From Caregiver to Personal Support Worker: Canada's Caregiver Programs and Labour Market Segmentation Among Filipina Women in Toronto

Abstract

The lowest rung of the Canadian healthcare system is occupied by those categorized as personal support workers (PSWs). Despite their important contributions to Canada’s healthcare system, this work is stigmatized, devalued and characterized by multiple dimensions of precarity. It is also a labour segment that is increasingly differentiated by gender, race, and citizenship, with Filipina immigrants accounting for 30% of immigrants in this workforce. Recent scholarship has drawn connections between Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) and the overrepresentation of Filipina immigrants in PSW roles. While these studies demonstrate how most caregiver migrants eventually transition out of caregiving, many remain in a narrow set of low-wage, “low-skilled” occupations, with PSW work emerging as a notable choice. By centering the experiences of Filipina PSWs in Toronto who migrated to Canada as live-in caregivers, this thesis explores how the caregiver-to-PSW pathway is constituted in the local labour market and within the lifeworlds of Filipina former caregivers. Using a feminist economic geography framework, this research calls attention to: 1) the social and institutional mechanisms that construct a pathway towards PSW labour; and 2) the racialized and gendered discourses that construct idealized PSW subjectivities and the ways in which they overlap with notions of Filipina identity. Key theoretical concepts include the social embeddedness of labour markets, embodiment and interpellation, and citizenship. I situate this research within the wider institutional landscape of Canada’s temporary migrant caregiver programs and the gendered politics of transnational labour migration in the Philippines to illustrate the context in which Filipina women come to view PSW work as a viable and suitable post-caregiver program career.