‘I’d rather work in a supermarket’: privatization of home care work in Japan

Kaye Broadbent

Work, Employment & Society, 2014, vol. 28, issue 5, 702-717

Abstract: The rise in nuclear family households and more married women engaging in paid work have forced governments to address the issue of aged care for the elderly to a greater degree. A good illustration is home care in Japan where the government introduced a Long Term Care Insurance scheme (LTCI) (2000) focused on offering affordable almost universal care by extending existing home care services. Japan’s home care services were privatized in 2006 and, while this is not unique to Japan, the combination of cost-cutting measures and the client-driven model encompassed in the LTCI has had a significant impact on employment conditions and the organization of work in home care services. This research assesses the impact on employment conditions and the organization of work in Japan’s former government-run home care sector compared with the pre-LTCI period and argues that privatization has resulted in work intensification and deteriorating employment conditions.

Keywords: aged care; employment conditions; home care; Japan; Long Term Care Insurance; work intensification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wes.sagepub.com/content/28/5/702.abstract (text/html)

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:sae:woemps:v:28:y:2014:i:5:p:702-717

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().