Chapters Three and Four showed that work and care interrelated in women's lives to a great extent. Care was never absent from these women's working lives, even when it might be invisible to managers and co-workers. Women put immense work into setting up, maintaining and repairing care networks, using personal relationships, scheduling and many other strategies to manage care while they were at work. As such, we could describe the relationship between care and work as being dynamic, with these women at the intersection between the two spheres, trying to manage their precarious employment alongside their unpaid care responsibilities. Chapter Five focused in particular on how women felt about their jobs and what factors encouraged or prevented them from disclosing a care responsibility at work. Due to the power imbalance at work, women often refrained from “rocking the boat” for fear that they would lose out on future work by being seen as “unreliable”.

This chapter focuses on what happened when it became inevitable that they disclose a care responsibility to a manager; when women could not smoothly manage the tense juxtaposition of shifts, care responsibilities and wider care networks. In other words, this chapter focuses on the moments when the unpaid care work that women did became visible to managers and co-workers. Sometimes this was due to a change in the care needs of a loved one: a health crisis for example, or a change in nursery or schooling patterns. Women also found their care arrangements interrupted or swept aside when employers changed their shifts at short notice or left it to the last minute to inform them about contract renewals.