Childcare labour continues to be some of the lowest-paid work in society and is disproportionately performed by working-class, migrant and racialized minority women. The large-scale entry of middle-class women into paid work continues to rely on the low value attributed to the labour of economically marginalized women who care for their children. Childcare continues to be subject to intense policy scrutiny from neoliberal governments, yet workers, especially those in the lowest-paid jobs in the informal sector, are rarely at the table in these discussions. The classed and racialized divisions in paid childcare continue to pose an ethical, practical and political challenge to 21st-century feminism. This book returns to a well-rehearsed debate about feminist divisions and solidarities by offering a distinctive framework that theorizes maternal workers as divided and yet connected through comparative case studies of contemporary childcare struggles in three distinct sectors. The biggest transformations to childcare provision in post-welfare neoliberal economies over the last 20 years are the increased share delivered by corporate chains (Penn, 2011), the increasingly minute amount of state-funded provision and increased public subsidies for private, in-home, unregulated childcare, often performed by migrants (Adamson and Brennan, 2017). The worsening conditions of childcare labour and its continued devaluation matters for the future of a broad-based social movement for childcare justice. Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction builds a sociological schema that can both capture and contest these transformations to the social organization of childcare.

During the pandemic, most media coverage in the UK focused on the damage that the disproportionate share of childcare that professional working mothers took on was causing to their careers, with journalists lamenting that ‘Lockdown has proven a step backwards for gender equality, with women bearing the brunt of home-schooling and their career prospects diminishing’ (Morissey, 2020). The liberal feminist framing of the pandemic childcare crisis as one of gender inequality within individual households predictably neglected the impact on waged childcare workers, especially those in the informal sector. The widely reported desperateness of dual-earner working couples with no childcare contrasts with the relatively limited attention given to the many childcare workers who lost their jobs, were made homeless and lost their lives after catching the virus at work.