In the work that I have done throughout my life there have been three unifying themes, gender, race and social class. Having now left the UK to live in Turkey, I’d be particularly interested in talking about this to women in other countries. I’ll explain why.
In the 1980’s, when I was at the Leicester Outwork Campaign, that organisation was well-funded, we had premises, we had admin. support, so that as staff we could do the work. When Leicester City Council ran the home care system in what was called ‘social services’, the carers were all on proper terms and conditions. OK, they were still low paid. There were problems. But there was an infrastructure. But thirty years ago or more a shift occurred that remains a background theme throughout this entire narrative – the breakdown in infrastructure in Britain began. Jobs have changed so much. Many people became accountants, they became administrators and they started to be asked to police things. In Britain we don’t have an infrastructure any more.
I had various jobs before I became a carer that fed into my experience. I was a welfare rights officer in the social services department of Leicester City Council for 5 years, working alongside social workers, child protection workers and so forth; and I worked on different groups of people – one year for example, on the elderly. Then I worked in a women’s project for five years, with homeworkers – who in Leicester were incredibly lowpaid women working on huge overlock and lockstitch sewing machines in their own homes, making garments for Marks & Spencers, Jaegers, everywhere. When the hosiery trade declined in Leicester and the factories closed, all these hundreds and hundreds of women who worked at home for a pittance were told that they were self-employed, and therefore not entitled to any redundancy pay. I would represent people at tribunals advising that they were in fact, employees.
