Contesting Nursing: Gig Care Workers and Their Helper Script

ABSTRACT Why have so many care workers left formal wage employment for gig work since the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic? What promise do they see in gig care work, and what precarity? Drawing on interviews with care workers and managers in U.S. nursing homes, this article explores gig care at the point of production. Gig work, by facilitating easy exits from poor working conditions, carves out a social space for crafting what I term the “helper script”: a set of speech acts that emphasize workers' status as helpers rather than staff to counteract caregiving exploitation. Care work differs from other types of work in that its resistance is under closer ethical scrutiny and requires more justification. By framing themselves as only present to help, gig workers simultaneously uphold dominant care ethics imposed on staff employees while exempting themselves from it. In practice, care workers use the helper script to subvert the aspects of care work that often demand their time, emotions, and relationships. Although some gig care workers express a sense of precarity, none want to return to regular employment; they would rather creatively maneuver their way out of the precarity within the gig than leave it.