The Tensions Between Hidden Work and Hiding Work for Care Workers in Residential Aged Care

Although care workers in residential aged care are pivotal to maintaining the dignity of older people, little is known about their experiences of work. We know they are undervalued, invisible and unrecognised. This paper explores embodied experiences of care workers supporting older people in residential aged care. Two interactive workshops using the arts-based method of body mapping were conducted with 11 care workers. In making body maps, participants made visible the complex and hidden physical and temporal job demands. They also illustrated ways they hid strain, pain and stress to successfully care for older people. Care workers agreed that hiding some emotions was essential to care and dementia work, but emphasised that organisational and managerial expectations meant they hid emotions they needed to express. Moreover, care workers felt that organisations transferred responsibility for person-centred care onto them. We unpack tensions between hidden labour and the ways in which hiding can be at once individualised, collectively or relationally negotiated and structurally and culturally imposed. Understanding and recognising how the maintenance of care work relies on this tension between hidden labour and different kinds of hiding helps to understand how to improve care and avoid hiding's more insidious consequences.