This book has drawn on interviews with women in precarious work to understand how they managed work alongside unpaid care. While the women's accounts were diverse, a story has emerged about how and why this balancing act is so difficult and what could be done to support these women in the future with family-friendly rights. This final chapter recaps the key findings before outlining some considerations that could shape future attempts to provide family-friendly rights for precarious workers.

Summary of findings

Analyzing the accounts of work and care that women provided in their interviews, powerful themes have emerged about the lack of choice, low and fluctuating pay levels, fear of reprisals, imbalance of bargaining power and intensified managerial control that they experienced in precarious jobs. We have seen in Chapter One that the women did not choose precarious work but took it because other work in their chosen field or in their local area was not available. When the women started work, they had little power to negotiate care-friendly work patterns. Employers determined the rate of pay and set the timing and patterns of work. Making ends meet was difficult, and women used a range of strategies to make their money last until the end of their pay period, including paying attention to food and transport costs, borrowing, and selling items if they needed to. All of this had an effect on their ability to negotiate with their employers. It meant that the women needed to prioritize getting immediate or future work to secure their ongoing income.

This would all be enough of a problem if women came to their jobs without any other responsibilities, but Chapters Two and Three focused on women's responsibilities regarding providing care for loved ones. Care was often invisible to employers, but it structured the women's daily lives, finances and longer-term planning in important ways.