Contesting Nursing: Gig Care Workers and Their Helper Script

Chia Yu Lien

Gender, Work and Organization, 2026, vol. 33, issue 1, 80-90

Abstract: Why have so many care workers left formal wage employment for gig work since the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic? What promise do they see in gig care work, and what precarity? Drawing on interviews with care workers and managers in U.S. nursing homes, this article explores gig care at the point of production. Gig work, by facilitating easy exits from poor working conditions, carves out a social space for crafting what I term the “helper script”: a set of speech acts that emphasize workers' status as helpers rather than staff to counteract caregiving exploitation. Care work differs from other types of work in that its resistance is under closer ethical scrutiny and requires more justification. By framing themselves as only present to help, gig workers simultaneously uphold dominant care ethics imposed on staff employees while exempting themselves from it. In practice, care workers use the helper script to subvert the aspects of care work that often demand their time, emotions, and relationships. Although some gig care workers express a sense of precarity, none want to return to regular employment; they would rather creatively maneuver their way out of the precarity within the gig than leave it.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70035

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:33:y:2026:i:1:p:80-90

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0968-6673

Access Statistics for this article

Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis

More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().