16th April 2021. Social care | Road trips
The financialisation of social care; The Black road
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
The ways in which social care in the UK is in crisis are almost too many to mention, but one of the features that they have in common is that they are exacerbated by the financialisation of the sector by private equity companies. A post on the CUSP blogby Christie Corlet Walker, Tim Jackson, and Angela Druckman, based on a longer article, critiques the situation:
Exorbitant fees for residential care suck money out of local authority budgets and from families struggling to provide care for those they love. Opaque corporate structures siphon off a steady stream of taxpayers’ cash and families’ savings into the offshore bank accounts of wealthy investors. All the while, frontline workers struggle daily with low pay and impossible working conditions that stretch them to their limits and threaten the quality of care delivered.
There are lots of reasons why the social care system does not mesh well with financially driven metrics, and these are summarised in the post in this way:
“First, the time-based nature of care work means that there is limited scope for labour productivity (output per unit labour input) gains. In fact, labour productivity has declined in the social care sector over the last two decades… When care and attention form the very heart of the service you provide, drives for efficiency and productivity may end up delivering profit at the expense of quality.”
“Second, since local authorities buy services on behalf of a large number of people, they have the market power to set the price they are willing to pay for care unsustainably low… This has led to a perverse hidden subsidy scheme, with many care providers charging private residents higher fees for the same care package, in an attempt to maintain profit margins.”
“Last, the emotional and physical trauma of moving from one care home to another—particularly for residents with a high level of need—renders the concept of consumer choice effectively meaningless.”
The Care Collective constructed a similar set of arguments in their Care Manifesto published last year, concluding that care and finance were incompatible.
The combination of unmet need, low wages and poor care suggest that this is a system that is close to collapse. But it’s worse that that.
The post has an eye-opening chart mapping the relationships between different providers, and it’s also known that private equity owners have both loaded care homes with debt and asset stripped them—standard operating procedure for this part of the financial sector, in other words.
And, of course, this has also been driven by the toxic combination of a decade of austerity and the legal obligation of local authorities to provide care.
But it’s not clear what would make a government act—even one that is as attentive as the British Conservatives have been to the interests of older people. The collapse of Southern Cross in 2011 didn’t do it; nor did the slide into administration of Four Seasons Health Care in 2019; nor the scandal of the social care deaths during the pandemic. In his latest budget the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak ignored the problem.
#2: The Black road
The idea of the road trip is an American icon: get your kicks on Route 66 and all the rest of it. They’re a dream of freedom.
Not for everybody, of course. Some of Hollywood’s most iconic movies are about what happens on the road to people who are different. Easy Rider doesn’t end well, and neither does Thelma and Louise.
The road trip is also a trope of American photography—associated with great names (if white names) like Walker Evans and Robert Frank.
So I was interested to read a piece at 1854 about a black photographer, Amani Willett, reflecting on what the road felt like to a black American in a new book, The Parallel Road. (1854 is free, but registration may be required,)
His inquiry started while studying photography in New York, in response to the way the idea of the road was presented in class:
More often than not, the road was interpreted as an embodiment of liberty and “great American ideals”, a visual history that has, in large part, been captured almost exclusively by white men. “Everyone took that reading at face value, and I felt very uncomfortable by that, because it countered my own experience of the road, and the experience of my family and friends,” he says.
A spread from The Parallel Road, by Amani Willett
Willett started with the first edition of The Negro Motorist Green Book—an annual guide for Black roadtrippers that was first published 85 years ago. His original plan was to photograph those locations listed in the Green Book, but when he got there, he found he was more interested in the psychological experience of being on the road:
Among his own images are portraits of Black people sitting in their cars, parked at a location that has a “psychological relevance and trauma embedded within it”. These are places where his subjects had been racially profiled, interrogated, or arrested, intending to show the lasting isolation and trauma that the road can inflict on an individual… “But they are also portraits of defiance,” Willett points out.
His reflection on the experience of making the book: things aren’t getting better quickly:
the really sad thing is as I did more research, I saw that things have not gotten any better,” says Willett, referring to the Driving While Black app, released in 2014. “There is a continuum where Black Americans are still trying to figure out a way to be on the road safely.”
Update: Readers who want to know more about the innovative Chinese company Haier—which I wrote about here on Monday—will be interested to see that Stowe Boyd has just republished a 2019 article he wrote on the Haier model. It places the Haier approach in the wider context of organisational thinking.
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