The Labour of Care : Canada's Health Care Workers, 1945-2020

The Labour of Care is the first national, comparative history of health care work. In this book, historian Peter L. Twohig analyses the responses of governments, employers, professional groups, training programs , and unions to the challenge of staffing Canada’s health care system and the reorganization of care.

Through careful archival analysis, Twohig demonstrates the conditions under which employees’ boundaries become more flexible, the paths to health care work expand, and tensions emerge among workers in response to labour shortages, decreased funding, and health care reform. This book is attentive to the various identities of health care workers, as women, professionals, union members, and more. It also situates these developments within broader social, economic, and policy changes that reshaped Canada’s health care landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. Examining health care workers in this way reveals a new history of health care that highlights the experiences and contributions of a wide range of workers whose voices have not yet been heard.