Care work
MANY READERS will recognize the sinking feeling when you realize that some of the work you’ve undertaken not only won’t earn you any credit but may even hurt your chances of advancement. This is true of people of all genders, but especially so among those on the minoritized end of the gender spectrum, as women, femme, and trans folks are more likely to take on the kind of care work that is both essential to a functioning team and yet routinely derogated and dismissed. Often when I talk to folks, they describe tackling this work with enthusiasm and even gratitude, and only later discover the ways it may come to hurt them; that discovery is itself experienced as a harm, and it feels like it, too, with all the pain, frustration, rage, and sadness that follows.
The work I’m referring to here is sometimes called “glue” work for the ways it holds a team together, but I’m going to go with calling it “care work” as I think at the end of the day that’s what it does: care work cares for the people on the team, and seeks to meet their needs so that they can do good work. Care work in the workplace includes things like organizing team lunches, mentoring less experienced colleagues, and coordinating informal consensus-based decisions. It also includes making and updating documentation, facilitating healthy conflict (and diffusing the unhealthy kind), and advising a colleague about the tricks for navigating a fraught HR process. Critically, it also includes things like initiating conversations about a union, modeling how to step back when you need a break, or organizing your peers to protest an unethical business contract.
Look over that list and you will immediately see why this work rarely appears on any career ladder, why it’s never part of a promotion packet, and why it often barely goes acknowledged. Care work supports the team, of course—we have decades of data to show that teams that care about each other are going to outperform teams that don’t, one hundred percent of the time. But that’s just the thing—care work supports the team, it serves the people. It acknowledges that the work is only possible with the consent and care of the people doing the work. Alas, very few organizations are brave enough to reflect that fact in their career ladders, as doing so would be to acknowledge workers’ own power.
Where does that leave the people who do this work? Many times I’ve listened as someone says they realize the work they’re doing to support the team not only isn’t going to be rewarded, but may actively work against them. “My manager says I’m great at keeping the team together, but I haven’t delivered as much as my peers this quarter,” is a common refrain. Of course, such a tale fails to take into account that her peers were able to ship so much because of the efforts she made to help them understand each other—efforts that may not have been reciprocated. But that’s not one of the ten criteria her manager is required to mark, so it doesn’t count towards a promotion. The conversation at this point often winds around to the possibility that she has to stop doing this work because it’s hurting her career.
To which, I have two questions: the first is, what’s the cost of stopping? Maybe she took up this work reflexively, without really thinking on it, and now she can see that she doesn’t really want to be doing it, or that it’s not really worth the effort. In which case, by all means, she should stop. Likewise, maybe this is energy better spent in other venues—in her community or neighborhood, where the work will be welcomed rather than challenged. But more often than not when I ask this question, I hear a sigh or see someone’s shoulders drop, as they feel the effect of letting it go. As the realization that not doing this work would cut themselves off from something that matters to them, would inflict another kind of harm, one even less legible to the system but just as painful to the heart.
There’s a kind of pathologizing of care at work here, an effort to define care—the regular acts of kindness, outreach, and support, alongside the effort to work across differences—as unhealthy, inefficient, not aligned with business goals. The reverse is true, of course; teams without care inevitably falter. But the systems most of us operate in are designed to isolate us, to make us fearful of our own power, to keep us narrowly focused on our own careers instead of imagining what’s possible when we’re all in on things together.
What if we didn’t allow our need to care for each other to be pathologized and diminished? What if we saw that care as a source of power and possibility? What if caring for each other is the most important work that we do, every day?
The second question I like to ask is: who else can do this with you? Care work needs good workers, not martyrs. And good workers work together. If you’re doing this work alone, who can you invite in to work alongside you? And if you’re not doing this work—if you’re merely benefiting from it—where can you join in? It’s certainly the case that some people will not take up this work, even if you ask them to. They’ve been taught that doing this work is beneath them and they haven’t interrogated that teaching; or they are too overburdened as it is, and just don’t have the spoons. But in my experience, most people want to be in a position to care for others, want to be useful, and not only in career-ladder legible ways.
I’ve seen it argued that we ought not to care for our colleagues, ought not to make friends at work, because it exposes us to harm. We’ve all learned, some of us the hard way, that organizations will exploit the friendship and camaraderie that develops on a team, given the chance. But again, what’s the cost of not caring? And what if the story of exploitation is only the half of it? Caring for your colleagues—caring for anyone—makes you vulnerable. But it also makes you human, and alive, and aware of your own collective power, capable of not only standing up to that harm but of building new worlds. And at the end of the day, the only path to a better world is the one we make together.