Scheduling longer working lives for older aged care workers: A time and income capability approach

Abstract

Like many other countries, Australian government policy focuses on extending working life as a response to concern about the cost of an ageing population. In this article, we focus on older aged care workers and highlight how poor employment conditions hinder their capacity to work in later life. Many of these workers are at risk of time and income poverty, since they are on low wage, part-time, low-hour contracts and need to pick up extra shifts to earn a living wage. The interactions between time poverty and income poverty have been developed within a body of literature that analyses the quantities of time individuals and households allocate to paid employment, household, family and caring responsibilities, sleep and self-care. Burchardt’s notion of ‘time and income capability’ brings insights from this corpus into dialogue with the capabilities approach, a political philosophy that equates wellbeing with the breadth of realistic opportunities for people to do things that they have reason to value. This study uses Burchardt’s construct to analyse qualitative data from interviews with 20 older personal care workers. While all the workers we spoke with engaged in self-sustaining practices, there were varying levels of opportunity to pursue them. Workers with less time and income capability found it more difficult to sustain themselves and their households. Some employer practices diminished workers’ time and income capability: unrealistic workloads necessitating unpaid hours; providing little opportunity for input into rostering; and late-notice roster changes. When time and income capability was too low, workers’ informal care duties, social connections and health were compromised. In the Australian aged care sector, several changes can enable longer working lives: sufficient paid hours to perform the role, wage loading for hours in addition to those contracted, written notice for roster changes, and increased wages.

Keywords

Aged care capabilities approach casualisation employment conditions pink-collar

Background and introduction

For many workers, the erosion of standard working conditions and industrial protections have reduced autonomy over time (Colley et al., 2012; Pocock, 2003; Woodman, 2012). These effects are felt most acutely among workers with low pay, informal care responsibilities and precarious work conditions; circumstances more commonly experienced by women (Goodin et al., 2008; Irving et al., 2017; Southerton, 2006). In this article, we focus on the work/life balance of older, pink-collar aged care workers. We explore how one operationalisation of work/life balance – ‘time and income capability’ – can illuminate measures to maintain the health of older aged care workers and enable them to more fully participate in the life of their society.

Aged care work, like other direct care work, is feminised and often low paid. To distinguish this kind of feminised work from white- or blue-collar jobs, it is often referred to as pink-collar work. Aged care workers, especially those in roles requiring less than a Bachelor’s degree qualification, are especially vulnerable to poor work/life balance, and to its deleterious health effects. In Australia, most have informal care duties (Mavromaras et al., 2017) and pay for workers in personal care roles is undervalued when compared with comparable work (Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce, 2018). The increase in pension eligibility age to 67 by 2023 currently underway in Australia may induce some of these workers to stay in the industry longer, especially since women have lower average lifetime incomes, wealth and superannuation savings (Irving et al., 2017). However, older workers may suffer from compounding negative health effects if they are forced to continue to work because they have little alternative (McGann et al., 2015). Aged care can be heavy work for those in personal care roles (Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce, 2018). Twenty-seven per cent of the residential workforce and 39%of the home care workforce are 55 years or older; older than comparable feminised industries (Isherwood et al., 2018).

Many aged care workers are on part-time, low-hour contracts with highly flexible rosters. In Australia, around 80% of Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) in residential care and Home Care Workers (HCWs) work on a permanent part-time basis (Mavromaras et al., 2017). Industry census figures demonstrate that a large proportion of workers in the industry are unsatisfied with their quantity of work hours. Forty-four per cent of PCAs are dissatisfied with their hours (14% want fewer and 30% want more hours); and 54% of HCWs are dissatisfied with their hours (40% want more and 14% want less; Mavromaras et al., 2017). Over half of the employers of PCAs and HCWs report ‘skill shortages’ in their workforce and respond by asking staff to work longer hours (Isherwood et al., 2018). Skill shortages are evident across the aged care sector, which comprises not-for-profit providers (who employ 58% of the aged care workforce), for-profit providers (who employ 34%) and providers owned by government (who employ 7%; Mavromaras et al., 2017). No minimum hours are specified under the industry-specific employment conditions covering part-time PCAs (Fair Work Commission, 2018a) and HCWs (Fair Work Commission, 2018b). In Australia, National Employment Standards, the national minimum wage, and industry specific determinations or Awards make up a safety net of entitlements for employees. Nevertheless, industry specific practices can compromise employment conditions. For example, ‘flexed-up’ hours – that is, hours in addition to those that workers are contracted for – do not attract wage loading in personal carers’ awards, as they typically do for the awards governing part-time work in masculinised workforces (Charlesworth and Heron, 2012). Flexed-up hours can be given, or not given, at employers’ discretion and with little notice (Pocock et al., 2009). According to their award, part-time PCAs will have seven days’ written notice of the changes to their weekly roster. However, other ‘flexible’ rostering arrangements that do not apply in future weeks can be made without written notice. HCWs, who work under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry award are not entitled to any written notice – only to be ‘informed’ about their working hours (Charlesworth and Heron, 2012). These employment conditions amount to casualised part-time work, with workers adhering to what is effectively a casual work schedule without the 25% wage loading paid to casual employees (Campbell et al., 2019). In addition, shift durations in aged care can be limited. PCAs under the Aged Care award have 2-hour minimum shifts, while HCW workers under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability award have a one hour minimum shift (Fair Work Commission, 2018b). In the policy context of consumer directed home care, service providers are exposed to uncertain demand and income, and employers mitigate their exposure to this uncertainty by shifting workers’ rosters. Additionally, there is no requirement under the award to pay HCWs for travel times between their clients’ homes, although most employers do (Mavromaras et al., 2017).

Rosters that are flexible at employers’ discretion have been attributed with a range of negative effects for part-time workers. In their study of job quality in part-time retail, Campbell and Chalmers (2008) observed: ‘the fact that the employer can decrease or indeed abolish their hours without penalty or notice has a powerful disciplining effect on casual workers’ (p. 491). Given the casualised conditions of their part-time roles, this is likely to be also true for aged care workers. For example, aged care workers who have concerns about care quality or are aggrieved with a manager may hesitate to raise the issue with their employer for fear of being overlooked for additional shifts. Flexed-up part-time employment can also create difficulties for workers who may be in receipt of means tested government benefits. In this situation, workers who take on unanticipated hours may incur a welfare debt if their income exceeds the maximum rate for a given benefit (Banks and Bowman, 2019; Bowman and Banks, 2018; Carney, 2018). Finally, worker control over schedules tends to be highly valued by those with informal care responsibilities. In the context of low wages and low hours, workers may find it financially difficult to reject a shift offer that interferes with their care responsibilities (Chalmers et al., 2005).

Formal methods for assessing time constraints in poverty measures have built upon the pioneering work of Vickery (1977), who proposed a ‘poverty standard’ measurement that included both time and money inputs. Vickery argued that this was warranted since income poverty measures could exclude some single mothers who had income slightly in-excess of the poverty line but insufficient time for domestic production. Of particular concern for Vickery was the extra time and skill required to prepare the low financial-value food that was accessible on a constrained budget. She also aimed to establish methods to distinguish between the involuntary poor who had few options to be otherwise; those who were poor as a temporary or voluntary condition; and those who would become poor in the event of household change, such as the arrival of a child or the departure of an adult. Although some of the analyses were crude – such as substituting actual work-hour data with an assumption that adults worked either zero hours, 20 hours part-time or 40 hours full-time – Vickery estimated that a much greater number of households would be counted as poor or at risk of being poor if time poverty was taken into account.

The research corpus building upon Vickery’s approach has developed some common topical and methodological attributes. A typology of time proposed by Ås (1982) is used more or less consistently, with contracted time (paid employment); committed time (household, family and caring responsibilities); necessary time (sleep and self-care); and free time (remaining time after the above three have been taken into account). Studies typically direct particular concern towards gendered divisions of labour, especially the care of children. Some studies have applied this focus to developing countries (e.g. Bardasi and Wodon, 2006, 2010; Wodon and Blackden, 2006) and others to richer nations, where parents remain at risk of time and income poverty, especially women and single parents (e.g. Goodin et al., 2005; Harvey and Mukhopadhyay, 2007). Curiously, much less attention is paid to the care required by other family or community members, such as those who are ill, elderly or disabled. To this extent, these studies probably under-estimate the workload of some individuals (Bardasi and Wodon, 2006).

Some methodological variations can be observed in the literature building on Vickery’s 1977 study, and these have been documented by Zacharias (2011). Goodin et al. begin with different income groups and assume ‘enough paid hours to get your income up to the poverty line’ (2005: 50) and then assess whether the time remaining is sufficient. Bardasi and Wodon (2010) take the opposite approach, calculating the paid hours left after other time-commitments are met and assessing the resulting income against the income-poverty threshold. There is also some variation in the treatment of workers’ options to choose how many hours they work. Douthitt’s (2000) method assumes that working hours are fixed, but householders may substitute home production from marketplace equivalents when time is short. Goodin et al. (2005) instead allow for workers to increase or decrease their hours, but adjust wage rates for different numbers of hours per week, as higher- and lower-end wages tend to be concentrated in jobs demanding greater or lesser quantities of hours. Arora (2015) and Bardasi and Wodon (2006) measure time/income poverty at the individual level, while Goodin et al. (2005) aggregate time and income at the household level.

Of particular interest to our present concern is Burchardt’s (2010) notion of time and income capability, which draws on work from the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach, developed by Sen (1979, 1999, 2004) and elaborated by Nussbaum (2004), Robeyns (2003) and others, is a body of philosophical, economic and political theory. It draws from the traditions of liberal political philosophy, but is distinct from utilitarianism and social contract theory. It proposes that the equitable distribution of human development is a moral imperative, and that human development is a process of increasing the substantive freedom of individuals. Substantive freedoms have been defined as ‘the whole set of combinations of functioning which the individual could achieve, should he or she wish, including the one combination she or he is actually achieving’ (Burchardt, 2004: 738). Substantive freedoms are defined as ‘opportunities to achieve particular states of being or undertake particular activities’ (Burchardt, 2004: 738), rather than specific instances of their having done so. In other words, the focus is on freedom and constraint, rather than actual functioning. To illuminate the significance of this distinction, Sen made a distinction between two hungry men, one fasting and one starving. He said: ‘we look not merely at what the two respectively ate, but also at what option of eating they respectively had’ (Sen, 2002: 594–595). If substantive freedom is the measure of an individual’s wellbeing, then it is also useful as a basis of measurements of inequality within a society. The capabilities approach is often used as a framework for thinking about inequality.

Burchardt (2010) contributes to the time and income poverty literature, and the capability literature, by bringing the two into dialogue (Burchardt, 2008). This combination is significant because it focusses not on the particular allocation of time and income that people actually experience but on their freedom (or lack of freedom) to choose other allocations. Of particular interest is Burchardt’s introduction of the notion of a ‘feasible’ range of time and income allocations, in which basic needs and responsibilities are met. For example, ‘someone with no feasible allocations will necessarily be unable to meet her responsibilities – for example, she may be going short of sleep, leaving children unsupervised, and/or be in material poverty’ (Burchardt, 2010: 326). We would add that, in light of the strong connections between health, wellbeing and social connectedness (Franklin et al., 2018; House et al., 1988), particularly among older people (Cattan et al., 2005; Endo, 2018), some maintenance of friendships and kin bonds would be required for a time and income allocation to be feasible. This notion of ‘feasible’ allocations has particular significance for time and income poverty studies using qualitative data. While quantitative studies take care with calculus and the construction of thresholds for defining time or income poverty, qualitative data require a more situated approach, looking instead for difficult trade-offs between mutually unfeasible options. Burchardt’s time and income capability rubric has been used to analyse the temporal tensions between parents’ wage labour and child rearing (for example, Drobnič and León, 2014; Hobson et al., 2014) and can usefully be applied to the tensions experienced by older aged care workers.

Methods and approach

This article presents data drawn from qualitative interviews with older aged care workers. Our project was animated by two research questions: first, what job characteristics are significant for the health of older ‘pink-collar’ workers in the aged care industry?; and second, what policy measures might be available to encourage these characteristics? We chose to focus on pink-collar workers in this context because of their particular vulnerabilities within the context of policies to extend working lives. Our overall response to these research questions have been published in a research report (Hart et al., 2019), but our particular focus with this article is to engage more deeply with the intersections of time and income poverty and worker health. Our sampling frame was aged care workers aged 50+ years in positions requiring less than a Bachelors’ degree qualification. After advertising the opportunity to participate in trade publications, 92 potential participants completed an online screening survey. Drawing from this pool, we recruited 20 participants to approximately reflect the demographics and characteristics of the older home-care and residential aged care workforce (Irving et al., 2017; Mavromaras et al., 2017). Given this recruitment process, it may be that our participants’ data are weighted towards a greater intrinsic interest in the integrity of the aged care system; and those who had more discretionary time. Participants’ were aged 50+ and resided in the Australian states of Victoria (n = 15), New South Wales (n = 3) and Queensland (n = 2). During the recruitment process, participants’ confidentiality was assured and the sources of funding and institutional support were disclosed. Participants were compensated with a $50 AUD groceries voucher. The recruitment process received ethics approval from the University of Melbourne Humanities Law & Social Sciences Human Ethics Sub-Committee.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted face to face (n = 11) and by phone (n = 9). Aside from the different geographic location of phone interviewees – for practical reasons, all participants who resided outside of Melbourne completed a phone interview – we did not note any substantive difference in the data elicited by phone. Each took about 60 minutes and asked about work and family biographies, care responsibilities, work and money, and health. Work questions targeted the physical, emotional and temporal dimensions of work quality, and sought information about relationships with supervisors, opportunities for training and career development, and meaningfulness. Intersections between these work characteristics, home life and health were explored.

Transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo qualitative software. The resulting coding frame arranged 14 nodes among four primary themes: biographical; supervision and workplace culture; statements defining good care; employment conditions and temporal quality and its connections with worker health. For this article we focussed on data coded into the latter node, and analysed worker statements about their time scheduling against Burchardt’s notion of time and income capability, with a focus on identifying the effects of employment practices and possible remedies.

Findings

All workers engaged in self-sustaining practices, but there were varying levels of opportunity to pursue them. Financial and personal circumstances gave some workers a relatively high time and income capability, while workers with less time and income capability found it more difficult to sustain themselves and their households. Some employer practices diminished workers’ time and income capability: unrealistic workloads necessitating unpaid hours; providing little opportunity for input into rostering; and late-notice roster changes. When time and income capability was too low, workers’ informal care duties, social connections and health were compromised. In these ways, employer practices diminished workers’ capacity to sustain ongoing work.

All workers had practices that sustained them, but there were varying levels of opportunity to pursue them

Financial and personal circumstances give some workers a relatively high time and income capability. Margaret (57, HCW, Melbourne), who did not have any informal care responsibilities and was comfortably well-off in her own home, worked six days per week. When we asked if she would like to spend more time at home, she replied ‘no … I miss my people if I do … Every morning I get up. You know how some people wake up in the morning and go “agh I’m going to work”? I get up happy to go to work.’ Margaret had a wide range of choices about how to use her time and she actively chose home care work because it was meaningful for her. Mae (64, PCA, Melbourne) was in a similar financial position and was also free of informal care duties, but, with three shifts per week, she worked half as much as Margaret. She told us ‘Monday to Friday, I go to [suburb] Swimming Pool, swimming at least half an hour and then 15 minutes sauna room, maybe sometimes if I have time, spa and then relax in the swimming pool. I like that. Very relaxing for me. Because we’re in a nursing home, I’m very stressed sometimes.’ Mae told us that she continued this work because it afforded meaning, purpose and the relationships with colleagues and residents. Carol (59, PCA, regional NSW) was also financially secure and set aside regular time for her health: ‘I’ve got the time, so I don’t have to work. So, then I’ve got the time to go to the gym, I go, four times a week, two hours at a time.’ Carol was aware of her relative privilege in being able to make this choice: ‘I’ve got all the good things. There’s a lot of people out there that don’t’. Chang (65, HCW, Melbourne) was also financially secure and used his discretionary time to look after other aspects of his wellbeing. Chang told us that: ‘I’m a Christian so I go to Church every Sunday, I’ve got a lot of Church members and whenever I feel unhappy or whatever about something I can talk to my pastor and my [fellow worshipers]’. Chang also took some time to unwind after each shift:

So every time after I finish the work I go to go shopping, I won’t go home first. I go shopping, I go have a cup of coffee in the shopping centre, I walk around in the park before I go home. I try to release all these toxics in my mind and this is very – I think you can imagine because when you’re facing an old man, his faeces everywhere and you have to lift him up.

Chang was purposeful in using his time to recover mentally and physically from the distressing situations that he encountered in his work. These workers’ time and income capability allowed them to balance their work and non-work time in a way that suited them. They participated in non-work activities that they found nourishing, meaningful and restorative. The activities helped to maintain workers’ capacity to continue paid labour, which they performed at a level that was sustainable for them.

Workers with lower time and income capability also tried to sustain themselves. Most participants did not have the means to reduce their hours at will, but they also attempted to achieve a balance between work duties and other activities. Olivia (62, PCA, regional Victoria) was still paying her mortgage and cared for her husband who had health problems and was unable to work. She worked four or five days per week. At the time of our interview, she had been working in residential care for about 12 months and initially found the role physically demanding:

Oh my goodness. The first month I thought I was going to die. It takes me four minutes to walk to work, and the first month or two maybe I would stagger home, collapse on the couch and say, “What have I done? I’m never going to be able to do this.” Because I thought I’d wasted a whole year on study and it wasn’t going to work.

However, Olivia adjusted to the work and engaged in some self-care practices. She told us: ‘If I’m out in the garden I feel very happy. Even if I’m working really hard in the garden I’m really happy. The irony of it is physical work in the garden recuperates me from physical work at work.’ Olivia also attended church weekly: ‘[the priest] provides me with something to make me recover, just out of nowhere. It’s just fulfilling. It’s just, “I’m right for the rest of the week now” at least, until next time.’

Helen (59, PCA, regional NSW) was the sole carer of her husband, who was very unwell, and she worked most days: ‘I reckon I’m doing 55 [or] 56 [rostered hours per fortnight]’. Nevertheless, she also managed a number of regular activities for her own enjoyment and wellbeing. ‘I go out for coffee with a friend once a week or once a fortnight. I go to tap-dancing classes’ and ‘I go to Qi Gong of a night, once a week … Great for my mental status’. Helen also said that during her annual leave each year, ‘I go to Bali for two weeks with a girlfriend … My dad funds that.’ This was the only time during the year that she got respite from caring for her husband.

Jing Yi (50, PCA, Melbourne) lived alone and suffered from pain which she associated with her decade-long career as a personal carer. When we met her for the interview she was wearing acupuncture tacks in her ears and hands, which she said helped to manage her pain. She was working five days per week but did her best to maintain her body when she had the chance: ‘when I’m [having a] day off, I go to the fitness club. Once or twice a week – pilates, yoga. So, needs stretching, a lot of muscle pain, back pain, yeah. So later it’s worse, so I need that course [of exercise] every week. And at home and also do some stretching when I watch the TV. And most of time it’s rest.’ With this regime, Jing Yi had ‘no time to spend money’. Earning and saving at her current rate, she hoped to pay off her mortgage after two years and planned to work three days per week when her mortgage was finished. ‘The rest of time I can do more relax like garden work. Garden work is relaxed my mind and now, so I’ve got more energy to do the exercise in the fitness club.’ The physical nature of work for Jing Yi, Olivia and Helen – and the unknown capacities of their ageing bodies to endure this into the future – added extra impetus to their efforts to maintain their health within the envelope of time that they had available to do so.

Andrew (65, HCW, Melbourne) lived with his wife and they owned their house, but had insufficient superannuation and savings to retire. Andrew told us that his ‘survival strategy’ was to ‘to keep on working and defer taking pension as long as possible, and it’s basically to take very regular breaks.’ These included shorter breaks during the working day and longer breaks for a holiday. Andrew was the only participant in our study to work for a local government employer and as a result his employment conditions were better than most, particularly in relation to training, occupational health and safety and schedule flexibility. He told us, for example, that ‘I can manipulate my hours to work less or more according to my need.’ He explained the importance of this for his ability to sustain work:

I’m personally quite happy to have lots of time to wander in the park between jobs and refresh myself, not overstress myself. I think my body’s always probably been a little bit prone to tendon and joint kind of injuries. So, I put more emphasis than some need to on care in that way, not too much repetition of the same job all the time. I will bend the rules by going a bit early to one job and slightly later to the next, so I can create that space to relax between jobs.

Despite having lower time and income capability, each of these workers sustained their capacity to work through purposeful self-maintenance practices. If these workers’ time and income capability was further diminished, their capacity to maintain these practices would be eroded. Ongoing work may become unfeasible and they would be at risk of involuntary retirement and financial precarity.

Some employer practices diminished workers’ time and income capability

Some participants described employer practices that diminished their time and income capability and hence their capacity to manage informal care and self-care. These employer practices included imposing unrealistic workloads that required unpaid hours, providing little opportunity for workers to influence their own rosters, and making roster changes at short notice.

Unrealistic workloads leave some workers doing unpaid hours

Employers’ austere and inflexible rostering practices, and the necessity of providing care when it is needed (Davies, 1994; Hirvonen and Husso, 2012), left some workers doing regular unpaid hours. Unpaid hours doubly diminish time and income capability by displacing discretionary time without generating any corresponding income. Some participants mentioned that they completed much of the paperwork associated with their role outside paid hours, because priority was given to practical care tasks during paid hours. Helen told us that during home care duties:

you’re spending so much time [providing direct care] then doing your pay [claims], sending emails, putting in dated notes—you don’t get paid for that. And you can’t do that when you’re with a client, because that is really rude, I think. And you can’t concentrate. You’re trying to talk to them, you’ve got your head in the phone, and I just find that really rude.

Jenny (55, PCA, regional Victoria) had a similar story. She told us that ‘sometimes there’s two PCAs looking after 54 people.’ This made it impossible to complete administrative tasks within the allocated time:

But on the morning shift, sometimes we’re there for an hour and a half, after our shift, doing paperwork, unpaid. Sometimes it gets a little bit better, sometimes, the worst I’ve done, I’ve stayed there for two hours after my shift finishing off stuff. And it’s because something happened in the middle of the shift on my section, like somebody had a fall, which can take two hours out of everything else that you’ve got to do. And of course, you want to do the right thing with the resident, make sure they’re okay and all that, so, you don’t regret having to do that. But as a result of that, you have to stay longer to finish your other tasks that are expected of you. It’s horrible. They don’t have enough staff.

Insufficient staffing levels left these workers with a choice between disregarding the needs of people in their care and working unpaid hours. For Jenny and Helen, care must be given, regardless of the impact on other schedules and this came at a cost to their time and income capability.

Lack of input into rostering

Several workers told us that a lack of input into their work rostering system left them walking a fine line between maintaining their income, informal care duties, and self-care. Helen told us that she would like to work less and care for her husband more, but this was prevented by her financial situation and rostering arrangements. At the time of interview, Helen was ‘on a 50 [hour fortnightly] contract’. This mostly suited Helen, but her roster required that ‘every four weeks, [I have] got to do 12 days straight because you have to do that in your contract’. Helen found this period without a day off physically and psychologically taxing, and would have preferred to drop some hours to avoid it. She explained:

knowing the [shift] allocator that we have now and all the rules and regulations, I can only go down to a 30 [hour] contract. They don’t have a 40 [hour] contract … So I’d have to stick with the 50 [hour contract] to make any money.

The financial gap between 30 and 50 hours was too much for Helen to bridge, and her lack of opportunity to negotiate a more manageable middle point left her in an uncomfortable routine. In addition, the schedule of work hours that she was offered was uncertain and the limits she tried to impose on her hours of availability did not hold. Helen told us that she would indicate to her allocator: ‘I have a specific time that I can work, because of my husband … I can start at 8.00am [and be available] until 4.00pm’. However, she sometimes felt compelled to take on additional shifts outside the hours she has indicated as available: ‘so then they’ll give me a job from 2.30pm to 4.30pm or 3.00pm to 5.00pm. And if I say I can’t do that because it’s out of my availability, I miss out on those hours.’ Jing Yi also felt depleted by the rhythm of her rostering arrangements. Her permanent shift cycles left her feeling: ‘quite confused. Okay, two day [shifts then a] night shift and then turn back to afternoon shift and one day, morning shift … But I can’t [drop any shifts] because I need to keep the saving, the income stable.’ The implication here is that the rostering process left Jing Yi with only the option to drop shifts, rather than exchange them. In the context of her need to pay off housing debt while she was able to work, she was unable to choose otherwise.

Late-notice roster changes

Frequent late-notice roster changes were a sore point for several participants. Leanne (66, PCA, rural Queensland) was employed on a casual basis and had an accepting disposition towards the reduction of her hours:

our shift in clients coming into the system and leaving our service has had an impact on those hours [I used to work], so I can’t really complain. You can’t pull hours out of the sky just for the sake of it. So it would be a bit rude of me to demand extra hours when there’s nobody to go and visit.

Carol, whose high time and income capability was detailed above, reflected that: ‘I get about 15 hours and I was getting about 20 odd hours. Now that this man is in hospital, I’ve dropped down to about eleven I think.’ Some residential aged care employers made seemingly arbitrary decisions about roster changes. Jenny was often left with little notice about her upcoming shifts: ‘as for the rosters, they drive me nuts … the worst-case scenario was we got down to three days’ roster on the board, three days.’ Jenny attributed these late-notice changes to the poor practice of the staff member who allocated shifts:

The lady that’s in the office has no floor experience whatsoever, so she doesn’t care enough, I feel. If somebody rings in sick, or even people would say, “I’ve got an appointment two weeks later, I can’t work that shift”, she will leave it to the night before or the day of to try and find somebody to replace them.

In addition to Jenny’s analysis here, we might note that an absence of formal obligations for employers to negotiate schedules with workers (Charlesworth and Heron, 2012), leaves managers with little incentive to facilitate a more deliberative rostering arrangement. Whatever the reason, the uncertain rostering practices diminished workers’ autonomy to plan their time and their capacity to look after themselves and others.

Jenny also gave an example of how unpredictable scheduling could interfere with the care she provided for a friend:

I had to drive my best friend down to the hospital and back in Melbourne and I’m like an hour into the trip and work rings me and says, “Do you realize you’re supposed to be at work today.” And I said, “I never work on these weekends. What do you mean? Am I on the roster?” And they said, “Yes.” So, I stopped, got my roster out and sure enough, my name’s on the roster and I just completely missed it because I’d assumed that I wasn’t working because I never work on this weekend … It’s every second weekend, I don’t work. And all of a sudden, they’ve popped me on and I didn’t even know. So, now I feel really bad.

Uncertain rostering practices compromised workers’ time and income capability, with clear implications for their capacity to care for themselves and others.

Unfeasible time and income capability erodes informal care, social connection and health

Workers gave us several examples of the ways in which low time and income capability diminished their social connections, informal care duties and health.

Social and family connections

Several participants with low time and income capability had difficulties in maintaining connections with significant others. Jing Yi visits her family in an Asian city annually. In Australia, her social support is limited to a small circle of people she has met through aged care work. Some have now retired and she sees them ‘maybe every two or three months’. Her main social support is a current colleague:

And I have a best friend here, she work here too. Cause it’s same Chinese background, it’s more easy to communicate and the culture’s similar … From last month, we don’t have the same shift anymore because I moved … department.

Jing Yi’s primary friendship is largely dependent on their respective rostering arrangements. Although they no longer work in the dame department, they have a concurrent shift each week, so they travel to and from work together. The fragility of these arrangements and Jing Yi’s otherwise small field of social connection leaves her vulnerable to social isolation. For Leanne and Jenny, social connections withered because of their work-induced fatigue. Leanne said: ‘even just going out, like socialisation, I don’t feel like it anymore. I’m tired. I get tired of a night, that’s it, I’m home, that’s it for the day’. Jenny gave an example of a similar scenario:

My friend thinks it’s really funny because she’ll ring me up and say, “Oh do you want to go down to the pub for a beer or play pool or whatever.” I go, “No, I’ve got work tomorrow and the next day.” And she goes, “Well so do I.” But for me, it’s just different, I just can’t. I have to remain completely focused on getting to work and back, that’s the only thing I can think of with my health.

These workers need time to recover from the heavy physical and emotional demands of aged care work. They have little discretionary income, irregular hours and limited scope for determining their work schedules. The resulting low time and income capability leaves them at risk of social isolation. These observations are consistent with findings that informal networks can be diminished by irregular work hours (Woodman, 2012).

Informal care, self-care and working sick

When low income was combined with informal care duties and ill-health, workers could be left with an untenable time and income capability. Jackie (50, HCW, Sydney) lived with her husband and son in a public housing unit. Her son had a disability and Jackie hoped that he would soon achieve greater independence as he moved into adulthood. Jackie regularly took time off work to care for her son, leaving her with no sick leave to take when she was unwell. She reflected: ‘I’ve looked after everybody else instead of myself.’ Although her husband worked, his income was low and her 30 hours of work each week were essential for the family income. Around 18 months ago, Jackie had both knees reconstructed. She described the situation before and after the operation:

I was working for [home care provider] and my knees just broke down and I worked until I couldn’t practically walk. And then I went on leave without pay [to have surgery and recover] … It took a lot of toll out on me as well as the pain and trying to get back to work as well as the financial situation with bills and everything. It just wasn’t a really good time … So pretty much I ran out of money. So I was living off my husband’s income and basically that’s – yeah, we were living on a really tight budget.

Jackie credits her family’s long-term tenancy in public housing with getting them through: ‘if we were out in the private [housing] sector there’s no way we would have been able to eat and pay rent.’ Jackie’s combination of low income, informal care duties and ill-health combined to leave her with a grim choice either working in pain or running out of money.

Beverley (52, HCW, Melbourne) lived with her husband and son, who both worked, but her income was a necessary contribution to the household budget. She estimated that, on average, she worked 18 or 19 hours per week, although her part-time contract specified 24 hours. Beverley’s low income left her fearful of losing further shifts. On two occasions when she had been unable to work – because of the death of her father, and because of a broken toe – Beverley had lost her regular shifts with existing clients and had to advocate with her employer to have further shifts allocated. This left her reluctant to turn down shifts in the future: ‘if you phone in sick, it’s not looked upon well … once the shift’s gone you don’t get that money, it’s gone. You get paid by the shift. So you never know what you’re going to get paid.’ Helen’s husband had been unwell and she has taken ‘lots of time’ off work to care for him: ‘I had to take some of my long service leave and then I had to take all my sick leave. I don’t have any sick leave for me.’ Mae reflected on a colleague’s need to keep working: ‘[they were] hurt, yet kept going to work because if you take too much sick leave and maybe use all the sick leave, maybe they don’t trust you and then you get low income, so you bring your injuries to work.’ Mae’s observation about working sick or injured echoes Campbell and Chalmers’ (2008) observation about the ‘powerful disciplining effect’ of casualised work (p. 491). Employers’ power to withhold the hours needed to earn a living wage effectively required unwell workers to be available for work. Jenny was particularly irate about the effects of her workplace rostering system on her efforts to maintain her health: ‘So, how do any of us organize our lives? We don’t. Anything that we want to do, it has to be last minute appointment. Hope for the best to get into a doctor or whatever’.

Discussion

Some workers’ time and income capability was high and their capacity to sustain longer working lives was primarily related to the match between the work available and their intrinsic motivations to do this work. Increased wages or employment conditions are unlikely to make a significant difference for these workers. The time and income capability of other workers was critically low, and this was made evident in instances of workers working sick or injured, having insufficient income to meet basic requirements, limited social and family supports and pressure to forego informal care duties. Unrealistic workloads and insufficient staffing, lack of input into rostering arrangements and late-notice roster changes contributed to this low time and income capability.

These findings overlap with those of Goodin et al. (2008), who argue that work time flexibility ought to be a priority for policy makers who are concerned with social equity. These findings also overlap with those of Chalmers et al. (2005), who argued the quality of part-time work depended on the number of hours; when hours are scheduled, and how this synchronises with caring responsibilities; worker-determined variation and flexibility in the number of hours; wages and employment benefits; employment security; access to training and career progression; employee voice; and content of jobs. More specifically, the time and income capability of aged care workers might be advanced through improvements to the awards covering aged care work (Fair Work Commission, 2018a, 2018b). Target measures might ensure: wage loading for flexed-up hours; written notice for roster changes; minimum shift hours; sufficient paid hours to perform role; minimum hour contracts and paid transit time between home care sites. Ensuring sufficient hours to perform the role to a reasonable standard is a particular priority, since unpaid hours doubly diminish workers’ time and income capability by displacing discretionary time without any corresponding income. Many workers feel intrinsically motivated to provide care to a high standard, and the difficulties they often face in doing so has a range of negative affects – a topic we have explored elsewhere (Hart et al., 2019).

Because of their increased cost to aged care employers, who are primarily government funded, these measures will have budgetary implications. However, failure to address these issues may result in fewer workers in the aged care industry, and a larger number of involuntary retirements.

Examples of policy settings in New Zealand (New Zealand Ministry of Health, 2018) and Sweden (Daly and Szebehely, 2012; Meagher et al., 2016) suggest that these challenges are not insurmountable. While many of these issues are likely to be evident in other pink-collar roles, further research with pink-collar workers is needed to identify the mechanisms affecting time and income capability within specific awards and industries.

Our analyses demonstrate that time and income capability is a suitable rubric for assessing the ways that wages and work scheduling mediate older pink-collar workers’ capacity to extend their working lives. They also demonstrate the utility of Burchardt’s notion of ‘feasible’ time and income capability for identifying difficult trade-offs evident in qualitative data. In light of our findings, future studies using this rubric may wish to pay careful attention to the extra time and care older workers need to keep their body in working order.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The project brings together researchers from the Australian National University, the federal departments of Social Services and Employment, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the University of Melbourne, Safe Work Australia and Queensland Treasury. Chief Investigator is Prof Lyndall Strazdins (Australian National University).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded as one component of a larger Australian Research Council Linkage Project (LP160100467) entitled ‘Working longer, staying healthy and keeping productive’.

ORCID iD

Aaron Hart

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