Cleaning as care work

Care—both as a concrete work performance and as a structure of interpersonal relationships—was already a politically and socially problematic, often precarious, less visible, and thus crisis-ridden area even before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, a "crisis within the crisis" arose: The existing crisis of care within the crisis of the pandemic. The Co-Care project addresses this "crisis within a crisis" and analyzes the tension between overload, precariousness, and invisibility on the one hand, and the importance of care for the preservation of society on the other.

Cleaning is one of the areas that was classified as "systemically important" during the pandemic and thus considered central to what is known as critical infrastructure, but at the same time remained largely invisible during the pandemic. Like many other systemically important fields of work, cleaning is a feminized, precarious sector that receives little social recognition. At the same time, cleaning is a heterogeneous field: working conditions, working hours, and formal safeguards vary greatly depending on the place of work. Cleaning is also rarely perceived or understood as care work. In private households, it is less associated with care than with (rather technical, object-related) housework, while in public spaces it is considered a pure service without interpersonal relevance.

The overarching goal of Co-Care is to find new ways and means of making care and the caregivers and care recipients operating in these contexts (more) visible and to strengthen them in the long term. To this end, the significance, needs, and resources of care dynamics for post-pandemic society—which may well find itself in crisis again—are to be identified and specified for different fields of practice by means of case studies on cleaning and social-educational family assistance.

Co-Care thus addresses the urgent need for research to clarify where care arrangements have been destabilized during the coronavirus pandemic, what needs and resources can be identified in this context, and how care dynamics can be stabilized for everyday life so that in a further crisis, the care sector can function not as a crisis within a crisis, but above all as a resource in the crisis.

"Cleaning as Care Work" is a subproject of "Corona and Care – Care Dynamics in the Pandemic" (Co-Care), in cooperation with the University of Tübingen (consortium leader: Prof. Dr. R. Ammicht-Quinn).