We should cherish and revere the elderly in society, but we just don’t, do we? Infact, nowhere is this clearer than in the care home industry.
Care homes are places that should be a home from home, filled with kindness, love and care for the elderly in our society, to live out their last days in comfort and happiness with the respect they deserve. For that to happen, we need the kindest, most committed, loving and considerate people to be our carers, and we should be paying them to reflect this important and valuable job.
In my mind, carers have one of the most important jobs in society and should be lauded. But they are looked down upon, seen as lesser individuals in unimportant work that most seem to feel is demeaning and beneath them.
There has been uproar this week because the Labour government has announced an apparent attack on migration that will stop the importation of care workers from overseas. I say, about time! I am tired of this mass importation of low-skilled, low-paid workers who often speak very little and very poor English, who then take up roles in this land of milk and honey and clearly leave shortly after. I say the latter because since 2020, we imported 450,000 people to fill 120,000 care worker vacancies. Now there are 130,000 care vacancies.
This is yet another wheeze to gain access to the UK and then disappear into other roles, leaving nothing meaningful in the lives of people that they briefly touch, nor in the care homes they briefly traverse through.
Labour's immigration crackdown on care homes is to be lauded - this vile trade must stop - Renee Hoenderkamp
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And it is this very trade in overseas care workers that demeans the role, tells society that we absolutely don’t value our elderly nor the carers looking after them, that we don’t care who does the job, don’t care if they can’t speak English and don’t care enough about the them to pay a living wage.
Just this week, we read of a man who died after being transferred into a care home to be ‘cared’ for by staff described by the coroner as ‘struggling to have sufficient grasp of the English language to understand instructions and communicate with residents’. How dare we care for our elderly using staff who don’t speak their language? Staff should be part of the daily enrichment through conversation that residents enjoy.
And let us not forget, we cared so little about care workers that in Covid, we chased 40,000 of them out of their jobs by threatening to inject them with a COVID-19 vaccine whether they consented or not. Well, many did not, and they left. Ironically, they left to take up roles in the NHS, where Covid vaccines were not mandatory.
And those who did stay worked through Covid with no PPE to start with, as it all went to the NHS, the care home owners left to fend for themselves in the wild west of PPE. They worked just as long hours as their better-paid, better-cared-for NHS colleagues, hell, some of them even moved into the homes to live with their elderly patrons in order to protect them, forsaking contact with their families and friends. These are the true heroes of Covid, unsung.
You would, in all of this, be forgiven for thinking that those 130,000 vacancies could be filled with British workers (there are, after all, nearly a million young people not in work or education). But they cannot be filled. Young people have understandably considered the importance of the role, the hard work, the emotional input and realised that at minimum wage, to take up such hard work in return for being underpaid and under-appreciated is just not appealing. Who can really blame them?
And so then to the local authorities and private care home owners who don’t need to address the work and conditions of these workers, because they know that there is an endless stream of overseas workers who make no demands and are as cheap as chips. Why would they improve conditions and pay for their workers?
Of course, because they should value their elderly residents and strive to deliver care from staff who are equally valued, invested in the job and want to get up and come to work every day. They should consider that a carer may some day be caring for their mum, dad, brother and that they would want that carer to be happy, to place their residents at the centre of their world, to feel valued and appreciated. They clearly don’t. They see the bottom line only, and immigration has allowed them to destroy this most important role and leave workers feeling that they are better appreciated and paid at Tesco’s, and the emotional toll is not comparable.
It is a travesty. A societal, governmental and cultural travesty. In my honest opinion, we can judge a society by how it treats its elderly, and the way we treat ours is shameful.
So for once, I laud Labours plan to stop this vile trade in overseas care workers… but now we will see one of two things; the remaining pillars of the care industry will collapse and deliver a fatal blow to our reliant elderly or, it will force wages and conditions up, put caring up on the pedestal it deserves and the millions of currently unemployed youngsters /will be convinced to do something meaningful and rewarding with their lives.
The jury is out.
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