Disco shifts as care work: When Marx Said the "Working-Class", He Meant the Working Women, part 3.

 

Disco Shifts As Care Work

For the last 6 months I’ve been working in an SEN school through an agency. I regularly receive verbal and physical abuse from kids with varying degrees of behavioural and educational needs and triggers. I’m lucky enough to have been requested and placed in the same class every day after my first week, but for agency staff this is relatively rare. Given the nature of temp work, you tend to go where you’re needed, whether it's a different class or a different school altogether. Equally, if you’re not needed, you don’t get to go. Since I’m placed by an agency, my low wage per hour is higher than some of the other teaching assistants, although the difference is minor, because agencies are only used when more consistent workers aren’t available. Paradoxically, often workers aren’t available because the pay and the conditions of the role, like most roles in the underfunded care-sector, are not concomitant with a sustainable quality of life, resulting in a high staff turnover rate. If I don’t work - if for example I’m off sick or transport delays mean that I’m late - I don’t get paid.

The shift nature of working through an agency should mean that there is a clear distinction between clocking-in to the DMM sphere, and clocking-out, but this is, of course, unrealistic. The nature of this work means that the emotional and financial labour required to deal with kids like this doesn’t just stop when you go home. If the bruises we accumulate thanks to episodes of dysregulation weren’t enough of a reminder, I spend my weekends worrying about whether the kids are ok at home - especially the ones who come from negligent or abusive backgrounds. I buy toys for those whose parents can’t afford a replacement if another child has broken or lost something they brought into school, or I communicate with my class team in a Whatsapp group about the best way to approach certain scenarios or behaviours. Although I have few other responsibilities, I rarely, if ever, leave “on time”, whether for any of the aforementioned reasons or simply because if you’re dealing with a child who is dysregulated, you can’t just tell them to stop because it’s home time. Some days I can’t believe I’m paid for this, like when we have water fights in the school yard or spend the afternoon drawing made-up dinosaurs. Other days I go home with a bust lip and sore arms from having to restrain a child less than half my size so that he doesn’t hurt himself or somebody else. I forgo breaks and sometimes lead lessons even though I’m unqualified, because we’re understaffed and you can’t just sit and do nothing when you’ve managed to get a bunch of kids to stop braying each other and actually sit and listen for a minute.

Unsurprisingly, the workforce, including my class team, is overwhelmingly female, the presumption being that even though many of us are unqualified, our female coded biological traits will enable us to act on instinct in order to carry out this feminised labour. This assumption subjects our labour to devaluation through poor pay while our lack of experience is presented as a USP to the profit of my agency and the detriment of the kids we’re trying to care for. Not only this, but the misconceptions that the feminisation of this labour produces also means that many of us often end up in dangerous situations with violent children because a lot of us are physically weaker than some of the boys in our care, or the few men in our workforce who may be preoccupied with something else in another part of the school, and therefore unable to help in a moment of crisis.

Furthermore, the majority of predominantly female staff in the school also have their own children to care for during their non-working hours, many of whom also have additional needs. This means that for these women, not only are they carrying out devalued labour in the care-sector, but they are shouldering the double-burden doing almost exactly the same thing at home. What’s more, many of the school’s staff do this kind of job because it enables them to follow a similar timetable to their own children, to be there when they finish school and need care at home. Thus, many people in these positions, particularly parents or those with other caring responsibilities external to the sector of measurable value-production, have had their career options negatively impacted by the unavailability and unaffordability of childcare services thanks to their increased privatisation in our current regime of globalised, financialised capitalism. As Fraser writes, ‘this regime has relocated manufacturing to low-wage regions, recruited women into the paid workforce, and promoted state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare.’1 The reason that many people I work with have accepted a low-paid job in which they get abused and economically devalued, then, is exactly because the devaluation of this kind of labour, despite being intrinsic to the running of capitalist society as the protracted crises in the 20th century demonstrated, means that they have no other option in order to care for their own families.

Despite all of this, my position is precarious. This means that although I’m in the same school performing this labour every day five days a week, I have no union, nor essentially any worker’s rights. When I used to work in bars, we’d call these temporary staff disco shifts, people employed just for the night to help on the bar when we were slammed. If they had any previous experience or common sense, they were helpful as an extra pair of hands. If not, they would ultimately make everyone else’s lives more difficult as we struggled to manage our own stations and quickly train up a newbie who was unfamiliar with the bar. No matter how stressful these disco shifts sometimes were, I imagine it was equally if not more stressful for them, having no idea how to work a new till or which beers we served as people were running around and yelling at and over them from both sides of the bar. Nevertheless, we’d still grumble in the secluded staffroom afterwards, or over a cig while taking the bins down, about how they’d exacerbated our already trying shifts. The same concept applies with the disco shifts with agency staff in schools and manny institutions of care. Except the ramifications for inexperience or incompetency with vulnerable, often neurodivergent, kids is far worse than getting an order wrong or spilling a drink. Take, for instance, the recent death of a teenager at a psychiatric care unit at a private hospital in Buckinghamshire.2 While the individual agency worker who left Ruth Szyankiewicz alone when she required constant observation is, invariably, at fault, as the case’s charity inquest suggested, the focus is consistently placed on ‘individual failings rather than systemic ones.’ Absolutely under no circumstances should the individual going by the identity of Ebo Acheampong have left a child in such a vulnerable state alone. Nevertheless, the conceptual instability of hiring and placing teaching assistants and care workers through an agency - so that those who already have additional needs or specific vulnerabilities might have to adapt to new, and often unqualified, faces each day - demonstrates the capitalist regime’s attempts to commodify IMM labour for surplus value, as well as its failure to provide public provisions in order to preserve necessary and accessible social welfare.

Yet, we do it. Largely this is because socially reproductive labour is intrinsic not just to economic production but to the social reproduction and wellbeing of the people forced to live through this oppressive value-based system. Part of it is due to the often greater accessibility of ‘precarious service labour’, especially for those who face discrimination or limitations in terms of legal work requirements.3 Most of all, however, positions like this, despite their devaluation, precarity, and feminisation, will always be occupied through people’s good will. This is because the alternative is to watch the same pattern repeat itself upon the lowest-valued and most vulnerable individuals as they’re excluded from a society which stacks the odds against them and refuses to offer either support or compensation.

To be complicit in this kind of reproduction is to admit that the capitalists are right, that profits are more important than people. And, personally, the possibility of that view becoming hegemonic is a possibility far worse than even the roughest day at the chalkface.

1

Fraser, p.104

2

Steven Morris and Jessica Murray, ‘Girl left unwatched by agency worker at psychiatric unit was unlawfully killed, inquest finds’, in The Guardian, 14/08/2025 <https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/14/ruth-szymankiewicz-unlawfully-killed-psychiatric-unit-inquest-finds>

3

Ray Filar, ‘What Kind of Work is Prostitution?’, in Invert Journal, (31/05/2020), < https://invertjournal.org.uk/posts?view=articles&post=7106265#gender-as-accumulation-strategy> [accessed 2023], pp.13-21