As we have seen from Chapter Three, interviewees provided much care themselves through very busy daily routines and rounds of scheduling around their precarious work. However, as this chapter shows, women also played the role of care coordinators. This meant that the women felt ultimately responsible for organizing care and helping with large decisions; for example, deciding whether an elderly relative should move into a home, or helping a parent with mental health problems to liaise with service providers. Essentially, women organized other family members, co-parents, schools, nurseries and paid care workers to provide care in what this study terms ‘care networks’.

I have dedicated a chapter to care networks because they were so important in the interviewed women's lives. Care networks describe complex, collective and multi-institution arrangements involving different forms of informal and formal care provided by family, friends, schools, nurseries and care workers. Care networks might be fragile or partial, leaving women with much of the day-to-day work of providing care, or they might provide valuable, regular wrap-around support.

Women interviewed for this book reported that their care networks allowed them to access precarious work in the first place – the networks were shaped in such a way that they fitted around the irregular, episodic or interrupted work schedules the women had. When care networks worked well, they were invisible to employers. When women arrived at work, the employer would only see one person, not the rounds of telephone calls with family or ex-partners or quickly made bargains with friends. If the work pattern was changed or cancelled, as often happened in precarious jobs, an entire network of people was affected. At the intersection of care networks and precarious jobs, these women provided a crucial buffer zone, resolving tensions, coming up with solutions and allowing each employer to imagine that the worker was available to them without other obligations.

Creating and maintaining care networks around precarious jobs required these women to develop distinct scheduling skills and practices and led to time-intensive consultation with groups of people and care providers. This chapter begins by describing what women did when care networks involved friends and family members.