Description
Care workers in the National Health Service (NHS) have experienced deep transformations in their labour due to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has enforced understaffing, workload pressures and new management practices, reorganising everyday dynamics of care. Moreover, as neoliberalism broadly rearranges the distribution of care within families, it also transforms what care is and encompasses. This research explores how workers perceive and deal with these transformations. It asks how they are making sense of everyday dynamics of care in the context of neoliberal reorganisation. In order to do so, it analyses personal narratives in vlogs of nurses and doctors in the NHS. The narratives show how workers are absorbing neoliberal transformations through an increase in their emotional labour. They are constantly negotiating and adapting to conflictive demands imposed by neoliberal rationality over care. The narratives present a series of emotional practices that workers develop to compensate for the increasing burden of their workload and to maintain their own capacity to care. Through this narrative analysis, I connect emotional labour to the subjective dimension of neoliberal transformations, and suggest that neoliberalism changes everyday care relations not only through the access to healthcare, but also by changing how care work is experienced by workers.