Historically associated with the private sphere and notions of “love” or “vocation”, care work is fundamental to the sustainability of life (Perez Orozco, 2006). For a long time, feminism has challenged this association with the well-known slogan: “They say it is love. We say it is unpaid work” (Federici, 2013), aiming to make visible, denaturalize and assert the labor dimension of care, typically performed by women without remuneration. However, in some poors neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, a nuance emerges from some voices that identify as popular: “it is love and it is unpaid work”. This phrase, which arose from conversations with community care workers, encapsulates a tension explored in this research: how do the affective and relational dimensions of care coexist with its recognition as paid labor and the demand for its value to be acknowledged?

This study delves into the experiences of community caregivers for older adults in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area between 2019 and 2023. These caregivers are part of what in Argentina is referred to as the economía popular (“popular economy”)—a growing sector encompassing diverse forms of labor created by workers excluded from formal wage employment. This includes unregistered, community-based, and often self-organized work that emerges in response to the crisis of the fordist regulation regime. A particular feature of the Argentine case is that part of this sector has been politically organized through the Union of Workers of the Popular Economy (UTEP), which denounces and seeks to reverse the societal, economic, and political devaluation of this labor in the pursuit of rights linked to a different mode of production. The socio-community branch —including care work in soup kitchens, early childhood centers, and elder care, among others— is a significant part of this economy and largely relies on social policy for remuneration. Although essential for social (re)production, it is highly feminized and characterized by precarious conditions and low or non-existent pay.

Professionalization: A process of social valorization in tension

In response to the historical devaluation of care—often portrayed as a “natural feminine gift”—organizations within the popular economy, such as UTEP, along with certain state agencies, have promoted the professionalization of care as a strategy to achieve legal and economic recognition of this activity through the certification of skills. As is often the case, this involves identifying and codifying knowledge, delineating tasks, and stabilizing standards in pursuit of legitimizing validation. In this context, there is an aim to reframe knowledge rooted in territorial activism and unpaid family caregiving as professional skills, distanced from their domestic and community-based origins.

However, the research shows that caregivers are constantly negotiating the boundaries of their activity, which lies between the domestic, communal, and market spheres. While caregivers assert the need to be paid for their work, they also believe that quality care involves a significant affective-relational component, often described as “love” or “vocation”. Unlike previous times and experiences (Zibecchi, 2014a and 2014b; Masson, 2004), during the research period, caregivers infused their work with political and practical values while also demanding remuneration. Simply put, caregivers do not claim to act out of love, but rather to work with love.

In practice, caregivers combine, not without contradiction, the native category of cold work or work and nothing more —a reference to the technical competencies tied to an instrumental and heteronomous logic of engagement—with the category of commitment, which bridges meanings from popular activism with those of care work as a mode of action. This combination of categories is ambiguous, as it both implies an “affective plus value”, largely expressed as a “gift of time”, as well as the use of “territorial experiential knowledge”. Together, these serve as distinguishing elements, valued among peers and, in contrast, with other professions linked to community care.

Regimes of trust and the socio-political coordinates of professionalization

The professionalization process, linked to the accreditation of knowledge, has produced certain friction in a situation. It is presented as a mechanism for incorporating knowledge and know-how into an institutionalized and objectified regime of trust. However, in professions long devalued and subject to constant public scrutiny, some of the community caregivers for older adults often viewed evaluation as discrediting their daily activity and experiential knowledge. We propose reading this perception of being discredited as a tension between an institutional regime of trust, based on the certification of skills, and an interpersonal regime, based on the credibility of labor practices and grounded in local and community knowledge. Due to feeling undervalued, some caregivers reaffirmed the value of their work and knowledge, which this research interprets as a political dispute aimed towards the social valorization of their labor. This tension highlights the need to incorporate historical and socio-political coordinates into any situated understanding of professionalization processes.

An Emerging Profession

Theoretically, this research engages with the sociology of work and professions, proposing to see these community-based occupations as “emerging professions”. That is, their contours remain undefined, lacking a specific collective labor agreement to frame them and without stable, socially recognized legitimacy. This research also draws from care studies and feminist economics, particularly those that expand the notion of work and value beyond orthodox economic rationality, challenging binary oppositions such as “love” vs. “money” in care work. In this light, the case of the “popular care economy” in Argentina, with its specific genealogy in social organization and its entanglement with the state, provides a unique context to analyze these dynamics.

In conclusion, community care work within the popular economy, as reflected in elder care experiences, is a complex activity with shifting boundaries between the moral, political, and economic realms. The protagonists of this research articulate an ambivalent knowledge politics: a search for recognition and inclusion within the legitimate system of professions coexists with an effort to distinguish themselves from that very system, highlighting the “plus” they bring in comparison to those who also engage in care work in other fields or professional settings. Despite efforts toward professionalization, the alignment between the economic, political, and societal value of this work remains unstable. The phrase “it is love and it is unpaid work” continues to express the demand for recognition and remuneration through the mobilization of affect and commitment, constituting a complex “moral economy of community care”. This research highlights how, “from below”, the protagonists of this historically undervalued work develop strategies and tactics to assert their worth, even without complete systemic recognition.

Photo by Mustak Jaman: https://www.pexels.com/photo/elderly-person-wearing-rings-12982208/. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.