Through our Valuing the Care Economy Project, LEAF will identify barriers to economic security in the care economy and work towards dismantling those barriers through law reform advocacy and public legal education.
What is the care economy?
The care economy is the sum of feminized labour performed in the care sector, including both paid and unpaid work. The care sector includes health care (including elder care, care for disabled people, home care, and long-term care), childcare, and cleaning services. Feminized labour is work that was traditionally done by women or children, usually in the home but not always.
Care work is significantly undervalued in Canada.
In the paid economy, women are disproportionately represented in “5 C” occupations: caring, clerical, catering, cashiering, and cleaning. Racialized, migrant, and/or undocumented women occupy the lowest paid and most precarious caring jobs, such as cleaning and disinfecting. The “5 C” occupations attract lower wages than male-dominated occupations at the same skill level. This is systemic discrimination, as these lower wages stem from a devaluation of work traditionally associated with women.
Women also perform the lion’s share of unpaid care work in Canada, but caregiving burdens are not distributed equally across women. For example, accessing high-quality childcare is more difficult for Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, racialized groups, rural communities, women and their families reliant on precarious employment, newcomer women, poor women, and single mothers.
Changing law and policy to value care work
To address the undervaluation of care work, we need significant reforms to our social protection systems, in domains including labour standards and enforcement, immigration, and social welfare.
From 2025 – 2027, LEAF will identify legal, regulatory, and policy barriers that limit the economic security and prosperity of women, non-binary, and trans people in the care economy – and then create public legal education materials and law reform advocacy proposals that address those barriers.
To do this, LEAF will :
- Interview caregiver rights organizations, unions, academics, and advocates, to ask what their members need to increase their economic security and prosperity.
- Deliver workshops and other public legal education materials that provide care workers with legal information regarding their workplace rights or rights as caregivers.
- Develop and advocate for law reform proposals that have at their core the concerns of care workers.
Who is involved in this project?
We have an Advisory Committee of 9 advocates and researchers with lived, organizing and/or academic expertise in the care economy.
We are conducting interviews with 25 stakeholders across the country – caregiver rights organizations, unions, academics, and advocates.
Researchers Laxana Paskaran and Jessica Chandrashekar are leading the development of the environmental scan (including stakeholder interviews) and the literature review.
Anti-Heroine Media is providing instructional design and graphic design services.
Reciprocal Consulting is providing evaluation services.
CONTACT
Cee Strauss
Project Director of the Valuing the Care Economy Project
[email protected]
LEAF acknowledges the support of Women and Gender Equality Canada.
