An ideal of “home” as the best site for living and dying in old age has become embedded in residential care policies and practices in many countries, often in tandem with neoliberal restructuring. This article compares the ways that two Canadian jurisdictions have approached this ideal, and identifies contradictions in the effects this policy direction has had for direct care workers and residents. The investigation reveals challenges and possibilities for gender equity.

Professional urban fire services across the United States and Canada are now engaged in care work, as a significant aspect of their work as emergency medical first responders. Given that the historically resilient world-wide unequal gendered division of labour continues to assign care to women, and to subaltern women in particular, the engagement of this primarily white, male labour force bears examination. In Canada, the late 1990s saw fire responses to ‘medical’ emergencies increase dramatically to become the dominant call category for fire services, as part of a tiered emergency response. Further, these responses are seldom to heart attack, stroke or catastrophic events for which firefighters are trained, but instead are responses to more predictable and recurring issues imperiling the health and well-being of people with chronic illnesses, disability or frailty. Using data collected from research in four Canadian cities, this article explains how fire services have been pulled into emergency care concurrent with health care and social services re-structuring and what this move tells us about re-structuring in terms of the fragility of the care economy and masculinized public sector work.

Social reproduction has received considerable recent attention from academics and activists aiming to stimulate and advance transformative political change. Yet, an understanding of social reproduction as “work” has sometimes slipped away, leaving behind important anti-racist feminist insights. Engaging with recent contributions from scholars in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, we argue that social reproduction is most useful as a concept, not as a theory, and is best understood as “work”. We point out quandaries and ambiguities that have produced conceptual confusion in scholarship on social reproduction and argue for a conceptualization offered by feminist political economy. We conclude that social reproduction, when understood as work, can support efforts to build the mass movements and solidarity necessary for effective anti-capitalist politics if its relationship to, and contradictions with, the processes of dispossession and capital accumulation are taken into account.

RÉSUMÉ: Aujourd’hui, des hommes, ainsi que des personnes immigrantes, travaillent dans le secteur des soins de longue durée. Cette nouvelle donne modifie profondément le stéréotype du travailleur de ce secteur, soit une femme d’un certain âge née au Canada. Bien que toujours minoritaires, on en sait peu sur les expériences de travail des hommes qui prodiguent des soins de longue durée, ainsi que sur les dilemmes et les opportunités auxquels ils font face en raison de leur genre. Cet article examine comment le personnel de deux centres d’hébergement et de soins de longue durée ontariens perçoit les travailleurs masculins de ce secteur. S’appuyant sur une méthode ethnographique rapide, qui comprend à la fois des entrevues et des observations, nous avons constaté que le style de gestion de ces établissements entraîne des répercussions significatives sur l’intégration et l’acceptation des travailleurs masculins. Dans un centre d’hébergement doté d’une organisation du travail rigide et laissant peu de place au pouvoir décisionnel des travailleurs, les travailleurs masculins sont perçus négativement. Au contraire, dans des centres d’hébergement dotés d’une organisation du travail plus flexible qui met l’emphase sur une approche relationnelle du care, les travailleurs masculins sont perçus plus positivement. Finalement, des processus de racialisation influencent également les relations de genre dans les centres d’hébergement et de soins de longue durée.