Issue 25: Hammering the Sky: Collective Action in Care

Nov. 3, 2025

Who does the care work so we can go out and work? Who cares for us when we can no longer work? In this issue of Notes from Below, we focus on social care. Since the early stages of privatisation in the 1990s, social care has been undergoing a slow and uneven shift from a public service to a fully commodified, for-profit industry.

In this environment, social care shares many features with so-called “unorganisable” sectors: insecure employment, high turnover, small and dispersed workplaces, and a disproportionate concentration of migrants. The contributions in this issue explore the ways in which care workers are finding industrial strength and fighting back.