Care Workers Day is a moment of recognition, a day to appreciate those who sustain life in its most intimate and fragile forms. But to leave it there is to misunderstand its political weight. Care Workers Day is not simply about appreciation; it is about struggle. It is about labour. And more precisely, it is about a feminist labour movement that exposes the fault lines between what is valued and what is essential.

To speak of care work in South Africa is to speak of history. It is to speak of the long arc of Black women’s labour, labour that has always been central, always necessary, and yet persistently devalued. From domestic work under apartheid to the informal and formal care economies of today, the expectation has remained strikingly consistent: that Black women will carry the burden of care, often invisibly, often without adequate compensation, and almost always without the dignity that should accompany such indispensable work. Care Workers Day enters this history not as a neutral marker, but as an intervention.

At the heart of this intervention is a fundamental tension within capitalism itself: the divide between what is considered “productive” labour and what is relegated to the realm of “reproductive” labour. Productive labour is waged, measured, and recognised, it is the work that generates profit and is therefore legible within economic systems. Reproductive labour, on the other hand, is what sustains life itself: caring for the sick, raising children, maintaining households, and supporting communities. It is the labour that makes all other labour possible, yet it is systematically undervalued or rendered invisible. This divide is structured and gendered.

Reproductive feminism has long insisted that we cannot understand labour without understanding care. It refuses the idea that the economy begins and ends at the site of formal employment. Instead, it asks us to look at the full continuum of work, the paid and the unpaid, the visible and the invisible, and to recognise how deeply intertwined they are. In doing so, it reveals that the exploitation of care workers is not a deviation from the system, but a condition of its survival. Care Workers Day, then, is a site where this analysis becomes concrete.

Community Health Workers, home-based carers, Early Childhood Development Practitioners, and others who make up the care economy occupy a paradoxical position. They are essential to the functioning of society, yet treated as if they are peripheral. They are called upon to provide not only physical care, but emotional and social support, to be present, attentive, and responsive in ways that exceed any formal job description. And yet, this expectation of constant availability is rarely matched by adequate compensation or stable working conditions.

There is a quiet but pervasive assumption underpinning this dynamic: that care is natural to those who perform it. That women, in particular, are inherently suited to care work, and therefore require less recognition for it. This assumption does dangerous work. It collapses labour into identity, turning what is skilled, demanding work into something that appears effortless and therefore undeserving of fair remuneration. But care work is not instinct. It is labour.

And while it is true that women, particularly Black women, make up the majority of the care workforce, a feminist analysis of Care Workers Day must also hold space for the full range of workers within this sector, including men who are part of and affected by these structures. The point is not to essentialise care as women’s work, but to understand how gendered histories and expectations shape the conditions under which care is performed.

Men in the care economy, too, encounter precarity, low wages, and limited recognition. But they do so within a system that has already been structured through the devaluation of feminised labour. In this sense, improving conditions for all care workers requires confronting the gendered logic that underpins the sector as a whole.

This is where Care Workers Day becomes unmistakably feminist, not because it centres women alone, but because it challenges the very conditions that have made care work undervalued in the first place. It insists that dignity cannot be selective. It cannot be reserved for certain forms of labour while denied to others. It demands that we rethink the metrics through which we assign value, not only in economic terms, but in social and political ones.

In previous reflections on the treatment of Community Health Workers, we have seen how the language of dignity is often mobilised without being materially realised. Care workers are praised as “heroes,” particularly in moments of crisis, yet continue to face delayed payments, insecure contracts, and a lack of benefits. This disjuncture between recognition and reality is not incidental. It is part of a broader pattern in which care is celebrated rhetorically while being undermined structurally.

Care Workers Day disrupts this pattern by refusing to separate appreciation from accountability.

It draws a direct line between feminist principles and labour rights. It asks what it would mean to take seriously the idea that all labour, particularly labour that sustains life, deserves fair compensation, protection, and respect. It challenges the notion that care can be endlessly extracted without consequence, that workers can be expected to give beyond the call of duty without receiving in return. At its core, this is a question of justice.

To frame Care Workers Day as a feminist labour movement is to recognise that the struggle for fair wages, stable employment, and safe working conditions is inseparable from the struggle for gender equality. It is to understand that the devaluation of care work is both a labour issue and a feminist issue, and that addressing one without the other will always be incomplete.

But it also pushes us further. It asks us to consider what a transformed care economy might look like, one in which the principles of care are not only practiced by workers, but embedded in the systems that govern their work. One in which the responsibility to care is not individualised and feminised, but collectively shared and institutionally supported.

As we recognise Care Workers Day, we are called not only to recognise care workers, but to reckon with the conditions under which they labour. We are asked to confront the uncomfortable reality that a society can depend on care while refusing to properly value it.

And perhaps most importantly, we are invited to consider the possibility that feminist principles, grounded in dignity, equity, and the redistribution of labour, are not peripheral to labour struggles, but central to them.

If care is what sustains life, and labour is what sustains the economy, then what would it mean to build a system in which the ethics of care shape the conditions of work itself?

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