Organising care in solidarity:Five years of the care revolution

It could be beautiful and enriching - taking care of ourselves and each other, providing people with friendly, neighbourly and professional support. Instead, the conditions under which we carry out this care work lead many of us to exhaustion, poverty or a loss of empathy because all the necessary care is not affordable. The Care Revolution network was founded five years ago to counteract this. One of our starting points was: We will not allow ourselves to be played off against each other as care workers, as care workers in families and neighbourhoods or as people who are dependent on care. We will recognise and acknowledge the needs of all those in caring relationships. And the fact that so many people are overwhelmed by care work shows this: It is not the individual care workers who are failing, but the social system. There is no reason to assume that things can improve within the framework of neoliberal capitalism. We are currently seeing three trends that are putting care workers under increasing pressure.

• Cost minimisation: As long as the focus of the economy is on maximum profit and competition between Germany and other countries, care work should be one thing above all else: cheap. It becomes cheaper, for example, when the length of stay of patients becomes shorter and shorter due to flat rates per case in hospital financing, while the number of patients that a carer has to look after increases and at the same time the state does not finance the necessary investments in hospitals.
• Privatisation: Care work should not only be cheap, but also become a field of capital investment. This is happening in care for the elderly, for example, where the proportion of homes owned by private chains such as Curanum or Pro Seniore, which in turn are owned by corporations or hedge funds, is growing year on year. These homes are not only competing with others for people in need of care, they also have to generate a return. It is therefore no coincidence that wages in private homes are particularly low and collective labour agreements are largely unknown.
• Shifting to families: Care work is cheapest when it is provided free of charge. This happens for the most part in families. Caring for loved ones makes sense and may be desired by the carers. However, if people who take responsibility for those in need of care or single parents, around 90% of whom are mothers, are not available to the labour market, they risk falling into poverty immediately or at the latest when they retire. Compensating for this with more gainful employment leads to excessive demands - and there is always too little time left for children or those in need of care.

This is why Care Revolution has been resisting cost pressure, privatisation and familialisation for five years. Instead, we first want to improve the framework conditions for paid and unpaid care workers. This means, among other things, a basic income that ensures dignity and participation without sanctions, a sufficient minimum wage, a reduction in full-time gainful employment and an expansion of public, supportive infrastructure. Implementing these initial steps alone would improve the situation of care workers and reduce the burden, but we want more. Because what we are opposing is not simply the result of misguided policies. As long as care remains a means of private enrichment, human needs will be subordinated to the primacy of capital utilisation. We will have to run into this wall again and again and use all our strength to shift it at least a little. Ultimately, however, we want care to become a social task that is distributed according to need and not according to gender, nationality and skin colour, because caring relationships are central to the lives of all people; the care work that we do at work, in families or as a social commitment is socially necessary. Sufficient time, resources and support from professionals must be available to all those who carry out these tasks. No one should be excluded from fulfilling their care needs because of poverty or nationality, for example. Viewing care as a social responsibility also means fundamentally questioning and breaking up the gender relations that hand over care responsibilities to women - mothers, daughters, partners, migrant care workers working under poor conditions. We will not achieve such a social, solidarity-based solution as long as institutions such as hospitals or care homes are privately owned and run for profit. We want to stop the trend towards privatisation in the care sector and regain social control over currently private facilities. Because every million in profits distributed means fewer care workers; where the power of private owners prevails, comprehensive democratic decisions are not possible. But if we are serious about organising care in a spirit of solidarity, we need this radical democracy. That is why, firstly, we are striving for a social infrastructure in which all those affected can jointly decide on what is offered and how care relationships are organised. And secondly, that is why we are also committed to collaborative solutions, from the polyclinic in the neighbourhood to cooking together and looking after the children. Ultimately, successful care needs even more: housing in which many people can live together; neighbourhoods that have space for collective care facilities; attentiveness to the needs of all people who live here; participation by everyone in all decisions that affect them. A society based on solidarity that supports people in caring for one another is what we are working towards. We start in the area of care. This is where we fight - until we have achieved our goal, join us! Care Revolution groups already exist in over 10 cities. You can find us online at www.care-revolution.org and on Facebook.