We have seen that the women interviewed for this study did not have much choice about taking on precarious work, did not usually negotiate their pay and were responsible for complex individual and collective arrangements to provide care for others. This chapter moves on to the question of whether these women felt able to disclose a care obligation at work, which is an important step in asserting any of the usual family-friendly rights or in coming to a more informal arrangement. Interviewees reported having little power to negotiate flexible working or to challenge employer-led working arrangements that made care difficult. They focused on the problem of continuing in work with the present employer or finding suitable follow-on work, which resulted in their attention being more on “showing willing” than expressing their need for carefriendly work arrangements. Indeed, these women perceived making informal requests for flexibility to be risky because the requests could identify them as a “liability” to the employers or as “unreliable” in situations where they wanted to avoid antagonizing employers in order to be offered future work. As such, “risky requests” put the responsibility of managing care dilemmas on the women themselves and intensified the stress and the stakes of communicating care needs to their employers.

This chapter begins with how interviewees felt about their work overall. Women described enjoying work, which gave them important social contact and a sense of achievement. Yet women described feeling like “second-class citizens” in the workplace, with worse terms and conditions that others on permanent contracts, and struggling to cope with job uncertainty and last-minute shifts. Women were aware that their jobs could be discontinued with little notice and that they were replaceable. They experienced the combination of job uncertainty and second-class status as a reason not to ask for flexibility at work or even to disclose a care responsibility. They were often already overwhelmed by the stresses of managing care alongside work (what is termed in this chapter “carefog”) and this impeded their taking more proactive measures to find out about their rights or protect their positions. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the idea of negotiating flexible work is particularly risky for women in precarious work, who have good reason to fear “rocking the boat” and avoiding appearances of being “unreliable”.