Sustaining Low Pay in Aged Care Work

This article examines the ways in which employers in the Australian aged care sector justify and sustain low pay for work that is both highly skilled and in high demand. We build on a large body of feminist research that analyses why care work is devalued by showing how such devaluing is produced at the level of the organization. To do so we examine some of the specific discursive mechanisms that sustain low pay. We show that aged care employers actively reproduce a familial logic of care that represents paid aged care work as unskilled and natural for women and therefore not deserving of higher pay. We argue that in order to achieve their goals employers must develop and sustain an opposition between care as love‐centred and work as money‐centred, while upholding the notion that they provide quality care for care recipients.