This retired carer from Gorleston reflects on what motivates people to continue in socially useful work, noting that such jobs are often among the lowest paid.
He argues that social reproductive labour is treated as private work done in the home, mostly by women, and is essential to how society and capitalism function.
Because it is seen as something done out of love rather than professional labour, it is not properly valued or paid accordingly.
This ex-care worker describes experiencing better care when services were well funded and directly insourced under the council, with higher standards, stronger oversight and union support for workers.
They recall extensive in-person training being funded, including a three-day swimming lifesaver course and a Makaton (sign-along) course, allowing staff to take as much training as needed to improve professionalism and care quality.
This training helped them support a service user who used Makaton and had severe self-harming issues, leading to fewer incidents as the relationship and understanding improved.
They attribute these improvements to increased public service funding under Tony Blair’s Labour government in the mid-2000s, and note a major negative change after 2010 when the coalition government began widespread cuts.
In a conversation at Gorleston library, Simon, a care worker with nearly 20 years’ experience across elderly dementia care, learning disabilities and home care, describes how outsourcing of council care homes and day centres since 2010 led to major cutbacks:
He says care pay is often minimum wage with no night or weekend enhancements, and doubts government promises such as a fair pay agreement or a social care commission will deliver.
Simon argues for an insourced national care service with proper pay, training and career structure, transparent staffing ratios, suitable purpose-built buildings, reduced paperwork pressures and enough staff to give residents autonomy, choice and better quality of life.
The speaker says efforts often stop at collecting information and then get pushed into long timelines of five to ten years, with no real change even after a decade, as they were told in Winterbourne.
They express anger that councils take so long to act and argue this is no longer acceptable, insisting changes should happen within weeks or months, not over several years.
The story teller describes their autistic brother’s stressful A&E and two-month hospital stay, where noise, lights, and crowds triggered meltdowns and staff initially lacked autism awareness.
After advocacy, he was placed in a dark, quiet side room with controllable light and sound, which stabilized him, and staff learned to make reasonable adjustments (including limiting the number of clinicians during rounds). Learning disability nurses helped but were unavailable overnight, leading to more problems.
Discharge was delayed because no rehab facility would accept him due to perceived “aggressive” behavior and understaffing.
Her brother had to self-discharged home with OT adaptations and short-term family support.
The storyteller argues that councils should not restructure services for people with learning disabilities or autism without including people with disabilities and lived experience on committees and in decision-making and service creation.
While they applaud efforts to bring personal stories (often tragic) to decision makers, they insist this should not be the end point; meaningful inclusion needs to extend to designing the services themselves.
They compare it to cancer treatment, saying it would be unreasonable to build such a service without involving people who have cancer, and call it nonsense to rely on stories and then exclude disabled people from the decision making process
Jack talks about the human to human contact, and being able to have conversations with people that he has never been able to have before.
Jack came away feeling that he had had many conversations that day where he felt listened to, and not having had to fit someone else’s agenda.
Jack wanted to support peoples understanding of autism on the day, most memorably was a conversations about the low numbers of people with autism in the workplace, the barriers and for those people to openly admit they need help to change things and make the workplace more accessible for people with autism.
This is a poem called Groundworks. It’s about an organisation called Groundworks, here goes the poem.
Charlotte Eloise Dimmick went for a walk to ground force groundhog day. She met a man in a coffee bar, for tea on a laptop. Philanthropic pie, a matcha tea of personality.
Don’t flush your bad decisions down the loo. Put them in a shoebox. I would like to explain to you, the solution to my life, but I hold in my hand your heart.
Kyle talks about the difference that working on the real care deal made for him, and the improved connection with the managers of the care agency.
This experience however is still mixed, keep connected to the real care deal to hear more from Kyle…
Kyle would like to see the manager regularly to catch up.
For them to be more on board, not leave decisions to late.
