Who Cares? Pay and Working Conditions in Social Care in the 1980s and 1990s
Home > Who Cares? Pay and Working Conditions in Social Care in the 1980s and 1990s
This blog is based upon the research funded by a grant awarded by the Economic History Society through its Research Fund for Graduate Students to Freya Willis of the University of Oxford.
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In the wake of the recent UK general election campaign, Britain’s failing public services have become a matter of urgent political debate. In his first speech as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to restore a politics of public service, fix the health and social care system, and address growing economic insecurity among working people, invoking nurses, builders, drivers and carers as the emblematic figures of working people. The present urgency of the problems Starmer described, however, should not obscure their deep historical roots. In many ways, his speech summed up the end result of the economic transitions underway since the 1980s: deindustrialisation and the rise of the service economy; the progressive underfunding of the welfare state; and the fragmentation of the organised industrial working class, replaced by a low-paid, precarious, and female-dominated service workforce.
My PhD dissertation—”Who Cares? Social Care Workers’ Experiences of Work, Gender, and Class in England and Wales 1979-2010”—seeks to explain this period of economic transition and its implications for working people by examining the rise of caring industries and the lives, labours, and working conditions of care workers. I seek to answer the questions: how were working conditions in social care shaped by, and shaping, the major shifts in economic and social life between 1979 and 2010? How did social care workers experience, feel, and make sense of these changes? What was the impact of these shifts in economic and working life on the family, social reproduction, class identity and formation, gender relations, and race?
Thanks to the generosity of the Economic History Society’s Research Fund for Graduate Students, I have recently been able to view the records of local authority social services departments responsible for administering social care in Tower Hamlets, Bolton, and Neath Port Talbot. The records were highly fruitful and generated many new insights. This blog post will focus on what the records revealed about the ways in which key government policy choices in the 1980s and 1990s, when the care industry was being established in its current form, contributed to poor pay and working conditions.
The rapid expansion of caring industries in the 1980s was driven by the confluence of an ageing population, women’s increasing workforce participation, and growing state-support for care. Between 1979 and 1999, care assistants were the fastest growing sector of employment, increasing by 419 percent; 80 to 90 percent of these workers were women. Employment opportunities in care, however, expanded against the backdrop of recession, cuts to local government funding, and the declining value of local authority wages. In the 1980s, most care workers were employed by councils and classified as local authority manual workers, one of the lowest paid occupational classifications. Since the late 1970s, anti-inflationary wage restraint policies had eroded the value of local authority manual wages from two thirds of the national average in 1974 to just 45 percent in 1983.
From 1980, moreover, councils came under increasing financial strain as the Conservative government sought to reign in what they deemed wasteful and inefficient local authority spending, including by reducing the level of the Rate Support Grant and rate capping selected councils, of which Tower Hamlets was one. The local authority records showed how the limitation of available resources at a time of increasing demand for care services forced councils to make economies in numerous ways—for example, by tightening eligibility criteria for state support, increasing charges, home closures, and crucially, by reducing manpower costs. For frontline care workers, spending cuts were translated into worsening pay and working conditions through reduced staffing levels and hours of work, intense scrutiny of sickness absences, redeployment or redundancies, and pressure to limit pay awards. Tower Hamlets, for example, maintained a 5 percent staff vacancy rate in its home help service and residential homes from 1986, and up to a 20 percent vacancy rate for social workers.
Yet, without overstating their generosity, conditions for local authority workers throughout the 1980s and 1990s were still generally better than the private sector. Council employees were covered by national agreements, which provided for higher wages, guaranteed hours, enhanced overtime, holiday and sick pay, payment for travel time, and trade union representation. These limited benefits and protections were undercut by the privatisation and marketisation of care, which first begun in 1982, but came more fully to fruition in 1993 with the introduction of the purchaser-provider model, reconfiguring local authorities’ role from direct provider to purchaser of care. One of the principal arguments for privatisation was that private providers could deliver care more cheaply, which given care was a low productivity and labour-intensive sector where payroll costs made up between 60-80 percent of running costs, usually meant they offered worse wages and conditions (a fact that was widely acknowledged by local policymakers). Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) data from 1996 confirmed that the mean hourly wage in local authority care homes was £4.46, compared with £3.38 in private nursing homes or £3.58 in private residential homes.
A primary contributing factor to low wages in the private sector was the policy design of the care system. Under the purchaser-provider model, councils simultaneously had quasi-monopoly purchasing power and very limited budgets, a result of persistent underfunding by central government. They therefore exerted their purchasing power to drive down the price of care, often below the actual costs of delivering the service. In representations to both local and central governments, care providers and their representative organisations cited low contract prices as the reason for low pay, and increasingly by the late 1990s, drew attention to the challenges this posed for staff recruitment and retention. Although it must be noted that it was difficult for councils at the time and historians subsequently to interrogate other factors contributing to low pay given companies did not have to disclose financial information and/or profit margins.
Council employees were not insulated from the effects of underfunding or the competitive pressures that resulted from the introduction of the purchaser-provider model. For example, in 1993, Bolton expanded its in-house home care service to cover evenings and weekends. Despite the protests of trade unions, the council employed staff working these shifts on plain time rates, rather than paying the normal enhancements, citing the need to keep staff costs down to remain within the cash limits imposed by central government. In 1995, the council further proposed to remove all pay enhancements for staff in residential homes, including weekend working, shift allowances, sickness and holiday pay, night allowances, and unsociable hours. The council acknowledged that the changes would be detrimental to staff morale and goodwill, but claimed they were necessary for local authority homes to remain competitive with private providers, suggesting privatisation caused something of a race to the bottom.
As the example of caring industries shows, then, the declining quality of social services and rising economic insecurity are not new or distinct problems; they are both the result of decades of underfunding. Underfunding placed intense downward pressure on wages and conditions, that, in turn, compromised service quality insofar as they hampered staff recruitment, retention, and job satisfaction. Any efforts to fix social services must therefore first address working conditions.
In addition to archival research, I am seeking to interview people who worked in the care industry between 1979 and 2010, whether as a care worker, manager, provider, or in government. If you or anyone you know fit these criteria and might be willing to be participate in an oral history interview, please contact me.
To contact the author:
Freya Willis
University of Oxford
