산모･신생아 건강관리사의 노동 경험: 시장화된 사회적 돌봄서비스 전달체계에 관한 비판적 고찰 = The Work Experiences of Maternal and Newborn Health Care Workers in the Marketized Social Service System

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to revisit the problems of the the marketized social care service system by illuminating the experiences of ‘Maternal and Newborn Health Care Workers’. Existing studies on uncovering the characteristics of social care-work have been largely discussed in terms of ‘undervaluation of care-work’, ‘gendered work’, and ‘women’s increasing engagement in low-paid jobs’ through empirical researches. Also, qualitative studies have tried to reveal the experiences of social care workers, focusing on ‘long-term’ care workers for the elderly or the disabled. ‘Maternal and newborn health care workers’ have common characteristics like other ‘long-term’ and ‘home-based care’ workers in terms of the ‘dispatched(to home) workers’, but they have the additional labor insecurity as ‘intermittent workers’ in terms of only providing ‘short-term’ care-services during the postpartum care period. The ‘shortness of work’ increases the difficulties of care workers as ‘dispatched workers’. Therefore, this study examined how social care workers experience and perceive care labor through qualitative data on five maternal and newborn health care workers. First, social care workers cannot identify exactly who are their final employers in their work like dispatched workers. Even when social care workers are dissatisfied with working conditions, they cannot express these anywhere because they are detached from the government or contracted institutions, which may be their employers. Second, having to work in private space (home) not in formal workplace, they experience their roles and their work scope are violated and blurred. Working isolated and alone, social care workers hardly communicate with other care workers and the attachment to the care recipients is often the only satisfaction they have with their work.