Guilt, care, and the ideal worker: comparing guilt among working carers and care workers

This article explores care workers and working carers' experiences of work. It focuses on how both groups of workers experience pressures to adhere to an ideal, which this article argues, is centered on an emotional reaction of guilt. Through this ideal of a guilty worker, a “care ethic” is reconfigured to become a “work ethic.” Drawing on 120 semistructured interviews with care workers, working carers, trade union officers, and care company managers, the article examines how guilt is experienced and constructed in the workplace, and how it becomes beneficial to the aims of the employing organization. The article links the construction and instrumentalization of guilt to Acker's analysis of the ideal worker and to the problematic discourse of the “heroism” of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. This discourse can reinforce the image of a sacrificial ideal worker; it implies that if workers do not take a sacrificial approach as part of their work and care ethics, they should feel guilty.