Augias' stables: myth of performance and denial of vulnerability

Abstract

The care perspective, as a practical and theoretical orientation centered on concern for others, highlights our vulnerabilities and interdependencies not as failures or forms of deviance but as constitutive of human life. In total opposition, the model of human being at work that prevails today is founded on the imperatives of excellence, performance and competitiveness, even if vulnerability has recently made its appearance in the catastrophic form of work-related suicides. Does the perspective of care offer other resources to critique the model of the man of performance? The proposal of a care policy and one of its possible applications is to promote, in the interest of all, the knowledge derived from the experiences of care work, but also from the experience of disabled or elderly workers, or of people returning to work after a serious illness. All have knowledge based on vulnerability. Care is an invitation to decompartmentalize the boundaries between the categories of private and public, of salaried and domestic work; it is also an invitation to decompartmentalize the struggles between stable and precarious employees, between citizens and undocumented workers, between skilled and unskilled women, between recipients and providers of care; an invitation to critically question what is important in our societies.