Taskforce on care costs (TOCC) 2007 report
TOCC has released its 2007 report, The hidden face of care: Combining work and caring responsibilities for the aged and people with a disability.
The report says carers are marginalised. They are “far less likely to participate in the paid workforce, and at a level commensurate with their skills and qualifications”.
The taskforce says that as well as being “patently inequitable”, this is an “immediate and growing threat to Australia’s continued economic prosperity”.
The work-care dynamic matters for all Australians, the taskforce says.
Major findings of the report include:
- Carers currently feel undervalued and misunderstood by bosses and colleagues. Minimal service provision and financial and workplace supports for carers show a gap in empathy.
- Thirty-four per cent of carers surveyed said that their job or career had suffered because of the competing demands of their caring responsibilities.
- Carers find support services inadequate and fractured across federal and state governments and departments.
- Government perceptions of carer financial support as welfare, not a strategy to enable workforce participation, means carers just do not get enough money. One in four carers surveyed had reduced their work hours because of the cost of outside care.
- Carers are an under-utilised skilled workforce, at a time of acute skills shortages in Australia. Forty-four per cent of the carers surveyed had chosen jobs below their skill level, because they needed flexibility for caring.
