Criminalizing Care Workers

This chapter offers a critique of the ‘care worker offence’ in section 20 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, which criminalizes ill-treatment or wilful neglect in circumstances of ‘paid work’ by care workers. It argues that this new offence has obscured the political and managerial choices that render care work badly paid and precarious. Judicial narratives are all too often framed around thick moralized judgements of vice and bad character, marginalizing alternative narratives that identify the terrible pressures that precarious workers experience in their working lives. These pressures are being generated by poor management, underinvestment in training, high staff turnover and high rates of sickness absence, and chronic starvation of public resources for social care. In this way, this chapter suggests that we might even regard the section 20 offence as a contemporary variant of 19th-century master and servant laws, using criminal laws to enforce labour discipline and to police the precarious.