little attention to how the group ‘working mothers’ needs disaggregating. Public discussions of the impact on childcare workers during the pandemic focused on the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for workers in nurseries, the way nurseries in the most deprived neighbourhoods were most at risk of closure and, in one report, how childminders were most at risk of falling through the cracks. Missing were discussions of how lockdown sensitized women to the value of other women’s care work, the differences between babysitters’ and teachers’ wages, and the redistribution of that labour beyond individual households. The construction of the childcare crisis remained limited to demands for male partners to do more childcare or employers to recognize the effects of lockdown in their promotion procedures, with little analysis of the differentiated vulnerability of some care workers and demands for state support for the most vulnerable workers not eligible for furlough. It was white, middle-​class women’s double burden, and laments about the injustice of the childcare system, that were unsurprisingly heard loudest given that they have the ‘cultural capital required to be orators to their own suffering’ (Deutsch, 2020). Addressing the blind spots created by a partial definition of the childcare crisis means not only centring different accounts of it, but also theorizing solidarity, depletion and intimate unions from these perspectives. I seek to redress some of this invisibilization through the accounts of nanny organizers during the pandemic and show that their distinctive positions not only unsettle the pandemic childcare crisis as primarily about gender inequality, but also challenge the assumptions of concepts of solidarity used in the literature on care worker organizing. In the following case studies, 87

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I explore how nannies’ visions of childcare coalitions and solidarities with co-​workers, parent-​employers and others in the childcare sector were shaped by their location as disposable migrant workers, often outside of employment protections. I start with a discussion of how the pandemic shaped the organizing of nannies and the development of childcare coalitions before and during the pandemic.

Nanny organizing during the pandemic I researched how two grassroots organizations who work with migrant nannies and domestic workers responded during the pandemic. The International Domestic Workers Federation (2020) has called for the enforcement of paid sick leave and adequate compensation in the event of dismissal, and the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO, 2020) lobbied for the inclusion and recognition of the domestic workers sector in emergency relief programmes. Whereas the UK and the US saw very little relief for the informal sector, the organizing and lobbying of domestic workers and their allies in Latin America resulted in 30 policies across ten countries that sought to recognize and protect workers in the informal care economy (Grugel and Lines, 2020). I conducted an analysis of two organizations’ constitutions, organizing resources and websites, as well as seven virtual interviews with nanny worker organizers and one full-​time organizer in November and December 2020. I asked them about how they became involved in these organizations, what the specificities of organizing during a pandemic were like and daily challenges, and to reflect on their involvement in childcare coalitions that brought together unions, parents and workers in the formal childcare sector. More interviews were planned but were impacted by the January lockdowns in the UK, including school closures. I supplemented this with analysis of media coverage of the organizations and published interviews and think pieces written by some of their lead organizers. The Matahari Women’s Worker Centre4 is a Boston-​based organization led by nannies, domestic workers and home care workers in Massachusetts founded 20 years ago. During the pandemic, they created their own workers’ resources, including a letter to nannies and their employers, COVID-​19 safety tips, information on the domestic workers’ Bill of Rights, a toolkit for domestic workers, and a pledge for employers to keep paying their wages. These resources contained both radical education for home care workers about their rights and entitlements, and resources aimed at employers about their responsibilities including definitions of a fair employer. Following a listening survey of their members which showed that a high proportion were experiencing severe mental health issues, they formed a healing justice committee. Their organizing during the pandemic included weekly webinars, assemblies for new and existing members, training, and 88

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national campaigns with other advocacy groups in the US. In March 2020, a large funding campaign called the Coronavirus Care Fund was launched by the National Domestic Workers Alliance to raise US$4 million. The fund was distributed through smaller organizations and enabled workers to get access to safety equipment, buy cleaning supplies and access sick pay for themselves and families. The Nanny Solidarity Network is a smaller and newer London-​based grassroots organization that has over 100 migrant nanny members, many of whom are from Brazil, and was founded in March 2020. Since then, they have raised £10,800, formed a collective with a constitution and worked with other organizations to deliver English-​language training, welfare support and immigration/​employment legal advice.

Childcare coalitions: migrant workers at the table or thrown under the bus? There is a long history of domestic workers’ organizing that documents their distinctive praxis, such as lobbying for legislation on racist discrimination, employment legislation and family separation, as well radical education, mutual associations and cooperatives (Boris and Nadasen, 2008). As argued by Erica Lawson (2013) in the Canadian context and Colette Le Petitcorps (2018) in France, domestic workers’ struggles for labour rights and for citizenship need to be theorized as maternal activism since the desire to care for their own children and to provide for them economically through remittances is often one of the driving forces behind their activism. The campaign of the seven Jamaican mother domestic workers who faced deportation from Canada in 1979 illustrates the role of financial maternal responsibilities in attempts to resist the state’s deportation orders. This campaign spearheaded a nationwide campaign that resulted in changed immigration laws and access to residency (Lawson, 2013). Importantly, the deportation orders were based on the erasure of domestic workers’ children as a requirement for entering Canada. Demands for residency, recognition of migrant nannies’ existing educational qualifications and access to public childcare for their children are some of the issues around which childcare coalitions bringing together formal and informal workers have developed (Findlay, 2017). Based on two decades of participatory research with Filipino domestic workers in Vancouver, Pratt (2020) emphasizes the barriers to building such coalitions. Many domestic/​ home care workers from the Philippines devalue childcare themselves and hope to gain different employment as soon as they obtain permanent residency in Canada. This leaves feminist organizations in a contradictory position of wanting to both revalue feminized childcare and domestic work, and mobilize to have migrants’ existing skills and qualifications recognized. On the other hand, the growth of intersectoral organizing among different 89

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migrant workers, including domestic workers and agricultural workers, highlights the salience of citizenship status for building solidarity over and above mobilizing as childcare workers. One significant example of broad-​ based childcare coalition building between migrant nannies, centre-​based care workers and parents is the work of Vancouver organization Grassroots Women (Rosen et al, 2017), which brought together childcare workers, parents and nannies to campaign for universal childcare from an anti-​ imperialist perspective. Its materialist analysis of the childcare crisis allowed them to investigate the root causes of inequality through consciousness raising, campaigns and radical education, which became key mechanisms for building solidarity for over a decade. Nannies and in-​home care workers have historically been more likely to join coalitions with other migrant and informal sector workers, including domestic workers, cleaners and sex workers, rather than childcare workers. The hierarchization of the childcare workforce related to its differentiated conditions, pay and rate of professionalization constitutes an important barrier to organizing coalitions. Nevertheless, regional and national childcare coalitions in the UK, Canada and the US that have emerged since 2015 are attempting to include in-​home migrant workers and some of their demands. One of the organizers of the Nanny Solidarity Network in London joined the Post Pandemic Childcare Coalition, which brings together parent childcare campaigners, policy researchers, advocates and union representatives. Formed in June 2020, the work of the coalition has revolved around sharing knowledge from past successful campaigns and developing a manifesto that represents the different interests of its members, including campaigners, parents and unions representing both formal and informal sectors (Post Pandemic Childcare Coalition, 2020). Its manifesto explicitly states wanting to tackle how parents and workers are being pitted against one another. However, one member of the coalition expresses reservations about what it can achieve in the near future for migrant nannies given ‘hostile environment’ laws: ‘For the record, I think the Childcare Coalition is amazing, but if we are trying to get something through Parliament, there is nothing we can really say unless hostile environment policies are changed without throwing half the sector under the bus because calls to regularize the sector without migration policies being relaxed just means that wealth gaps between settled-​status nannies and those with unsettled status would just widen ... . The regulation movement’s push for nannies to be recognized as professionals and introduce CPD and pay scales, all of which would benefit the sector, but their rhetoric that nannies who are not regulated are unsafe plays on racialized and xenophobic stereotypes of dangerous migrant workers, when more privileged 90

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workers are finding themselves carrying out that work, they seek to ascribe value to childcare work but in doing so throw half the sector under the bus. A coalition is the only way we will see change because from a pessimistic point of view, government doesn’t care about low-​ paid migrant workers or working-​class families trying to make ends meet, so I think we will have a lot more weight if privileged people with economic power stand with us.’ By elaborating on how the stratification of the nanny workforce along migrant and non-​migrant lines contributes to a divided workforce, this participant suggests that the coalition needs to centre fighting for less punitive migration policies, such as regards ‘no recourse to public funds’, as well as the decriminalization of ‘illegal’ migrants. One of the organizers of the Matahari Women Workers’ Center shared similar reflections about the divergent interests of parents and workers as part of their work with the ‘Care that Works’ coalition: ‘It’s a great initiative that is bringing together community groups and unions organized by a group called Community United, so it represents community providers, unions and childcare centres and organizations like ours. A big project was –​pre-​pandemic –​on non-​standard hours of care, partnering unions representing women with non-​standard working hours and unionized childcare workers, and figuring out how to connect those two, especially when there was such a pushback from au pair host families and family employers after there were restrictions, after they were told they had to follow the law basically. There was a lot of narrative effort from parents and mothers to say, “This hurts working mums”, and so we had to do a lot of narrative work to push back and say, “Well, yes, there’s a childcare crisis and we can’t solve it on the backs of young immigrant workers.” And so I think a space like Care that Works was really important there in showing that, yes, we are committed to try to figure out what is in the US is a childcare affordability crisis in the long term but that workers very much have to be at the table.’ This organizer fully understands how women with low-​paid jobs with unsociable and inflexible hours are pushed into difficult circumstances, and welcomes the potential of collective discussion between these groups, but emphasizes that migrant workers’ interests have to be represented in those discussions. For her coalition building around childcare requires seeing not only that women are pitted against each other by the childcare crisis, but also that migrant workers have historically been the ones disproportionately harmed by this arrangement and that any solutions needs to foreground their voices. My participants’ approach to coalition building was to speak louder 91

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in order to mitigate against the voices of parent-​employers and other more established early years sector advocates dominating the conversation. In both cases, these organizers’ approach to parent–​worker alliances and alliances with the formal sector were cautious, while recognizing the possibilities offered by alliances with more powerful sector stakeholders, for example, in terms of their political networks and access to funds.

Capitalizing on fear: employers and COVID-​19 contracts Building worker power across communities usually assumes that this means solidarity between parents and workers. My interviewees reported that for many nannies, their relationships with parents as employers during the pandemic significantly worsened, and they faced new forms of vulnerability shaped by unequal power relations. As the pandemic heightened the demand for live-​in nannies, which were seen as safer by parents-​employers, there was mounting evidence globally that domestic workers faced heightened restrictions on their movements and ability to see their families, and that many faced unemployment, homelessness and death (Randall, 2020). My participants recounted stories of employers breaking lockdown rules and being careless over hygiene and social-​distancing rules, which some said they felt more able to challenge because of their belonging to a workers’ organization. One interviewee was asked to come into work after her employer family returned from a trip abroad without quarantining. Another was asked to look after a friend’s child without considering the heightened risk of transmission for the nanny. The pandemic heightens vulnerabilities for those working in their employer’s homes that were exposed to the risks employers took when disregarding social-​distancing and isolation measures. In one of these interviews, Anastancia Cuna –​a Boston-​based domestic worker organizer –​identifies fear of losing one’s job as the biggest challenge facing worker-​organizers during the pandemic. She describes this as employers capitalizing on the economic conditions of the pandemic: ‘Domestic workers have been exploited because we are women, we are immigrants, we are black and we have been invisible. Now, in the pandemic, some employers are taking this opportunity to exploit us even more. This nanny is now working more hours than before but without getting paid more. She is not only doing childcare work, she is also cooking, doing the laundry and ironing for the whole household. Not only that, but the employer is not social distancing herself even though she is asking her nanny to distance from her own family. The employer is having visitors to the house, and the nanny is expected to tend to their needs as well. This is why we have to keep fighting 92

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for domestic workers because, unfortunately, employers will still take advantage of workers.’5 The hierarchies of safety that this quote illuminates demonstrates how stratified reproduction plays out in the context of a pandemic. Similarly, one of the London-​based nanny organizers did not expect solidarity from any parent-​employers: ‘There are not many people who want to hear us. No one cares. I’m not optimistic about bosses holding hands with us; the fact they are having an easy life when we are around benefits them. My bosses would never support something like this – the Solidarity network – because they will be fine; lots of people are looking for jobs, so they would replace me in two minutes.’ Both organizations reported the consequences of a heightened climate of fear, but with little employment protections for undocumented migrants, they also appeal to employers’ consciences to treat nannies fairly. Matahari developed a letter addressed to both nannies and their employers to guide a conversation about safely returning to work that was available on its website: ‘This template can help nannies and employers talk honestly about how you will commit to each other’s safety and wellbeing, reach agreements and put them down in writing so that you can refer back to them regularly. This template should be used as an addendum to a standard employment agreement. In Massachusetts, nannies have a legal right to a written agreement in a language that they understand. A written agreement is a great way for both employers and nannies to lay out clear expectations about the job that can provide guidance throughout their employment relationship. All agreements should, at a minimum, incorporate the legal rights to which nannies are entitled, including the right to overtime pay, days of rest, protection against discrimination, sick days, and potential eligibility for worker’s compensation because of a work-​related injury or illness, among others.’ The conversation guide includes the discussion of procedures adopted to reduce exposure when someone tests positive, transport and entering work routines, and how to support children’s emotional well-​being. It also includes a section recommending employers commit to higher rates of pay during the pandemic and agree to give nannies paid time off for sickness or for relatives’ sickness. These statements are underpinned by a vision of an empowered and respected worker who can demand such a conversation, ask difficult questions and request a signed safety agreement. While many 93

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nannies’ and domestic workers’ relationships with their employers fall short of the relationships envisioned in these resources and contracts, they produce resources for building more egalitarian relationships at the individual and collective levels. Using the language of rights acknowledges the differential vulnerabilities between nannies and their employers, and foregrounds a framework to circumvent fear. During the pandemic, Matahari centred not only a redistribution of respect, but also greater wage equity, as a necessary part of building a more egalitarian relationship. Contracts can play an important role in securing employees’ rights; here, it formed a significant part of Matahari’s praxis for conscientizing both workers about their rights and employers about their responsibilities. Contracts – often absent in the literature on relational labour organizing – refigure what counts as intimate union organizing, such as emphasizing that it can be a praxis of collective care that ethical employers can take part in.

Aid versus building migrant worker power in a pandemic For both organizations, the first wave of the pandemic involved the large-​ scale raising (in the case of the London-​based network) and distribution of aid to workers who had lost their jobs, as well as designing fair and fast processes to do so. In both cases, interviewees discussed the distribution of aid as conflicting with their aims of building worker power and advocacy, as they came into contact with a larger workforce. In Massachusetts, a moratorium was passed on all housing evictions until 17 October, but the pressure on workers to continue paying rent after that deadline passed were on organizers’ minds as I spoke to them in December 2020. One of the US organizers recounted how aid distribution was followed by a dynamic drive to engage workers, which was well attended because unemployed workers had more time than usual and a desire for community: ‘We’ve always been an organizing organization and not direct service, and suddenly we were giving cash assistance, and a lot of it in large parts through the National Domestic Workers Alliance. There was a lot of consensus amongst worker leaders that this is what we had to do in this moment, so I think that was critical, but it wasn’t necessarily something we were totally prepared for or had experience doing, and I think when someone’s first interaction with us is receiving cash, then it does mean we do more work trying to situate them about how we are trying to build power. So, we’re able to move people from the funds to engaging with us. Many of the people who have been coming to “know your rights” training or came to our Zoom assemblies, their first contact was through the fund, so it seems, like, really important for building community and 94

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getting engaged with us as a place to grow and build power, so after the initial challenge of fund distribution, it’s been pretty successful.’ This difficulty played out very differently for the London network –​a newer organization with different immigration policies –​whose organizers found that some nannies who applied for aid perceived the organization as a charity rather than community worker-​led. According to one nanny organizer, it was also compounded by workers’ fears for their safety: ‘The most challenging thing is getting people involved. Some people, I don’t think they want to be involved, they don’t wanna get involved because they are scared and they don’t think we are nannies, they think we are just an organization that gives funds and that they might be at risk if they spoke to us. They don’t see us, me and the other organizers, are also nannies. When you build a network, they don’t see people, they see an organization that provides help. It’s quite difficult distinguishing between an organization and the people. That’s why we have organized Zoom calls: no one needs to be scared, everyone can talk here.’ Organizers articulated how donations and aid were needed because of governments’ silence and inaction; they saw aid as temporary firefighting, while keeping their focus on their longer-​term goals of changing employment and immigration policies. The London-​based participants I spoke with reported that hardly any of their members had been furloughed –​with those who had being registered nannies. In the January 2021 lockdown, nannies continued to work and all childcare settings remained open. Organizations were forced to respond to the demand for aid during the pandemic through a pragmatic lens. These vulnerabilities were further exacerbated as undocumented immigrants were left out of COVID-​19 relief packages, driving the need for mutual aid initiatives. Given that the pandemic did away with the well-​documented organizing that nannies have historically done in public parks, as well as shame demonstrations outside of employers’ homes (Boris and Nadasen, 2008), both organizations developed methods and resources to continue building worker power virtually, and for holding the state to account for its disappearing act. As the balance tipped towards more of their energies being focused on mutual aid for members at the end of 2020, their capacity to continue working on both fronts –​distributing welfare and building worker power –​was extremely stretched.

Conclusions The invisibility of migrant nannies and domestic workers reproduced a narrow definition of the childcare crisis during the pandemic. My research 95

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suggests that organizers developed strategies for precisely less intimate relationships with their employers, which adds nuance to the call for more intimate unions. For example, contracts were deployed as an important tool to mitigate nannies’ vulnerabilities related to their in-​home or migrant status. The question of intimacy with whom needs to be centred when feminist researchers call for a more intimate labour movement. The assumptions about building cross-​sector solidarity need to be thought through carefully if more worker-​led migrant organizations are to form meaningful coalitions with parents and other childcare workers. Organizations were focused on building solidarity with other national and international domestic workers organizations and unions. In contrast to the previous case studies, where the language of social reproduction was largely absent in my interviewees’ accounts and campaigns, the terminology of ‘worker power’ and ‘depletion’, and descriptions of how workers are pitted against one another, were much more visible in the ways that nanny organizers articulated their demands to governments and in their published analyses of the disposability of migrant workers. The fear evoked by interviewees about their employers or co-​workers’ employers shaped their accounts of solidarity. This constitutes a challenge to the ways in which childcare movements have centralized definitions of solidarity as predominantly meaning building alliances with parents and communities. In contrast to studies of migrant nannies’ organizing that query what is to be gained by portraying relations between women as antagonistic and choose to explore the potential of terms such as ‘critical empathy’ and ‘complex connections’ (Pratt, 2003, 2006; Pratt and Johnston, 2017), I argue that oppositional affects continue to receive too little attention in the conceptualization of the solidarity-​building strategies of care workforces. Migrant workers’ abilities to formally unionize would improve their conditions and rights by securing collective bargaining rights. By pursuing worker-​controlled representation, such unions can ‘mobilize domestics based on their status as workers, thereby recovering the salience of class in the new economy’ (Ally, 2005: 203). Service organizations that employ nannies centrally, rather than employer-​parents doing so individually, would lessen the potential for exploitation and increase routes for unionization (Pratt, 2003; Cox, 2011). The strategies of building worker power through more formal unionization and community-​based organizing are both equally necessary; yet, as I have discussed throughout, there are few frames that attempt to bring those modes of political organizing together without hierarchizing them. The praxis of the migrant nannies and nanny organizers I interviewed was shaped by the pandemic context of increased isolation and cataclysmic economic vulnerability for their members. Similar to the Australian case, it is difficult to tell this story without falling back into the trap of producing 96

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their praxis as either oppositional or relational. So, instead, I want to draw attention to how they crafted a distinctive praxis that limited this vulnerability. In the context of urgent demand for distributing aid to members, my interviewees said that their capacities for building worker power activities and changing state legislation and employment laws were very depleted. This suggests that discussions of intimate unions need to centre separateness, not just closeness and proximity. Nannies understandably expected little solidarity from employers, so shifting and widening the definitions of intimate unions to include other community groups, unions and low-​paid workers is even more necessary if migrant nannies are to be at the table in building strategic wedges around childcare. Nannies’ kin relations as mothers, sisters, neighbours, aunts and community members need to be centred in conceptualizations of maternal worker power. Maternal worker power gains a different meaning here as encompassing potentially risky conversation about contracts, including legal protection and employers’ duty of care. From this perspective, maternal worker praxis centres living with and overcoming fear of one’s employer. In this context, solidarities with other childcare workers are often not the focus of migrant workers’ organizing, as solidarity with domestic workers in other countries or migrant workers in different sectors are preferred. The perspective of migrant nannies’ organizing on maternal worker power puts a renewed emphasis on centring stratification and the practices to overcome it. The numbers of nannies who experienced homelessness, were coerced to stop seeing their families and were exposed to the virus by employers supports the argument that a stratified concept of depletion is needed to understand the multiple ways in which the devaluation of social reproductive work creates differential types of harms. The term ‘cannon fodder’ was deployed by commentators to highlight the disposability of home care workers and childcare workers’ lives during the pandemic in comparison to those of ‘skilled’ workers. Identifying how different groups of childcare workers are constructed as differentially disposable in public discourse is urgent given that the pandemic signalled a shift from the depletion of communities’ capacities for social reproduction to literally socializing death, as Tithi Bhattacharya argues (see Jaffe, 2020). In the next chapter, I address how the different dimensions of maternal worker power –​as praxis, as dual terrains and as threat –​can redress the twinned idealization of privatized mothering and the invisibilization of waged childcare workers.

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Introduction Denaturalizing mothering and socializing childcare require vocabularies that grasp both the implications of stratification and potential solidarity between childcare workers. The maternal worker framework uniquely centres waged and unwaged maternal labour. The fight for socialized childcare is constrained not only by its construction as a private responsibility that families must resolve on the marketplace, but also by our limited capacities to grasp these social relations through the labour lens. The model I develop modifies McAlevey’s (2016) definition of ‘worker power’ and her argument that social relations in the workplace and the community can act as a strategic wedge against capital. First, I lay out how maternal worker power challenges the ways in which the sociology of mothering continues to separate mothers from waged caregivers. I then outline how Susan Ferguson’s theorization of social reproduction struggles on dual terrains can best inform this project so that it does not put either waged or unwaged workers above the other. I develop a typology of maternal worker power as praxis, solidarity and threat and show how it can inform a new sociological research agenda. Finally, I develop a set of criteria for evaluating when childcare social movements can work as a threat by foregrounding how they prioritize claims on state resources, organize on dual terrains and hold states accountable for harm done through depletion. Grounded in my empirical case studies, the concept of maternal worker power extends the theoretical connections between labour, mothering and solidarity, and offers a roadmap for studying post-​ pandemic Global North childcare struggles.

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Towards a theory of maternal worker power Maternal worker power refuses to see the maternal as a site of either division or solidarity. This means making the target of critique the twinned cultural idealization of middle-​class mothering as an identitarian politics and the invisibilization of childcare workers. To this end, we need frames that enable us to grasp the connections between waged and unwaged workers. The concept of maternal worker power can both spearhead this critique and bring forth a renewed feminist sociology of social reproduction. Most sociologists continue to internalize the logic of mothering as a private responsibility. Maternal studies need to foreground mothers’ relationships with and reliance on waged childcare workers more thoroughly. By neglecting the relationships between mothers, waged workers and their wider community in their studies, sociologists replicate the individualistic biases about who mothering is done by and where. This means that sociology continues to fall back into studying the ways the categories of migrant, working class or queer stratify mothering but often neglects connecting this with the hierarchies of waged reproductive work that they are increasingly entangled with. This is manifest in the ways that literatures on childcare work and on mothering remain separated to a large extent. The increased hierarchization of the paid childcare workforce since the 1970s requires concepts that can equip us to return to the knot of mothering, division and solidarity in post-​austerity contexts. One starting point is for sociologists of mothering to pay attention to the organizing of childcare workforces. A sociology of mothering that centralizes unequal social relations between and across waged and unwaged caregivers, and multiplies who counts as a mother, will be better placed to inform 21st-​century struggles for public childcare. Given that teaching preschool-​aged children continues to be constructed as less skilled work than primary teaching, it is not surprising that many sector-​based movements focus on seeking professionalization and recognition as educators, and reject the label of childcare workers. Even though terminology such as ‘educare’ signals that education and care are simultaneous, in practice, the hierarchization of different components of care continues, where repetitive and menial tasks are erased or devalued (Rosen, 2019). Arguments that both care and education are of value have failed to convince neoliberal governments, suggesting that sociologists need analyses that give a sharper account of the stratified devaluation of some paid and unpaid work. Furthermore, given that childcare continues to be framed as a social-​economic investment in mothers and children that can reduce poverty (Langford et al, 2013; Lyons, 2012), we need to continue to make the argument for state-​funded childcare in a way that does not bolster neoliberal welfare states’ punitive regimes towards low-​income families. The maternal worker approach highlights the trap that representing some waged 99

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childcare labour as low skilled and some as professionalized, and seeing some mothers as deficient and others as proficient, produces a pernicious stratification of social reproduction. The framework of social reproduction offers a way forward since it is a conceptualization of care ‘as a set of practices bound up with inequitable social relations, power, and global capitalism’ (Rosen, 2019: 16). In contrast to those who call to abolish the family and advocate full surrogacy (Lewis, 2019), I suggest that building maternal worker power offers a praxis that can nurture broad-​based struggles to transform the social organization of child rearing. In a context where a large part of the population relies on commodified care, we cannot limit ourselves to building more extended networks of kin-​based care; rather, the relations between paid carers and unpaid carers need to be part of the larger project of revaluing interdependency. The framework of the maternal worker enabled me to make visible the absent presence of the ‘private sphere’ and ‘community’ in my case studies, despite the divisions between, and fragmentation of, parents and workers across different occupations. First, interviewees’ relations to mothers as employers, service users or customers restricted the extent to which they might consider potential shared interests, even momentarily. The discursive frames of advocacy for professional wages (see Chapter 3), self-​care and philanthropy (see Chapter 2), and, to a lesser extent, mutual aid (see Chapter 4) competed with and constrained the possibility of establishing social reproduction and whole worker power as a significant lens. I showed that it is the labour lens of social reproduction that enables those connected social relations to be brought to the fore when they would otherwise remain hidden from view. In Chapter 2, I showed that because there are few vocabularies that construct worker conscientization as interdependence, workers were either constructed as selfless, not sufficiently conscientized workers or as selfish, properly conscientized workers. In Chapter 3, we saw that it was both the emergence of maternal care markets and austerity cuts that simultaneously concealed and deepened existing divisions between groups of mothers in different parts of the city. In Chapter 4, the frame of social reproduction made visible both the erasure of some women’s childcare crisis and the construction of nannies as disposable.

For a qualitative sociology of social reproduction The sociologies of mothering and waged childcare work need to be brought closer together through the lens of social reproduction. By this, I am advocating for not only more comparative studies of these forms of labour, but also an approach that centres work-​based, home and community-​based movements. Maternal worker power opens up the possibility of alliances that 100

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can play neoliberalism’s twinned devaluation of waged and unwaged maternal work against itself. Yet, it is only when the maternal is closely infused with the lens of stratified reproduction and community mothering (Collins, 1994) that we are better placed to ask who benefits and who is harmed by the current social organization of childcare, and to identify what distinctive political praxis emerges from these locations. The sociological insistence that personal troubles must be understood as public issues (Mills, 2000) has a strong affinity with how social reproduction calls into question what constitutes labour. The socio-​materialist analysis of the unequal distribution of social reproduction is needed to contest its current organization between households, communities, the state and the market. The sociological desire to pay attention to the symbiotic relationship between microprocesses and macro-​level social analysis has a natural affinity with how social reproduction enables us to see capitalism as a dynamic and ever-​changing set of unequal social relations. The insights gained from ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews enrich analyses of contemporary labour relations that traditional political economy eschews. By paying attention to how my interviewees develop praxis to survive acute and long-​term capitalist crises, I showed that, contrary to those who portray Marxist feminism as overly economistic, it was the dialectics of depletion and survival that best characterize these social relations. At the same time, I emphasized the ways in which these capacities were more severely limited for some groups. Feminist sociology needs social reproduction perspectives, as they are frequently confined primarily to cultural studies and social theory. Such a sociology can exercise social reproduction as a threat fit for post-​pandemic times. At the same time, social reproduction will benefit from comparative sociological inquiry that can identify the specificities of localized struggles and capture how the contradictory relationship between productive and reproductive labour is constantly transformed and mediated by workers and communities. By bringing together the concepts of stratified reproduction (Colen, 1995) and depletion (Rai et al, 2014), I showed the differentiated harms that are at the heart of crises of social reproduction during and after austerity cuts and the pandemic, suggesting that the framework can ground attempts to hold states accountable for the uneven effects of the devaluation of social reproduction. Furthermore, deploying the lens of social reproduction can help future studies of the childcare workforce to avoid siloing migration policies, employment laws and grassroots community and work-​based movements. Mapping the local and transnational networks between waged and unwaged care workers –​including their organizing on dual terrains –​ would operationalize the maternal worker perspective beyond the Global North countries that this study has centred. This could start by bringing together the insights from research on the organizing of unwaged carers during the pandemic with those of waged care workers in the informal 101

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and formal care labour market in different states in order to determine the effects of differential state withdrawals. Critical discussions of care crises are replete with calls for policies and societies that centre interdependence and solidarity but often with too little attention to what the costs of such alliances mean or how they might be realized from worker organizers’ perspectives. It has long been established that traditional models of worker power neglect care workers’ relations to communities, and, most recently, the success of the Chicago teachers’ strikes, founded on deep relationships that took years to establish, illustrates this. According to McAlevey (2016: 202), the frame of selfishness failed because ‘Their community enabled their success against a vicious and powerful opponent who immediately framed the fight as “teachers abandoning their students and their community”. This frame failed the mayor precisely because the relationships between teachers and parents, and between teachers’ union and community had already been forged.’ My conceptualization adds nuance to this claim. First, we need concepts that go beyond unions to understand the building of relations between waged and unwaged maternal workers. Maternal worker power can more explicitly contests the construction of worker power as antithetical to care because it starts with a recognition of the contradictory nature of the relationship between waged and unwaged labour. Concepts such as intimate unions need to pay closer attention to the question of intimacy with whom (see Chapters 3 and 4) and what affects are privileged in definitions of solidarity building that downplay cautiousness, fear and adversariality (see Chapter 3) in order to reflect the differentiated ways in which, for example, informal and migrant care workers seek to establish alliances. My elaboration of the maternal worker power praxis documents both interdependence and separateness. This includes attending to times when unions and community groups call for less intimacy rather than more. I discuss the implications of this point for a renewed conceptualization of solidarity in the final section.

Maternal worker power as praxis As well as encompassing struggles to fight government cuts and secure citizenship and employment rights, the praxis of maternal worker power can destabilize the cultural hegemony of childcare as an individual responsibility. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the ways white, middle-​class women’s dependence on outsourcing this labour is left out of the realm of feminist critique in popular culture. In contrast, maternal figures such as the ‘chav mum’ in the UK (Tyler, 2008), the ‘welfare mother’ in the US or, more recently, the ‘mother behaving badly’ (Littler, 2020) continue to pathologize working-​class and racialized minority mothers as deficient, while having perverse effects on white, middle-​class mothers when their ideals are derided 102

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as dysfunctional. Solutions such as leaning in or husband training always leave out the connections to gendered, classed and racialized hierarchies of care labour, and limit our political imaginaries. These cultural formations exclude and partially incorporate some maternal subjects, hollowing out alternative cultural representations in the process. One way for such imaginaries to be widened is by centring migrant worker, parent-​led and worker-​led childcare struggles. Anthropologists in both colonized and communist contexts attest to the ways that imperialism worked to weaken systems of kinship in which aunts, sisters and others play a central part in child rearing; recovering such histories and practising care beyond our kinship circles will also play a key part in developing an ethos of ‘promiscuous care’ that requires cultivating caring for strangers (Hakim et al, 2020). Mapping the characteristics of my interviewees’ distinctive praxis can be one of the ways in which we centre other voices. Their voices were deployed to create local campaigns, build worker-​led collectives, ask questions of local politicians, convince parents to support their labour action and write in the press. Maternal worker praxis continuously evolves to respond to multiple crises: in between periods of industrial action (see Chapter 2), austerity cuts (see Chapter 3) and the increased disposability of migrant nannies during the pandemic (see Chapter 4). Echoing other studies of grassroots activism during austerity (Emejulu and Bassell, 2015), I show that workers chose carefully where they would place their energies to avoid burnout, including for some younger activists, greater separation between their personal and work relationships than earlier studies of maternal activism suggests. The category of the maternal warrior elaborated by Nancy Naples (1998), where boundaries of paid work, family life and community activism were absent in many Latina and African American participants’ lives, resonated with activist workers of an older generation in my study. Among some younger activists, there was a reluctance to bring their experiences as daughters, mothers or sisters into their workspaces and activism. As I argued in Chapter 3, stratified depletion captures the ways in which my interviewees were differentially affected by austerity cuts and, in turn, how they forged distinctive survival strategies as part of their praxis. My analysis of these transformations to activists’ praxis is an important tool for grasping ‘embodied and differently gendered, classed and racialized subjects who through their social relations with institutions such as households, welfare states or global labour markets reproduce and transform over time’ (Ferguson, 2008; see also Ferguson, 2014). There were significant differentiations in this praxis across my case studies. In the case of migrant nannies and domestic workers, a much more explicit social reproduction vocabulary was deployed in their interviews with me and in their public writing, which was less explicit in the case of the majority of participants in the last two case studies. 103

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One often-​neglected part of worker power praxis is the negotiation of fraught conversations about the stratified value of care with employers, parents and co-​workers. As we saw in Chapter 4, the inclusion of neglected affects, such as fear and caution, needs to be part of this refiguration. Part of the praxis of maternal worker power involves becoming skilled at negotiating uncomfortable conversations across hierarchies, at work and in the community. These conversations can bolster alliances, such as when a former educator’s discomfort about the differences between their wages and that of a parent/​client led to solidarity (see Chapter 2), or secure contracts through conversations with employers and a duty of care (see Chapter 4). Creating spaces that bring waged and unwaged workers to work, care and do politics alongside one another will necessitate renewed commitments to having uncomfortable conversations, characterized as involving deep listening by white women (Swan, 2017). In Chapter 3, I highlighted the discourse of individual self-​care across the third sector and maternal entrepreneurs. I made the argument that unlearning neoliberalism’s lexicon and replacing it with alternatives of collective models of power is a significant part of some interviewees’ praxis. In all three case studies, we saw philanthropical approaches that continue to limit the building of maternal worker power. How this relearning can continue to grow constitutes one of the biggest hurdles given that ‘the conditions of everyday life under neoliberalism mean that few people have sustained, positive experiences of collective decision making, socialized resource allocation, or solidaristic, non-​competitive environments in which to work, learn, or play’ (Shein, cited in Luxton, 2015: 162). Such learning can only take place on a wider scale once democratically run, socialized childcare becomes more widespread. Much more research needs to be done to connect historically distinct waves of childcare struggles (and their attempts at coalition building) closer together given that childcare is attracting the attention of historians of second-​wave feminism. Across all my case studies, political education featured repeatedly, and many of my interviewees told me how older women had explicitly sought to politicize them by encouraging them to join and lead unions, community groups or feminist organizations. The pasts, presents and futures of maternal worker power collided with one another as a new generation of activists made sense of how to organize under different circumstances. Organizations have developed formal and informal mechanisms to share intergenerational knowledge and mitigate the tendency for social movements’ memories to be forgotten. For example, in Bristol, the work of community researchers to archive and revive the work of the Single Parent Action Network (2020) highlights how multiracial parent power can still be built despite deepening urban divisions. In Manchester, the Save the Salford Five campaign illustrated that solidarity between parent campaigners from low-​ income families and unionized childcare workers was key in saving nurseries 104

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from cuts by a Labour council, and sharing this knowledge spurred on three other citywide campaigns in the UK (Stephens, 2021). This rich praxis blended together survival strategies, intergenerational relearning and negotiating hierarchies. It adds to existing literature that illustrates the complex strategies that workers develop to survive within and resist neoliberal contexts in Europe and South Asia (Bassell and Emejelu, 2014; Roy, 2015, 2019). Some scholars argue that identifying the primary location of this praxis matters to answering this question, that is, whether it is work-​based or community activism that is more important. I found significant continuities between community and work-​based organizing. As illustrated by the ethnographic accounts of broad-​based anti-​oppression strikes such as the teachers’ strikes in Chicago (Blanc, 2019) and childcare struggles in New York (Black, 2020), for those immersed in grounded inquiries of social reproduction struggles, this separation is abstract. In the next section, I argue for the importance of a dual-​terrain approach to this question, drawing on the work of Sue Ferguson.

Cultivating maternal worker power on dual terrains I have sought to make sense of the implications of the separation of waged and unwaged maternal labour beyond an abstract level by theorizing how this separation shapes the organizing of different sets of workers in my case studies. The contributions of thinkers who emphasize the importance of refusing the hierarchization of work-​based exploitation versus racial or gendered oppression is particularly insightful in understanding why childcare struggles continue to operate on separate terrains and the challenge of organizing across waged and unwaged labour (Perrier, 2021). Susan Ferguson’s (2019) Women and Work offers a conceptual roadmap for the building of solid alliances between feminist, Marxist and anti-​racist perspectives that helped me to theorize the difficulties in organizing dual-​terrain childcare struggles today. Ferguson shows that social reproduction struggles need to simultaneously foreground productive and ‘non-​reproductive’ terrains so that campaigns on the streets and in community centres, crèches, classrooms and other workplaces can be connected into a mass movement. Ferguson highlights that when we neglect social reproduction’s crucial insight that women’s oppression lies in the contradictory relationship between paid and unpaid work and instead centre unpaid work as the basis of women’s oppression, social reproduction remains attached to a white woman’s feminism. This perspective is best placed to explain why childcare struggles are currently most visible in the formal regulated sector and why they gain most traction when they are led by public sector workers whose collective bargaining rights are usually better protected, as in the cases of strikes by public daycare workers in Quebec (CBC news, 2020) and successful campaigns 105

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in the UK led by unionized workers and parents to save council-​run nurseries (Stephens, 2021). We still know too little about childcare labour movements’ connections to community organizing in the communities worst hit by successive waves of austerity and pandemic, which suggests that such movements are being researched separately. While I mostly listened to workers at or around their workplaces and their co-​workers, future enquiries will need to develop methodologies that can pay equal attention to the role of community unions, parent-​led groups and labour–​community coalitions in the next phase of these struggles. The Marxian school of Social Reproduction Theory is particularly adept at explaining why the hierarchies between waged and unwaged social reproduction are difficult to displace: [That] SR [social reproduction] work is essential to but not directly productive of value creation means that the basis of unity between fighting oppression and fighting exploitation is not as apparent as the autonomist tradition holds it is. And therefore, it must be politically unearthed, cultivated, and grasped as something that requires differentiated expressions within a larger unified project. (Ferguson, 2020) By tracing the neglect of the maternal and community within contemporary waged childcare struggles, I have argued that a turn towards building maternal worker power on dual terrains can help remedy these disconnections and hierarchies. In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks (2011) argues that the Left needs to let go of its melancholic attachment to the values of work. Weeks’ statement that ‘our over attachment to work remains a major obstacle to its politicization’ fails to resonate with my analysis of three sites of work-​based childcare struggles. Weeks highlights that whereas in the Fordist industrial order, reproductive labour and productive labour were linked to the division of social realms into household and economy, this ‘separate spheres model’ is confounded by post-​Fordist processes because the commodities produced rely on capacities and practices that cross these boundaries. For Weeks, social reproduction can no longer be imagined as a sphere insulated from capital’s logics, bringing together both Hardt and Negri’s and Arlie Hochschild’s early work on emotional labour. Weeks outlines an alternative strategy of resistance to post-​Fordist regimes by advocating replacing the division between reproduction and production by the distinction between life and work, arguing that the more expansive category of life cannot be reduced to the private sphere and the family. While Weeks’ contribution emphasizes the possibility of inventing new selves separate from work, my research adds to the voices of those who argue that the particular gendered, racialized and classed bodies of workers are differently able to access the alternative 106

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subjectivities that Weeks speaks of. What is missing from Weeks’ account is a detailed engagement with the specificities of how the contradictions between paid and unpaid social reproduction have shifted. As Luxton and Braedley (forthcoming, 13) point out: ‘Lost is an analysis that shows how and why inequitable gendered and racialized divisions of labour in social reproduction have become increasingly pronounced and are growing in many jurisdictions.’ Moreover, Weeks’ analysis downplays the continuity in the movement of social reproductive work done outside the home by black and migrant women inside white women’s homes under Fordism (McDowell, 2013). The implications of Weeks’ argument that we need to relinquish the meaningfulness of work for those already engaged in social reproduction struggles that started in and around their workplaces is left out of her account. My interviewees’ accounts speak back to this part of Weeks’ thesis in important ways. The workers were resolutely protective of their access to leisure time and to time for families, friends and communities. They did not see this in opposition to work, but as deeply connected. It was not, I would argue, their attachment to work-​based identities that made them more vulnerable to exploitation. My investigation showed that many workers were both involved in deep relational ties with co-​workers, communities, children and parents, and politicized about workers’ rights and the devaluation of their labour. What fuelled their discontent and hopes for a more just future was tied to their sense that their work matters deeply to the future of society and that childcare is neither just a social and economic investment, nor something workers do out of love ‘for the good of the children’. The implications of how the divergent priorities of a stratified workforce mediate movements’ abilities to contest the twin logics of privatizing and familializing social reproduction need more attention. The conditions that enable divisions between the childcare labour of lower-​class, migrant and racialized minority women to be sustained vary. Social reproduction scholars need to theorize how these dynamics are mediated by local histories of grassroots activism, national and international employment laws, and the extent to which new childcare movements are deploying dual-​terrain thinking in their demands, organizing and analyses. Drawing inspiration from McAlevey’s whole worker organizing model can leverage work-​based, kin and community ties in new waves of childcare struggles; however, it also undertheorizes community and assumes that communities are democratic rather than a gendered and racialized space. Social reproduction needs to pay more attention to the ways in which non-​profits and civil society can be an important site of building community–​labour alliances, at the same time as those very spaces being shaped by the neoliberal turn, including the growth of the social enterprise model and of self-​care as empowerment. There are many studies that document the important and contradictory role of the third sector, including non-​profits and social enterprises, in 107

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providing social reproduction on the cheap in neoliberal times (Martin, 2010; Dowling and Harvie, 2014; Hopkins, 2017). As Illner (2021: 123) writes, civil society-​led social reproduction plays a double-​edged role in times of economic disaster, as ‘mutual aid risks legitimating governmental withdrawal by covering domains of social reproduction that the state has abandoned’. The question is whether civil society has a distinctive role to play in transforming conceptions of worker power and whether this means that it is a triple approach –​communities, households and workplaces –​rather than dual terrains that social reproduction scholars need to adopt. These questions need attention if maternal worker power is to produce knowledge that counters the tendency to treat divisions between childcare workers and divisions between mothers as separate struggles, and if it is to centre seizing access to state resources.

Maternal worker power as potential solidarity Theorizing maternal worker power as praxis suggests a more nuanced account of the limits of solidarity. The building of maternal worker power across waged and unwaged workers, and between different sectors, is limited by the structures of neoliberal capitalist economies and their reliance on stratified workforces. Jane McAlevey (2016, 2021) has written extensively about building worker power in the context of the US over the last three decades based on her experience of organizing large strikes in the public and private sector. She contests the traditional model of organizing: ‘a one dimensional view of worker rather than as whole beings limits good organizing and constrains good worker organizers from more effectively building real power in and amongst the workers’ communities’ (McAlevey, 2016: 59). According to her, restoring worker power to 1930s’ levels requires an organizing model inside and outside the workplace that is adapted to today’s neoliberal conditions. McAlevey’s theory and strategy of whole worker organizing is elaborated based on the accounts of significant wins by multiracial healthcare workers’, teachers’ and other service workers’ strikes across the US. McAlevey’s model has much to offer contemporary childcare struggles given that it is grounded in the neoliberal restructurings and privatization of education and healthcare in the US from the early 2000s; however, coalition building with informal and non-​unionized migrant workers is not centred. The book contributes to better theorizing the divisions that constrain the building of maternal worker power and understanding the specific circumstances where cross-​sector solidarity might be established. McAlevey describes care workers’ and educators’ organic ties to the community as constituting a ‘strategic wedge’ that can be leveraged (McAlevey, 2016: 28). Waged childcare workers experience the importance of their work for the 108

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survival of their communities at the same time as exploitation, cuts and wage stagnation (McAlevey, 2016; Doyle Griffiths, 2020), but not all workers are embedded in communities to the same extent as resident citizen care workers. Chapter 3 showed how one of the neglected infrastructures for building broader childcare movements is the women’s NGO sector, which contains important epistemic resources for organizing on dual terrains given its existing ties to communities. Commentators on the Left call for renewed solidarity between care recipients and care receivers, and of moving away from caring primarily for our biological kin and immediate friendship circles. The term ‘solidarity’ is often used to denote how it is generative of political subjectivities and collective identities, and inventive of new imaginaries (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019), yet its normative use offers little analytical precision (Bauder and Juffs, 2020) with regard to the practices that enable such relationships to thrive in time-​poor capitalist societies. Two important dimensions of my study complicate the argument that parents and public and private childcare workers can constitute a ‘strategic wedge’ against neoliberal state retrenchment. Workers I spoke with fully understand the way the childcare crisis pits parents and workers against one another, yet some enter into alliances with parents and with other parts of the sector much more cautiously than others. The dominant framing of solidarity is one that privileges connection, yet these workers’ and activists’ accounts suggest a much more differentiated approach to solidarity. In Chapter 2, we saw how one long-​term activist emphasized that the wage inequity between most childcare workers and parents was an impediment to building solidarity that stuck in her throat. In Chapter 4, a participant discussed how she kept clear boundaries between her home/​family life and her paid work as a community organizer in the same neighbourhood as a way to protect herself from the effects of depletion. In Chapter 5, migrant nanny organizers talked about the importance of fighting the childcare crisis in solidarity with other childcare workers and parents, but not on the back of racialized and lower-​class women. The conditionalities expressed in these accounts suggest the importance of a sociologically grounded concept of solidarity. The establishment of relationships of solidarity was especially limited where trust was perceived as fragile (see Chapter 3) or inexistent (see Chapter 4). The professionalization of the ECE workforce creates a weak terrain for building solidarity with informal care workers, as ‘To achieve recognition of the renamed occupation as a profession, practitioner labour must have scarcity value by excluding the untrained and unqualified from centre-​based employment’ (Lyons, 2012: 123). The racialized and classed spatial divisions in one city made it difficult to establish alliances between small organizations competing for resources from local authorities. In the case of nannies, the ties between employers and nannies and their communities were compounded by the fact that they did not live in the same neighbourhood or share the same 109

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citizenship. Physical proximity on the urban scale is a catalyst for solidarity, and the depletion of public community spaces will no doubt transform practices. Widely accepted statements such as ‘A defence of caring under late capitalism, uttered by caregivers of every persuasion –​adoptive, biological and employed; female, male, lesbian, gay, trans and the rest –​could be a wide coalition indeed’ (Knott, 2019: 258, cited in Segal, 2020) are important not to lose sight of. What I have shown is that this project requires paying attention to who is doing the labour of relationship building to form solidarity, what affects we centre when we research alliances and solidarity, and what workers and organizers express as its limits. Given these differentiations, what are the transformative potential of these knowledges? In other words, how can the vibrant praxis of maternal worker power that I have documented shift the balance towards building more collectively owned and socialized forms of childcare provision, policies and infrastructures? Under what conditions can maternal workers’ praxis become legitimized?

Maternal worker power as threat The question of whether feminist movements have been subsumed by neoliberalism has been a source of intense debate. Both the Global Women’s Strike and the Women’s March on Washington have been read as demonstrating a turning point in feminism’s refusal of the gains of neoliberalism at the expense of the continued exploitation of working-​ class women and women of colour. One controversial formulation is the argument that feminism has been co-​opted by neoliberalism (Fraser, 2013). In an incisive critique of Fraser and McRobbie’s argument that feminism has been co-​opted, Eschle and Maiguascha (2018) shift the ground by arguing that feminism needs to be redefined as a left-​wing struggle that is: manifested in a range of sites, and entangled but never entirely captured within the complex weave of neoliberal power relations, [which] allows us to see that feminist organising is not either/​or, but rather both inescapably constituted by its neoliberal context and continually attempting to reframe and overturn neoliberal logics and its effects. Favouring a situated analysis of specific movements, they argue that social movements should be evaluated as progressive based on criteria of whether they fulfil inclusivity, reflexivity and prefiguration as a corrective to broad claims about the co-​optation of feminist movements. Rejecting neoliberalism involves mobilizing feminism as a threat, requiring both developing coalitions around precarity and capturing the state for social reproduction resources and infrastructure. In turn, childcare movement research needs to systematically map out how and where the overturning of neoliberal dynamics does happen 110

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rather than getting stuck in the trap of the co-​optation–​resistance dichotomy. One first step to loosen the knot of co-​optation versus resistance is to look for instances where we can identify a praxis that operates as a threat. The term ‘threat’ can more fully capture the complexities of the dynamics of resistance. ‘Threat’ is a term that we are more used to hearing discussed with regard to foreign policy, being seldom used to understand how 21st-​century social movements can shift the organization of social reproduction, migration policies or labour laws. Simon Black’s (2020) study of how welfare social movements in New York City were able to mediate neoliberal city policies of childcare ‘on the cheap’ maps out how a hard-​won, publicly funded, centre-​based childcare system was fought for using different kinds of threats. First, childcare advocates and labour activists used the neoliberal rhetoric of choice against city policymakers to fight back against welfare recipients’ lack of choice with regard to childcare, showing that they expressed a preference for public childcare with unionized staff. Second, they sought to expand the access of low-​income women of colour to regulated childcare work, and it was the welfare state location of their work that enabled them to form a union and make claims on the state as public employees (Black, 2020: 163). While New York’s childcare exceptionalism was built through five decades of activism, the importance of identifying pressure points rather than seeing neoliberalism as unassailable suggests that childcare movements need an arsenal of different types of threats. In the following, I identify four criteria to examine how maternal worker power movements can be conceptualized as threats. The recognition that capitalist labour markets need differentiated labour power has been difficult to turn into a praxis for broad-​based childcare movements beyond the local scale (Findlay, 2017). Identifying shared interests is increasingly urgent because as more states avoid regulating privatized childcare, the conditions of both the informal workforce and workers in private, for-​profit childcare are set to become more similar. Cross-​sectoral organizing is significant because non-​citizen, home-​based workers are excluded from much employment legislation. Second, mobilizing on the dual terrains of community organizing and work-​based organizing is paramount, as the discussion of childcare worker and parent coalitions as a ‘strategic wedge’ exemplified. Discursive and material resources are needed to enact such a shift. For example, sociological schemas and organizing resources need to continue to show care’s potential as a catalyst rather than as a threat to worker conscientization. The term ‘maternal worker’ offers a frame for shaping movements that work across fighting oppression and fighting exploitation that would enable childcare struggles to move well beyond nurseries. Third, the role of making demands for state resources needs to be further centralized within childcare movements. As many public sector workers leading these struggles are making demands on local and federal 111

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governments to protect services and jobs, part of the question is how, rather than whether, to engage with the state. At the same time, the coercive nature of most welfare states’ childcare policies and their differential impact on indigenous women and women of colour means that there is good reason for movements to demand both universal access and autonomy. The Care Collective argues that this requires building democratic states that refuse the paternalistic, racialized policies of post-​war welfare states (Hakim et al, 2020). Stronger worker power can be a threat that mediates post-​welfare states’ preference for cash and tax credit incentives to parents and providers rather than investment in public infrastructure. The corporatization of the childcare sector is a significant hurdle, as workers are least likely to have collective bargaining rights in large chains (Dowling and Harvie, 2014). The extent to which childcare coalitions can disrupt the separation of migration and Early Childhood Education policies will also be crucial (Adamson, 2016). We need a more comprehensive mapping out of the techniques, modes and repertoires that have succeeded in wresting resources for childcare from the state beyond the few case studies we currently have. As Quick and Martin (2020) write, unions can play a role in de-​financializing and democratizing the care sector that would enable a mixture of public and worker-​owned care services. Stronger collaborations between grassroots organizations, unions and community based social movements are needed to build maternal worker power that centres how some women’s labour is differentially devalued. Fourth, we need not only stronger broad-​based social movements that can wrest resources at the state level, but also international legal frames that can make states accountable for the harm done to households and communities through the depletion of social reproduction (Rai et al, 2014). The depletion that I documented among childcare workers, organizations and activists shows that the harm done as a direct result of austerity measures such as funding cuts to women’s services, as well as the harms recorded during the pandemic, are deep and have yet to be accounted for. Rai and Goldblatt (2020) argue that developing international legal frames that formally recognize preventive harm and compensation as a result of depletion through social reproduction can play a significant role in pushing transformative policy agendas that redistribute reproductive labour. Formal legal recognition of the effects of differential depletion on different groups of women would strengthen childcare social movements and bolster demands for state infrastructure.

New directions for childcare struggles Building the conditions for solidarity building across waged caregivers and between waged and unwaged caregivers requires new ways of thinking and 112

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being; the maternal worker power perspective outlines one possible route. Without the labour lens of social reproduction, mothers and waged childcare workers would continue to think of themselves as doing very different work, and sociologists will continue to produce work that reproduces rather than challenges these harmful separations and hierarchies. Childcare struggles have deployed, and continue to deploy, the powers of both unpaid and paid social reproduction strikes, and the attempts to build solidarity between struggles on the productive and reproductive terrains simultaneously is ongoing (Ferguson, 2019; Hakim et al, 2020). This does not mean prioritizing workplace struggles over others: ‘It simply puts a premium on finding ways to build meaningful solidarity that links (rather than subsumes) anti-​racist, feminist, and all social-​reproductive struggles to workplace-​based resistance’ (Ferguson, 2016: 51). Exercising social reproduction brings the question of the stratification of waged childcare, its corporatization and states’ retrenchment from investment in infrastructure to the front of sociological enquiry. The growth of formal and informal childcare workers’ unions and parent-​led campaigns, and the visibility of advocates’ calls for radical reform, show that there is renewed energy for securing both public investment and democratically controlled childcare systems. Neoliberalism’s attacks on publicly funded childcare are neither complete nor unassailable. The start of a broad-​based mass childcare movement is being built in current demands for state infrastructure and childcare sector bailouts that exclude corporate chains (Post Pandemic Childcare Coalition, 2020), and through coalitions between stratified workforces in Ireland, England, Massachusetts and many other places. In the UK, while the interests of small radical unions who represent childcare workers in the informal sector and large public sector unions are difficult to reconcile on a national level, there are stories of successful coalitions in large cities in Canada and Australia where the tradition of community unionism is well established. My participants’ accounts stretched my theoretical elaborations of ‘maternal worker’, often challenging my characterization of the relations between women who pay and those who earn a wage doing childcare as one predominantly characterized by either adversariality or commonality, and forced me to pay attention to the dynamics that constrained their attempts to transform social relations. The concept of maternal worker power is also a call for longer intergenerational and transnational conversations about the gains and losses of previous childcare movements, including historicizing building coalitions and widening the sites from which discussions of what counts as worker power start. While the memory of post-​welfare states’ economic interventions is still not too distant, the opportunity for shifting how the childcare crisis is framed post-​pandemic will need to be seized. As local and national governments decide which parts of the childcare sector will be bailed out and which will 113

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face new rounds of post-​pandemic austerity cuts, and as labour markets are shaped by post-​COVID-​19 migration policies, arguing for a care-​led recovery that does not leave different parts of the sector competing with one another for scarce resources will be crucial. As the fallout from the pandemic increases policy interest in fixing a broken childcare sector, childcare advocates will be once again faced with ‘capitalizing on narrow windows of political opportunity with meagre financial and human resources’ (Langford et al, 2013: 269). Empirically grounded social reproduction research that asks questions about the pitfalls of neglecting migrant workers’ perspectives (see Chapter 2), the exclusions created by professionalization (see Chapter 3), and avoids seeing care as a threat to worker politicization (see Chapter 3), can produce more connected knowledges. Such knowledges can equip scholars to theorize the gap between movements’ vision of childcare and the continued reality of its unjust social organization, help hold states to account about increased harms and foster conversations about what organizing on dual terrains might involve.

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Pandemic Postscript Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Roy, 2020) If universal public childcare haunted feminism pre-​pandemic, its spectre has been more than revived by the pandemic. Despite the public expressions of support and empathy for some childcare workers and teachers from working parents, the pandemic context made observing the trials and failures of practising maternal worker solidarity more poignant. The narratives around the intensification of working parents’ lives during lockdown showed little to no awareness of its (dis)similarities with the triple shifts that low-​paid mothers have long endured outside of pandemic conditions. The hypervisibility of childcare in public discourse during the pandemic is partly explained by the middle and upper classes experiencing a ‘real’ care crisis for the first time with little option to outsource this labour. As much as I was listening to childcare workers’ accounts of the pandemic, as a full-​time working mother, the writing of this book is embedded in these hierarchized definitions of care crisis and in the social relations of stratified reproductive labour. As I wrote the last chapter of this book, a second UK lockdown was announced on 7 January 2021, meaning that my daughter would be home for the next eight weeks while my partner and I tried and failed to work full-​time. I pondered whether it was ethical to send her to school under a provision that oddly listed university staff as ‘essential workers’, and hesitatingly applied for three days of school, which were granted. A few days later, the school sent a letter asking all parents who were able to keep their children at home to do so, as 115

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the school did not have enough places for everyone. After some reflection, I informed the school that we no longer needed the space. Feelings of guilt and desperation were rife among middle-​class parents faced with whether one should prioritize the impact on one’s mental health, the impact on one’s colleagues, risks to one’s health or children’s well-​being. What was striking was how absent from those discussions was consideration for the perspectives of teachers and carers, or the impact on other parents. This was not always because parents did not consider those outside their households, there were also no civic infrastructures to enable those workers to speak to one another –​individual requests and the lexicon of choice have shrunk the spaces for collective reflection. The reports about the growth of in-​home, online, private tutoring, as well as of parents deceiving schools about being key workers so that they could access school places, were reminiscent of Diane Reay and colleagues’ (2011) depiction of how middle-​class parents help their children get the most out of limited resources in comprehensive schools within the unequal UK school system. At the tenth anniversary of the Maternal Studies journal, the British sociologist Rachel Thompson poignantly described how the pandemic increased capitalism’s tendencies to pit teachers and care workers against parents. The pandemic, she said, means facing the dark question of: what would I do if I could only save my child? As important as noticing how the pandemic heightened our most selfish tendencies, I want to find a way to make sense of the pandemic that refuses to focus only on middle-​class parents’ sharp elbows, or which children are seen as worth saving, in order to foreground the structures that produce these responses and contest that they are the only solutions. Tracey Jensen’s (2020) powerful characterization of how the welfare state has been ‘shredded’ by austerity measures gives precisely the sort of incisive analysis needed to capture the scale of devastation. Feminist scholars will need to devise vocabularies that are equally sharp to account both for the extent of structural harm done by states and the collective strength of the most vulnerable communities in mediating those harms. This book provides an alternative framework for analysing childcare movements in the Global North that connects low-​income mothers’ struggles for resources for nurturing their families and childcare workers’ struggles for better wages under the framework of dual-​terrain organizing. Although my study found these connections were limited empirically, this was also because of the questions I asked and the case studies I chose. The project of connecting the histories and futures of marginalized women’s organizing as waged workers and mothers is ongoing. It is encouraging to see so much research on low income groups’ experiences of care being carried out in the pandemic, yet there is still much work to be done to reduce the methodological separation of waged and unwaged labour. Social scientists have been gathering the accounts of low-​income mothers during 116

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the pandemic over the last year, which show, for example, the toll that the higher cost of food, energy and home learning took on families (Hill and Webber, 2021). The COVID-​19 Crisis and the Informal Economy Study gathered the voices of informal workers’ organizations in 12 Global South cities, and its report calls for continuing relief, inclusive recovery and longer-​term reforms, including debt forgiveness, vaccinations and securing formal representation in post-​COVID-​19 policymaking (WIEGO, 2020). A recent report highlighted the ways in which the underfunding of services in several boroughs of London resulted in severe cracks in provision during the pandemic (Bear et al, 2020). Connecting these struggles can both hold states accountable for depletion following the withdrawal of infrastructure and capture work-​based women’s movements to secure recognition and compensation from the state. Comparative research on low-​income women’s experiences of economic hardship, waged and unwaged care work, and collective organizing on the local, national and international scales could inform a more transnational study of maternal worker power, especially given that relationships with employer-​parents were sometimes unsteady grounds on which to build solidarity. By centring how states, households and the third sector organize social reproduction, sociologists can produce more situated analyses of the distinctive struggles that emerge across different national policy regimes and employment regulations. This also means asking where childcare is on the transnational feminist agenda and bringing analysis of care policies, employment law and migration more closely together to ask questions that transcend those separations. This book demonstrates the need to resolutely multiply who counts as a maternal worker, contest the stratified organization of this labour and deepen social relations that can at least temporarily address the separation between waged and unwaged mothering. I argued for producing sociological knowledges that explicitly counters the idealization of middle-​class privatized mothering and the invisibilization of waged childcare workers. I show that one way to start this process is to map these workers’ praxis. Unlearning cultures of intensive mothering that individualize poverty and sharing childcare beyond kin groups can both be starting points to counter the harmful effects of neoliberal maternal cultures. Centring maternal worker power forces us to ask different questions about how we build relationships with waged and unwaged caregivers in everyday life. If the work of the feminist critic is to think differently so that different ways of acting can become possible (Conway, 2017), then the concept of maternal worker offers one way to imagine childcare beyond existing categories. Noticing the depletions, capacities and affects of maternal worker power gives us starting points for building more interdependent and caring societies. More attention to this multidimensional praxis can nurture individual and collective attempts to mediate how the care crisis pits groups of parents and workers 117

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against one another and to attend to each other’s vulnerabilities while not losing sight of hierarchies. This means making more room for alternative knowledges that centre ‘group survival, power and identity’ (Collins, 1994), refusing to validate stories that further idealize individualized mothering and deeper listening to the voices and demands of low-​waged workers in social reproduction struggles. Integrating the concept of maternal worker power into our everyday vocabulary would help us to notice how the separation between paid and unpaid work is replicated on a daily basis, and to affirm our abilities to imagine beyond this separation. At the same time, scholars need to foreground how maternal workers’ praxis can, at times, heighten and reproduce stratified divisions of care labour, for example, by emphasizing their superior caring skills. Whatever the direction of post-​pandemic childcare struggles, I hope this book helps future research grasp how centring fighting oppression and fighting exploitation are simultaneously necessary for more broad-​based childcare struggles.

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Notes Introduction 1

2

The materials are located in the Feminist Archives South in Bristol University Library and are discussed in more detail in Chapter 1. Although no data collection took place in Canada, much of the theoretical framework in the book is based on Canadian contributions to social reproduction theory and childcare movements. Canadian feminist childcare studies have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of these debates, partly because the trajectories of socialist feminism followed a different and less marginalized route than in other Global North Anglosphere contexts. For a discussion of the contributions of Canadian socialist feminism to social reproduction theory, see Susan Ferguson’s (2008) article in Race, Gender and Class.

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

The title of this chapter reformulates Cox and Federici’s (1976) Counter-​Planning from the Kitchen, which was a reply to the Left about its dismissal of wages for housework and its refusal to see the kitchen as a factory. The book shows how both waged and unwaged maternal workers are devalued to different extent but departs from the autonomist conceptualizations of social reproduction, as I discuss in this chapter and in Chapter 5. One exception is Beverley Skeggs, whose early works rework Bourdieu’s social theory using feminist concepts (see Skeggs, 1997), whereas her later work on values engages with, and returns to, Marxist value theory (see Skeggs, 2014). The debate over whether social reproduction theory sufficiently accounts for the racialization of reproductive labour and the extent to which it can be compatible with critical race and decolonial theory has a long and ongoing history. Scholars such as Ferguson (2019, 2016) and Nadasen (2021), have traced and emphasized the contribution of black feminists to social reproduction and socialist feminisms. This has informed how I have attempted to attend to the specificities of racialized minority and migrant workers’ organizing without losing sight of social reproduction’s integrative ontology. One example of this amnesia is discussed in Françoise Vergès’ (2020) Women and their Wombs: Racialism, Patriarchy and Capitalism. Vergès argues that colonial power relations led to the silencing from feminist debates on abortion in mainland France of over 8,000 forced abortions on Réunion Island in the 1960s. In April 1971, two months after the highly publicized trial of the doctors on Réunion Island, 343 French women published a manifesto in which they publicly declared that they had had abortions and demanded the legalization of abortion. Vergès argues that French feminists entirely ignored the thousands of abortions and sterilizations that had been performed without consent, as well as the state-​supported public campaign that encouraged Réunion Island women to abort or to be sterilized, despite the fact that the scandal had been largely covered by newspapers in which members of Women’s Liberation regularly published.

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6

7

8

9

The argument about the racialized and international division of reproductive labour reflects changing migration patterns to the UK and North America after the Second World War. Prior to this, in Canada to use one example before the First World War, British, Irish and North American women constituted some of the largest groups of migrant domestic servants, with whiteness being the primary consideration for acceptance into Canada and Australia from the 1890s to the 1940s (Langfield, 2002). The separation between workers and parents is far more blurred in accounts of childcare activists from the 1970s than they are today because some activists established nursery collectives, and their accounts are shaped by their experiences as parents who cared for a more extensive community. In the UK, the Labour Party’s 2019 general election manifesto included a universal free childcare system called Sure Start Plus as part of their plan for a national education system. I use the terminology of Intersectionality here because it reflects the concept most often used in the literature when childcare workers are considered in terms ‘race’, migration, citizenship status and how this affects their segregation in particular types of childcare labour. However, as I argue later the terminology of intersectionality is less able to capture the simultaneous effects of divisions and solidarities which is why I use the term stratification -​borrowed from Stratified reproduction (Colen) -​as it better attends to these dynamics. In Canada, these movements include, among others, mobilization against the Live-​in Caregiver programme, the work of the anti-​deportation campaign for seven Jamaican mothers in 1976, the work of Intercede from the 1980s and the Canadian Home Care Association’s action on paid caregivers (Lawson, 2013).

Chapter 2 1 2

3

4 5

6

7

See: www.australianunions.org.au/​industrial_​action_​factsheet See: www.smh.com.au/​business/​workplace/​big-​union-​merger-​vows-​to-​tackle-​wage-​ theft-​redistribute-​wealth-​shift-​labor-​left-​20191108-​p538me.html “So, we are focusing on large national providers so we will have say 40–​50 per cent density in the providers where we are focusing, and the reason for that focus is that we have to think strategically about how we can impact the sector best and how we can use our resources to impact the sector best, so it’s much easier for us, easier is probably overstating it, it’s more achievable to focus on a big private provider and get their support for the campaign” (interview with Linda, union official). See: https://​liammcnicholas.com/​tag/​big-​steps/​ See: www.abc.net.au/​ n ews/​ 2 013-​ 1 2-​ 1 9/​ s ussan- ​ l ey- ​ c hild- ​ c are- ​ wage- ​ m oney/​ 5162378?nw=​0 Educators mentioned the cost of housing in Sydney and long commutes as reasons for considering leaving the profession. Most of the community centres that were active in the walkouts were in the Greater Sydney area. See, respectively: http:// ​ womens ​ m arc ​ h syd ​ n ey.com/ ​ b igst ​ e ps/​ and https:// ​ w ww. radicalwomen.org/​activities/​melbourne/​Melbourne2013Activities.shtml

Chapter 3 1

In the UK, the pro-​breastfeeding organization La Leche League and the National Childbirth Trust are two examples of national organizations who overwhelmingly engage middle-​class new mothers.

120

NOTES 2

3

4

Sure Start was a flagship New Labour project introduced in 1998 to address Labour’s goal of reducing child poverty. The centres offer childcare and play sessions, parenting advice, and employment coaching. After being initially centrally funded, in 2004, they became a local government responsibility. In 2010, there were 3,600 centres, with a budget of about £1.8 billion. See: www.eyalliance.org.uk/​news/​2019/​11/​one-​six-​children%E2%80%99s-​centres-​has-​ closed-​2010 See: https://​thebristolcable.org/​2018/​02/​staff-​losses-​massive-​cuts-​to-​childrens-​centre-​ funding-​austerity/​

Chapter 4 1 2

3

4

5

See: https://​tribunemag.co.uk/​2020/​08/​covid-​19-​has-​exposed-​britains-​childcare-​crisis See: www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​opendemocracyuk/​solutions-​to-​the-​childcare-​ crisis-​must-​protect-​parents-​children-​and-​childcare-​workers/​ See: www.tuc.org.uk/​blogs/​government-​ignoring-​childcare-​crisis-​and-​its-​costing-​ women-​their-​jobs Its website describes the organization as follows: ‘Matahari Women Workers’ Center is a Boston-​based community organization working to end gender violence and exploitation. A leading force in advancing the rights of women workers and immigrant families, Matahari was instrumental in passing the MA Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, which extends basic labor protections to nannies, au pairs, home care workers, and house cleaners.’ See: www.refinery29.com/ ​ e n- ​ g b/ ​ 2 020/ ​ 0 7/ ​ 9 934049/ ​ b lack- ​ d omestic- ​ worker-​ rights-​coronavirus

121

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Index Page numbers followed by an ‘n’ indicate end-​of-​chapter notes, e.g. 119n1 refers to note 1 on page 119. A Abramovitz, M.  65 activist community mothering  68–​9 Adamson, E.  1, 9, 31, 37, 80, 112 Agustín, Ó.G.  109 Ahmed, S.  63 aid  94–​5 Ally, S.  96 Anderson, B.  6, 27, 38, 80, 85 Andrew, Y.  43 Arat-​Koç, S.  26, 84 au pairs  14, 27–​8, 40, 91 austerity  11, 17, 30–​1, 65, 66, 112, 116 austerity cuts  69–​74, 103 Australia  childcare movements  33–​4, 35 community unionism  113 early years educators’ walkouts  42–​61 context  43–​6 economic disruption  51–​3 letter writing and economic disruption  50–​1 migrant workers  56–​8 online campaign  46–​7 parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6 selfless workers versus natural strikers  47–​50 strikes  8 Union of Australian Women (UAW)  36–​7 universal childcare  31, 32 Avila, E.  84 B Baraitser, L.  7 Barbagallo, C.  32 Barrett, M.  7 Bassell, L.  9, 30–​1, 65, 103, 105 Bauder, H.  109 Bear, L.  117 Berry, C.  2 Bezanson, K.  24–​5, 78

Bhattacharya, T.  97 Bhattacharyya, G.  60 Big Steps Campaign  42–​61 context  43–​6 economic disruption  51–​3 letter writing and economic disruption  50–​1 migrant workers  56–​8 online campaign  46–​7 parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6 selfless workers versus natural strikers  47–​50 Birmingham Women’s Liberation Playgroup  32–​3 black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups  66 Black, S.  36, 37, 42, 53, 64, 73, 105, 111 black feminism  4–​5, 6, 30 black mothering  4, 21 black mothers  27, 65 black women  78, 107 Blanc, E.  105 Bloch, A.  85 Bonetti, S.  10 Boris, E.  6, 89, 95 Braedley, S.  107 Brennan, D.  1, 34, 36, 47, 48, 80 Brenner, J.  23, 68 Bristol  maternal care  62–​79 community mothering  68–​9 marketization of  64–​5 maternal entrepreneurs’ depletion  74–​6 maternal support workers’ depletion  69–​74 research context and methodology  66–​8 Busch, N.  14, 80, 83, 84 C Canada  childcare coalitions  89–​90 childcare movements  9, 34, 35

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childcare workforce  38 community unionism  113 feminist childcare literature  119n1(ch1) migrant workers  120n5(ch1) nannies  25 universal childcare  11, 31, 32 capitalism  40, 64 and collective childcare  7 and COVID-​19  116 and feminism  11 and motherhood  27 and reproductive labour  2, 16 and social reproduction  6, 22–​5, 101 Care Coalition  112 ‘Care that Works’ coalition  91 caring courses  47 charitable funding  71–​3 charitable work  75–​6 childcare  1 collectivized  7 community childcare  44 state-​funded  44, 99 universal  11, 31–​6 see also maternal care childcare coalitions  36–​9, 89–​92, 111–​12 see also community-​union coalition childcare costs  10 childcare crisis  86–​8 childcare labour  1, 2, 3 transnationalization  27; see also migrant nannies’ organizing see also childcare workers childcare movements  9, 15, 31–​6 intersectional  36–​9 and neoliberalism  110–​11 see also Big Steps Campaign Childcare Providers United  8 childcare provision  1, 9–​10, 32 see also childcare: universal childcare subsidies  10 childcare workers  2–​3 mobilization  see childcare movements parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6, 60, 90, 109 rights  14, 33 types of  12–​14 UK  10 see also childcare labour; early years educators; home childcare workers; maternal support workers; maternal workers; migrant nannies; migrant workers; nannies childminders  4, 14 children’s centres  66, 72 Chile  57 choice  111 class hierarchies  27–​8 see also power relations

Cobble, D.S.  6, 19, 37, 41, 48, 60, 81 Cock, J.  84 Cohen, S.S.  36 Colen, S.  28, 41, 81 collectivized childcare  7 Colley, H.  9 Collins, P.H.  5, 21, 30, 85, 101, 118 Collombet, C.  4 colonial power  119n4 community childcare  44 community development organizations  65 community mothering  26, 30, 40, 68–​9, 74–​5, 85, 101 community nurseries  33 community organizing  29–​31, 111 community unionism  113 community-​union coalition  56, 59 Conway, J.M.  117 Cook, K.  45 co-​optation  110–​11 Coram Family and Childcare Trust  33 Coronavirus Care Fund  82, 89 Counter-​Planning from the Kitchen (Cox and Federici)  119n1 COVID-​19 pandemic  1–​2, 10, 11, 115–​18 childcare crisis  86–​8, 115–​17 migrant nannies’ organizing  81–​2, 88–​9 aid  94–​5 nanny-​employer relationships  92–​4 research context  82–​3 Cox, N.  119n1 Cox, R.  14, 80, 83, 84, 96 Crean, M.  29 Cuna, A.  92–​3 Cunningham, I.  9 D Daily Mail Australia  51 Davidoff, L.  25 Daycare Trust  33 deep coalition  56 Democracy in the Kitchen (Walkerdine and Lucey)  27 depletion  11, 63, 77, 78–​9, 112, 117 maternal entrepreneurs  74–​6 maternal support workers  69–​74 stratified  62, 78, 101, 103 Deutsch, V.  87 Dinner, D.  34, 83 DiQuinzio, P.  40 domestic workers  see home-​based workers; migrant nannies’ organizing; nannies domestic workers’ movements  37, 38 Doucet, A.  6 Dowling, E.  63, 112 Doyle Griffiths, K.  109 E early childhood education and care (ECEC)  9, 44, 45, 47

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Early Childhood Education (ECE)  38, 109, 112 Early Years Alliance  10 early years educators  13 walkouts  42–​61 context  43–​6 economic disruption  51–​3 letter writing and economic disruption  50–​1 migrant workers  56–​8 online campaign  46–​7 parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6 selfless workers versus natural strikers  47–​50 Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF)  45 economic disruption  51–​3, 59 educare  99 Elahi, F.  66 Emejulu, A.  9, 30–​1, 65, 103, 105 empowerment  65, 69, 107 Equal Renumeration Order  45 Erel, U.  30 Eschle, C.  12, 110 European Union  35 F factory workers  24 family support workers  66 Fannin, M.  6, 17, 64, 74 Federici, S.  24, 32, 119n1 feminism  11, 110 black  4–​5, 6, 30 liberal  1, 31, 34 Marxist  2, 15, 101 neoliberal  78–​9 socialist  6, 16, 32 Feminist Fight Back  86–​7 feminist socialism  11 feminist sociology  1, 3, 6, 101, 115, 117 Ferguson, S.  24, 25, 29, 38–​9, 98, 103, 105, 106, 113 Ferree, M.M.  42 Filipino domestic workers  89 Findlay, T.  9, 38, 89, 111 Fraser, N.  11, 110 Friedan, B.  26, 27 G Ghysels, J.  35 Gillies, V.  22, 32 Glenn, E.N.  26, 27 Global Women’s Strike  110 Goldblatt, B.  112 grassroots community development organizations  65 Grassroots Women  90 grassroots women’s organizing  29–​31 Gregson, N.  80 Grewal, K.  87 Grugel, J.  63, 88

H Hakim, J.  103, 112, 113 Hall, M.  10, 66 Hamilton, M.  56 Harvie, D.  112 Hays, S.  22 Hill, K.  117 Hochschild, A.R.  84 home childcare workers  8, 36, 37–​8, 59–​60, 81 see also au pairs; childminders; migrant nannies’ organizing; nannies Hondagneu-​Sotelo, P.  84 Hoskyns, C.  70 I Illner, P.  108 imperialism  103 Infomigrants,  66 in-​home childcare  80 see also home childcare workers International Domestic Workers Federation  88 International Women’s Day  18 intersectional childcare coalitions  36–​9 intersectionality  38 intimate exploitation  83–​6 intimate unions  6, 19, 41, 43, 60, 102 educators’ support for  55 migrant nannies  81, 82, 96, 97 Ireland  8 Irish Times  8 Islington Action Group  33 J Jaffe, S.  2 Japan  57 Jensen, T.  116 Johnston, C.  96 Jørgensen, M.B.  109 Juffs, L.  109 K Kaptani, E.  30 Katz, C.  24 kindergarten movement  38, 47–​8 kinship  103 Kleinberg, S.J.  6 L Langford, R.  34, 38, 99, 114 Lareau, A.  22, 27 Laslett, B.  23 Latin America  88 Lawson, E.  89 Layton, L.  63 Le Petitcorps, C.  84, 89 letter writing  50–​1, 52 Lewis, H.  86 Lewis, S.  100

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Ley, S.  46 Leyonheljm, D.  50–​1 liberal feminism  1, 31, 34 see also neoliberal feminism Lines, T.  88 Littler, J.  64 Lonergan, G.  73 Lowe, M.  80 low-​income families  65, 99, 104 low-​income mothers  4, 6, 19, 28, 72, 86, 116–​17 low-​income parents  32 low-​income women  111 Lucey, H.  27 Luxton, M.  15, 24–​5, 26, 29, 78, 104, 107 Lyons, M.  99, 109 M Macdonald, C.L.  8 Macdonald, L.  85 Mahon, R.  35 Maiguashca, B.  12, 110 Martin, A.  112 Marxist feminism  2, 15, 101 Mashford-​Pringle, A.  38 Matahari Women’s Worker Centre  88, 91, 93–​4, 121n4(ch4) maternal activism  89 maternal care  62–​79 community mothering  68–​9 marketization of  64–​5 maternal entrepreneurs’ depletion  74–​6 maternal support workers’ depletion  69–​74 research context and methodology  66–​8 maternal entrepreneurs  74–​6 maternal support workers  67, 69–​74 maternal warriors  103 maternal worker power  98–​114, 117–​18 across waged and unwaged labour  105–​8 new directions for childcare struggles  112–​14 as potential solidarity  108–​10 as praxis  102–​5 sociology of mothering  99–​100 sociology of social reproduction  100–​2 as threat  110–​12 maternal workers  3–​8, 14, 39–​41, 60, 113 maternal workers’ movement  68, 78 maternalism  6 McAlevey, J.  81, 98, 102, 108, 109 McCafferty, T.  42 McDowell, L.  107 McIntosh, M.  7 McKenzie, L.  29 McKie, L.  29 McRobbie, A.  11, 110 middle-​class families  2 middle-​class mothering  26, 27, 85, 99, 117

middle-​class mothers  17, 22, 54–​5, 75, 81, 85, 86–​7, 102–​3 middle-​class parents  3, 116 middle-​class women  COVID-​19 pandemic  86–​7 economic privilege  83 kindergarten teaching  47–​8 marketization of maternal care  64, 75, 77 paid work  1, 11, 18 social reproduction  23, 25 migrant mothers  30, 65, 67, 75 migrant nannies  103 migrant nannies’ organizing  80–​97, 109 childcare coalitions  89–​92 COVID-​19 pandemic  86–​9, 92–​5 nanny-​employer relationships  83–​6, 92–​4 research context  82–​3 migrant women  8, 11, 13, 31 migrant workers  13 Canada  120n5(ch1) early childhood education and care (ECEC)  9 invisibilization  59 political subjectivity  56–​8 relationship with employer  8 selflessness  47 stereotyping  28 vulnerability  27 migration  66 Migration and Care Labour (Anderson and Shutes)  38 Mills, C.W.  101 minority mothers  see racialized minority mothers minority women  see racialized minority women Mitchell, J.  7 Mooney, G.  42 More Than a Labour of Love (Luxton)  26–​7 Morrisey, H.  1 motherhood  5, 17, 27, 64, 65 mothering  7, 17 black  4, 21 community  26, 30, 40, 68–​9, 74–​5, 84, 101 domestic workers  84–​5 as labour  22 middle-​class  26, 27, 85, 99, 117 neoliberal  6 sociology of  99–​100 transnational  85 working-​class  26–​7 see also othermothering mothers’ movements  40 mumpreneurs  64 N Nadasen, P.  23, 28, 89, 95 nannies  3, 13, 15, 25 relationship with children  8

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relationship with employer  27–​8, 81, 83–​6, 92–​4, 109–​10 see also migrant nannies’ organizing Nanny Solidarity Network  89, 90 Naples, N.  30, 68, 103 National Childcare Campaign  33 National Domestic Workers Alliance 82, 89 neoliberal feminism  78–​9 neoliberal mothering  6 neoliberalism  15, 62–​3, 101, 104, 110–​11, 113 New Economics Foundation  8 New Labour  32 Newman, B.  43 Norton, J.  24 O O’Connell, R.  14 O’Toole, K.  36–​7 Oakley, A.  26 Osgood, J.  9, 36 othermothering  30, 85 Out of the Pumpkin (Birmingham Women’s Liberation Playgroup)  32–​3 P parental rights  25–​6 parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6, 60, 90, 92–​3, 109 Parreñas, R.  84 Penn, H.  1, 10, 33 Pereira, M.D.M.  12 Perrier, M.  6, 22, 63, 64, 74, 105 philanthropy  75–​6, 104 Picchio, A.  24 playgroups  32–​3 political education  104 political organizing  17–​18 political subjectivity  56–​8 Post Pandemic Childcare Coalition  90, 113 post-​welfare economies  1 post-​welfare states  32, 35, 42, 112, 113 power relations  27–​8, 83–​6, 92–​4 Pratt, G.  89, 96 privatization  see maternal care: marketization of Problem with Work, The (Weeks)  106–​7 professional pay  see wages professionalization  45 promiscuous care  103 Public Education Alliance  59 Q Quick, A.  112 R racialized minority women  childcare labour  1, 107 community mothering  40

depletion  77, 79 nannies  13 reproductive labour  25–​8 selflessness  47 racialized minority mothers  21, 25, 28, 30, 31, 102 Rai, S.M.  11, 63, 70, 101, 112 Randall, R.  36, 92 Raw, A.  29 Reay, D.  116 Rees, M.  66 Reese, E.  37, 42, 53 reproductive rights  25, 25–​6 reproductive work  32 Reynolds, T.  27, 30 Richardson, B.  35, 64 Romero, M.  27, 83 Rosen, R.  9, 31, 38, 40, 90, 99, 100 Roth, S.  42 Rottenberg, C.  78–​9 Rowbotham, S.  18, 33 Roy, A.  115 Roy, S.  12, 105 S Sandford, S.  7 Save the Salford Five  104–​5 Scotland  8 Segal, L.  5, 7, 110 self-​care  62–​3, 69, 104 self-​care services  74 self-​employed maternal entrepreneurs  74–​6 selfless workers versus natural strikers  47–​50 Shutes, I.  38 Simon, A.  10 Single Parent Action Network (SPAN)  16, 67, 72, 78, 104 Skeggs, B.  15, 27, 29, 47 slavery  25 Smart, C.  22, 65 Snitow, A.  40 social enterprise  31, 65 social reproduction  14, 15, 19, 22–​5, 43 class and racial division  25–​8 harm caused by  70, 112 language of  78 privatization of  63, 64, 77; see also maternal entrepreneurs sociology of  100–​2 waged and unwaged labour  106–​8 social reproduction movements  65 socialist feminism  6, 16, 32 solidarity  5, 8, 59, 76, 82, 96, 97 maternal worker power as  108–​10 see also parent-​worker solidarities South Africa  57–​8 state resources  111–​12 state-​funded childcare  44, 99 see also universal childcare

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Stephens, L.  10, 66, 105, 106 stratified depletion  62, 78, 79, 101, 103 stratified reproduction  28, 41, 101 strikes  8, 9, 17–​18, 24, 36, 43–​4, 102, 105 see also walkouts Sure Start centres  32, 121n2(ch3) Swan, E.  63, 104 T Tattersall, A.  56 teachers’ strikes  102, 105 Thomas, D.  70 Thompson, R.  116 threat, maternal worker power as  110–​12 transnational childcare  27 see also migrant nannies’ organizing transnational mothering  85 Tuominen, M.C.  14, 36 Twamley, K.  40 Tyler, I.  7 U Union of Australian Women (UAW)  36–​7 union-​community coalition  56, 59 unionization  33, 34, 37, 45 migrant workers  96 unions  8, 17, 33–​4, 37–​9, 44–​6, 51–​3, 57–​8, 96, 112, 113 United Kingdom (UK)  childcare movements  33–​4, 34–​5 childcare provision  9–​10 childminders  14 COVID-​19 pandemic  82 nannies  80 unions  113 universal childcare  31, 32 United States  6, 8, 26 childcare movements  34 COVID-​19 pandemic  82 nannies  25, 80 unionization  37 universal childcare  31, 32 United Voices  42, 43, 44, 45–​6, 47, 49, 52, 56, 59 universal caregiver model  35 universal childcare  11, 31–​6 Unterreiner, A.  4 V Vacchelli, E.  73 Van Lancker, W.  35 Villasin, F.O.  84 Vosko, L.F.  24 W wage earning  4–​5 wages  44, 45–​6, 46 Walkerdine, V.  27

walkouts  9, 19 early years educators  42–​61 context  43–​6 economic disruption  51–​3 letter writing and economic disruption  50–​1 migrant workers  56–​8 online campaign  46–​7 parent-​worker solidarities  53–​6 selfless workers versus natural strikers  47–​50 Webber, R.  117 Weeks, K.  2, 41, 106–​7 welfare states  32 see also post-​welfare states whole worker organizing  108 Williamson, L.  43 Women and their Wombs (Vergès)  119n4 Women and Work (Ferguson)  105 Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO)  88, 117 women’s liberation movement  6, 7, 9 Bristol  16, 66 legacy  15, 31–​6 racialized minority women  30 Women’s March  110 women’s organizing  29–​31 work-​based organizing  111 worker power  98, 102 see also maternal worker power working mothers  1, 17, 86–​7 working-​class mothering  26–​7 working-​class mothers  childcare labour  1 community organizing  19, 21 economic provision  17 pathologizing  102 selflessness  47 social reproduction  25, 28 working-​class women  Bristol  78 ‘caring nature’  28 childcare labour  1 childcare movements  31, 34, 38 community mothering  40 COVID-​19 pandemic  82 depletion  77 grassroots women’s organizing  29–​30 as selfless workers  47 Y Yamashita, J.  6 Yates, C.  59 Z Zwalf, H.  6

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“In this vivid and persuasive text Maud Perrier offers a fascinating, if alarming, overview of the ever worsening conditions around childcare, with shrinking public funds and expanding corporate involvement leaving maternal workers challenged and divided. But she also suggests ways of building unifying solidarities to improve the lot of maternal workers everywhere. This is an essential, path-breaking text for our time.” Lynne Segal, Birkbeck, University of London

Maud Perrier is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Spanning the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, this comparative study brings maternal workers’ politicized voices to the centre of contemporary debates on childcare, work and gender. The book illustrates how maternal workers continue to organize against low pay, exploitative working conditions and state retrenchment and provides a unique theorization of feminist divisions and solidarities. Bringing together social reproduction with maternal studies, this is a resonating call to build a crosssectoral, intersectional movement around childcare. Maud Perrier shows why social reproduction needs to be at the centre of a critical theory of work, care and mothering for postpandemic times.

ISBN 978-1-5292-1492-5

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