(WPO6b) Healthcare Institutions, Work, and Immigration II: Exploring the Trajectories and Mobility of Healthcare Workers in Canada

Over the past three years, the global pandemic has underscored the vital role that healthcare workers have played in upholding healthcare systems worldwide. In Canada, a significant proportion of healthcare workers comprises those who are employed on the frontlines, many of whom have recently immigrated to the country. Notably, several have been involved in multiple migrations, working in healthcare systems in other countries prior to arriving in Canada. Particularly on the frontlines of healthcare work, the pandemic has exposed the disproportionate risk and impact of structural inequality at the intersections of race and ethnicity, occupation, citizenship, and socioeconomic status. Deemed essential and amongst one of the most stressful frontline occupations, these positions are predominantly occupied by racialized women.In this session, we will explore the dynamics between healthcare institutions, work and labour, and immigration, and delve into the complexities, challenges, and opportunities arising from the convergence of these domains. Particularly, we will examine the im/mobility and stratification that workers face within healthcare institutions and organizations. Understanding their challenges is vital for developing equitable organizational and management strategies, policies that optimize service delivery, and improving their retention within healthcare institutions. Their work is pivotal for ensuring the efficient functioning of healthcare systems, provision of patient care, and effective mentorship of new workers. Tags: Health and Care, Work And Professions

Organizers: Valerie Damasco, Trent University, Eugena Kwon, Trent University; Chair: Valerie Damasco, Trent University

Presentations

Rose Ann Torres, School of Social Work, Algoma University; Valerie Damasco, Trent University

Racial and Gender-Based Violence in the Healthcare System: Experiences of Filipino Healthcare Workers

It is widely held that racialized and immigrant healthcare professionals face immense challenges in the workplace because of compounding stressors, including adaptation, acculturation, burnout, discrimination, and violence. Particularly, Filipino immigrants are less likely to seek support for mental health issues due to the stigma related to help-seeking and the discomfort associated with obtaining assistance through conventional workplace programs and services. Thus, to support the health, mental health, well-being, safety, and retention of Filipinos in frontline healthcare work, an understanding of workplace practices is important. It is also fundamental to explore the cultural and structural dimensions related to providing these supports to Filipino healthcare workers. The pandemic has given rise to violence against healthcare workers and exacerbated issues related to stress and burnout. Filipino healthcare workers have faced threats to their health, safety, and economic stability. These challenges have coincided with a surge in racialized and xenophobic hatred directed at Asian communities. They have endured harassment, violence, and discrimination within institutions and communities. Despite the persistence of these issues, very little has been done to protect healthcare workers, particularly those from racialized backgrounds, from workplace violence and mistreatment. The literature extensively underscores the profound effects of workplace violence on the well-being of healthcare workers and their impact on patient care. Existing evidence suggests that violence is normalized within workplaces, underreported, and the lack of action to prevent further occurrences. In this presentation, we will discuss the gendered and racial violence experienced by Filipino healthcare workers within formal healthcare institutions, factors that contribute to these incidents, and the coping mechanisms they employ. Our objective is to draw from the insights gained from this research to inform recommendations for governments, hospital administrators, and community stakeholders to create a secure and safe environment for racialized healthcare workers.

Dionisio Nyaga, Algoma University

Genealogy of Black trauma and ethics of care

We live in a society that is framed and organized on violent colonial occupation and destruction of life in the name of civilization, improvement, and salvation. Such a premise seems to have guided the production of the social work care profession; wherein I argue that such care is violent and is sanctioned by the code of ethics. The birth of capitalism coincided with that of the social work profession. Capitalism divides the society into rural (hinterland, country) and/versus urban (city, heartland) and the subsequent differential and dualistic valuation between the two spaces. Rural sphere was marked as emotional, undeveloped, and degenerate while the city became the space of development, civilization and guided by codes/laws. This presentation argues that such spatial demarcation that were and continues to be sanctioned by the city bylaws, laws and policies were violent and had material and symbolic consequences to those who migrated from the rural to the city. Social work as a borderline profession was given the mandate to decide who gets to enter the city and who was to be deported. Given that the social work profession found itself at the intersection of law and lawlessness, it had to improvise code of ethics to guide the profession while simultaneously confirming itself as a science and part of the public profession. It is this epistemological progress at the violent intersections of the city and the rural that we witness the birth of codes of ethics and subsequent tragic violent care against immigrant others. The codes confirmed that social work had come of age as a science of care that would help manufacture or process the broken immigrant into an exalted subject with rights and duties to enter civilization. Part of the process of codifying Social work was saving it from its destructive state of nature that had previously been associated with the private space where white women would provide unpaid labor. By rationalizing the social work care, it meant that there were two types of care. The care provided by social workers was to be regarded as rational care and that provided by immigrant women as emotional and broken care. The immigrant was thus regarded as superfluous and in need of the coded and civilized social worker to enter the city of civilization. The code therefore helped the White Social Workers to determine who becomes the citizen and whose rights would be suspended while simultaneously confirming the profession as scientific and rational. Such forms of care logic continue to cause harm to marginalized communities. Subsequently, we seek to argue that for social work to decolonize, an ethical requirement grounded on non-violence needs to be revisited. Non-violence as an ethical requirement demands we remember and reconcile such historical and traumatic colonial tragedies that birthed social work as a profession; to start decoding the ways through which codes conceal violence against marginalized communities while affirming white and white social workers as rational providers and Savior of broken immigrant other. To argue for non-violence as a care methodology I delve into how social work ethical code have engaged in anti-Black hate. Social work as a care profession is implicated in Anti-Black racism. Anti-Black racism is a unique form of racism that Black peoples face because of their skin colour. Anti-Black racism is manifested in institutions, ideologies, and cultures as well as individually. In that regard, this presentation looks at code of professional ethics and how systematic prospers anti Black racism and hate. The birth of social work code of ethics was and is simultaneously the erasure and expulsion through reductionism of Black emotions, values, and histories. Such forms of rationalization of professional ethical code of social work care works in ways that forgets ontologies of Black and Blackness to which I argue is implicated in anti-Black racism. This paper engages with the codes of professional social work ethics and how they inform care; to start imagining how they define and authorize practice in ways that forgets histories, values and actualities of Black bodies while simultaneously affirming white subjects as quintessential protector, redeemer, Savior, and provider of rational care to Black social service users. Such kind of care mythologies are kept intact and suctioned by the code of professional ethics and help conceal whiteness and white supremacy in social work practice. This presentation therefore looks at how social work informed by rationalized code works in ways that are marginalizing and colonizing to Black communities. The paper calls for reimagining social work violent care through ethics of practice that are culturally informed and grounded on Black trauma. Rather than collapsing and quantifying Black trauma and selling them in the market place in the name of cultural sensitivity, social workers should instead give accounts and grieve Black deaths by imagining everyday care chokeholds Black people have to face in the hands of social workers. This presentation is therefore a form of grieving in ways that remember rather than forget Black ontologies. Such an ethical diversion calls for non- violent care as a necessary ethical requirement in social work practice. Non-violence is a methodology and praxis of care grounded on community histories, values and realities.