Care workers deserve kudos.

I am unapologetically contemptuous of those who disrespect care workers.

This is not my usual missive. I actually thought I was going to have a rant, because I was in the mood for that. If it’s not quite what I initially had in mind, some of it – trigger warning for the terribly proper - is sternly worded.

It started off with the kerfuffle over amendments to NZ’s Pay Equity legislation, enacted by the Government on 6^th May. However, this rant(ish) isn’t about that specifically, although it has generated much ranting elsewhere, both for and against. What I’ve taken exception to here, is the bloody offensive tone and content of some of the comments that kerfuffle has spawned.

In hindsight, I should have taken screenshots of them, but I wasn’t planning to have a rant at the time. My ire slowly bubbled away, though, and ultimately came to the surface.

The comment – on X - which put me in a particularly high dudgeon, scoffed at the idea that comparing workers in what was considered a more salubrious industry with people who “wiped old people’s arses”, was preposterous. I can’t remember what industry the commenter was referring to as being more salubrious than caring for the elderly, but I do remember thinking that I hoped one day they’d be sitting in their own shitty adult nappy for hours, until a scarce, scorned, and low-paid care worker was available to clean them up.

I doubt my dark desire for fate to be cruel to these types of commenters will abate. It’s not the first time I’ve seen such derogatory remarks about care workers and the elderly, and I’m not in the least bit remorseful for thinking such a vindictive malediction upon those who make them.

Perhaps my contempt for those who look down on those who do the unglamourous jobs, the messy jobs, the unsanitary jobs, the drudging jobs, the service jobs – although all work is about serving someone – is because my own mother was a cleaner. She worked feckin hard during the early hours of the morning and in the evenings, so she could earn the money to send her kids to good schools, something which couldn’t be accomplished exclusively on my father’s wages. The only way she could earn extra income as an uneducated woman with a home to run and kids to be there for while my father worked during the day, was to work after-hours jobs cleaning offices, so those office workers had a pleasant environment in which to do their own jobs.

Eventually, my parents became elderly and needed care. It’s incredibly hard caring for elderly people when they become incapable of doing many things for themselves. If you’ve never done it, you won’t understand it on a ‘lived experience’ level. If you have, you will know exactly what I’m saying. For various reasons, I became responsible for the bulk of the care for both my parents as they became elderly, which, combined with a fulltime job, was harder yakka than I could ever have imagined, and I didn’t always do it well.

The State provided home help whilst my parents remained in their own home, and it would have been impossible for me to cope without that. Occasionally, the system had a failure, and a care worker didn’t turn up, which created complications, but even so, when my mother could no longer stay at home (my father died before her), I wrote to HealthCare NZ and thanked them for the support they’d provided. From the response I got, I expect it was a rare thing for them to be thanked.

Without home care workers I wouldn’t have been able to continue with my own job. I would have had to give it up and become my parents’ sole caregiver, cook (a bad one), house cleaner, and manager of everything else in their lives like women once were expected to, especially single women. After my parents had either died, or went into the rest home, I would then have had to find paid employment again from a place of having been out of my field of work for several years, and past middle-age. So, although the work the home care workers did mightn’t have been ‘shiny’, they were goddamned diamonds, and I detest those who talk about them with derision. That goes for the care workers in rest homes, too.

Although care work is done overwhelmingly by women, one of those ‘diamonds’ who cared for my mother in her home, after my father had died, was a Filipino man. He was a lovely, gentle man, and my mother resigned herself to letting him shower her. She was still capable of making a fuss, so to me, no fuss indicated she was comfortable enough with him to submit to that. I realise now that the elderly do resign themselves to indignities, as their bodies become increasingly infirm and they’re unable to look after themselves, but no fuss doesn’t automatically mean no issue. I wish I had at least talked to my mother more about it. How do I know that some of her other behaviours weren’t a manifestation of the discomfort of that resignation? All I can remember at the time is feeling too brittle from years of doing duty to invite a problem to deal with that wasn’t immediately problematic.

There were also ‘diamonds’ in the rest home my mother finally had to go into for the last 18 months of her life. Two of those came to pay their last respects, with tears in their eyes, as the undertakers loaded my mother’s body into their hearse to take her away for embalming. Another came to her funeral. Don’t tell me that caring for the elderly is lowly work consisting only of wiping arses - I’d happily kick anyone’s own arse, and kick it hard, for saying that. It’s taxing work in ways that will never make heroic front-page pictures for the news. The toll it takes is not flashy in a publicly visible way, but it is ‘heavy’, and worthy of more regard than many may ever know, or choose to know.

And that’s not even mentioning caring for the disabled.

A story my older sister likes to tell is of the time when we were young kids, and I threatened a neighbourhood girl’s father that I’d chop his eye out with an axe for growling at our dog. It was an impressively imaginative threat, I have to say, for a kid who grew up in pre-internet times. It happened after I’d tagged along with my sister to her friend’s house, where the friend’s father was in the process of photographing a flower arrangement his wife had made, on an outside table. Our dog, Chum, had also tagged along, and photo-bombed the first photo, for which he got growled at. I don’t remember the incident as clearly as my sister, but apparently, I got fiercely protective of our dog and issued the aforementioned threat. The reaction of the girl’s father, I’m told, was to suppress a smile and carry on.

These days I might not advocate for chopping out anyone’s eye with an axe who is vile about care workers, but I do advocate for being fiercely protective of their worth. They are amongst those who enable us to have the lives we might otherwise be unable to have. Whoever doesn’t believe me, try doing all your own time-consuming, unglamorous, messy, dreary, necessary work, and see just how high you can fly whilst shackled to all that, as well.

• NB: I acknowledge that stories exist about care workers not doing a good job, but would there be fewer stories like that if care workers were well paid and shown more appreciation and respect?