This symposium considers the prospects for research collaboration between industrial relations scholars and trade unions, as well as its challenges. First, in remarks presented in the 2025 H.D. Woods Lecture at the Canadian Industrial Relations Association / Association canadienne des relations industrielles conference, Jim Stanford reviews the mutual benefits for both scholars and trade unionists from successful research partnerships and proposes strategies for building more respectful and trusting relationships between them. The symposium then presents three case studies of lasting, productive research partnerships, each described by a matched pairing of a scholar with a union representative. Lessons are drawn for future research collaborations.

This article rehearses various theories and strategies used by Canadian feminist political economists to understand and challenge existing conditions in care, touching on divisions among disciplines, among feminists, and among academics and communities outside academia, as well as divisions between theory and evidence. The intent is to prompt further discussion about moving in a more integrated and collective way toward just care while recognizing locations, identities, and related critical inequities, using the specific example of nursing homes to draw out implications for working together to make access to quality care and quality conditions of care work equitable and just.

Reflecting on findings from over ten years of research, four studies, and a focused two-day workshop, this article argues that it is past time to surface gender as a critical consideration in reimagining care homes to create conditions of dignity and respect for residents, workers, and families in all their diversity. Considering care homes as an indicator of equity in welfare states, we deploy a concept of gender that acknowledges the relationship between bodies and social relations, and an inclusive concept of women that interrogates the differences among women. We outline the reasons that make care homes a women’s issue, explaining why women are the majority of care home residents and staff across jurisdictions in high-income countries. We draw insights from our workshop and research studies to discuss how gender is both ignored and embedded in care home design and offer considerations and possibilities for designing care homes for women in all their diversity.

Assuming care is a relationship that builds on strengths and attends to individual needs, this chapter explores the skills, information, and structural supports required to develop and maintain these complex relationships and the multiple competing demands and tensions that are complicated by inequities in power and in continually evolving capacities. Understanding nursing homes as both work and living spaces, as well as organizations that provide medical, social, and living supports, it argues that it takes the village that is the nursing home, and the community in which it is embedded, to appropriately promote such relationships. It identifies some central ingredients and tensions that should be balanced for promoting nursing home care relationships, including risk tolerance, care designed for living, and structures that make such care possible in order to make nursing homes as good as they can be.

This introductory chapter begins by explaining the feminist political economy theory that guides the research and the multiple methods used by the international, interdisciplinary team that wrote this book. After explaining nursing homes, it then sets out the overall pre-Covid context for nursing home policy and practices in the jurisdictions that the team has studied - Canada, the United States, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany - beginning with the long history of concerns for aging populations and paying particular attention to the consequences of nursing home policies for equity and care. This is followed by an assessment of Covid-era government responses to nursing home tumult. Drawing on decades of research, the chapter concludes with lessons from Covid that would make life worth living and work worth doing in nursing homes.

The chapter argues that joy, as a concept, challenges the stranglehold of neo-classical economics and evidence-based medical knowledge on long-term care policy and practice. The concept is necessary to address quality issues in ways that question the knowledge base used to determine how care homes are organized and regulated. Given the potential costs that quality improvements can entail for provider organizations, what and how to assess care home quality has become high stakes, involving intense lobbying from for-profit companies. What are the strengths and problems of common approaches to quality assurance? Can they assess joy? The chapter draws on research examples from Canada, the US, Norway, and the UK to provide an overview of the challenges to measuring care home quality, consider the ways that joy is ignored or missed in most quality assurance measures and processes, and provide evidence on care home conditions that make joy possible.

Introduction: framing and comparingunpaid care work

As the pandemic rolled through care homes, did overcrowding, close quarters, large facilities, and shared spaces create the conditions for high rates of resident infection and death? Taking up the perspectives of residents and workers, this chapter draws on a physical design analysis of photo diaries and interviews at eight care homes in Canada to describe how residents, staff, and families experienced care home environments since the onset of the pandemic, including during lockdowns, restrictions, and physical distancing measures. Then, drawing on over a decade of international research, we outline six principles for planning and organizing the future of care home physical environments. We argue that there is no single “best” way to organize care home physical environments for all those who need 24/7 medical and social care, but there are principles that can guide care homes to achieve safer, welcoming physical environments for current and prospective residents and staff, including in disease-outbreak conditions.

In this chapter, you will hear from several of the Re-Imagining Long-term Care team members who have studied accountability extensively. The team brings expertise from different disciplines and jurisdictions. They were asked to share some of the most salient lessons they have learned through their research. While there are interesting differences among perspectives, the lessons also reveal an important re-imagining of accountability. This is a vision of accountability where the reduction or elimination for-profit participation is understood to be a central regulatory concern. We encounter strategies to ensure transparency and enforcement. We also learn about the need to use regulation to support adequate staffing and training, recognising that the conditions of work are the conditions of care. In these commentaries, accountability becomes empowering rather than punitive. It is re-imagined as a two-way street, rather than top-down, with room for interpretive approaches that enable care workers to respond to residents’ needs and even collaborate with compliance inspectors.

Drawing on fifteen years of international research employing mutiple methods, this chapter begins by explaining who provides care in Canada, Norway and Sweden, highlighting similarities and differences among countries in the training and organization of the nursing home labour force. After considering how race and gender shape the conditions of work and analyzing the kinds of conditions, such as staffing levels and health risks, that are experienced by the nursing home labour force in these three countries, the chapter moves on to describe the strategies introduced by each of these countries to address the Covid crisis. Informed by these more recent strategies, the chapter concludes by setting out the supportive working conditions that could transform nursing homes.

Seeking to support qualitative researchers in the artful development of feminist care scholarship, our goal here is to ‘look back’ on how we have conceptualized the problems of care and developed research that illuminates the social organization of care in distinct ways. As part of a ‘feminist care scholar retrospective’, we present five condensed ‘reverse research proposals’, which are retrospective accounts of past research or scholarly activity. From there, we discuss how each project begins with a particular problematic for investigation and a particular conception of care (e.g., as practices, as work, as a concept) to illuminate facets of the social organization of care shaping paid and unpaid care work and its interpretations. These approaches reveal multiple and overlapping ways that care is embodied, understood and organized, as well as ways care can be transformed.

When looking to promising international approaches to improve quality care in long-term care, it is necessary to avoid cherry-picking specific dimensions ignoring the integrated nature of what makes these approaches promising in the first place. In looking at promising Scandinavian or Green House models, attention is often paid to the size of facility. This often overlooks the importance of higher level of staffing, mix, and compensation of direct care staff and the integration of dietary, laundry, and housekeeping staff to care teams. Other overlooked considerations include recognition of family and friends and policies supporting care continuity.