“On the Floor” and “At the Table”: Child Care Work, Advocacy, and the Devaluation of Social Reproduction in Canada’s Non-Profit Sector

This dissertation examines the role of community-based non-profit labour under neoliberal austerity in Canada, where non-profit organizations have become both indispensable and increasingly precarious providers of care. Drawing on social reproduction theory, it conceptualizes community-based non-profit work as a critical yet persistently undervalued site of social reproduction. Focusing on child care provision and advocacy in Ontario, the dissertation asks: How do non-profit child care organizations navigate the neoliberal devaluation of care work? How do workers experience and interpret their labour under contemporary funding and policy regimes? The research draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted with a provincial child care advocacy organization and a community-based child care centre during the implementation of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care system. This dual case study enables a multi-dimensional analysis of care work at both the policy and frontline levels—those immersed in the policy and advocacy realm of child care (the labourers “at the table”), and those engaged in its everyday, embodied practice as Early Childhood Educators (the labourers “on the floor”). The findings reveal deep convergences between non-profit work and care work: their life-sustaining functions, chronic socio-political undervaluation, and tensions between relational labour and market-oriented funding regimes. Despite operating in distinct domains—policy advocacy and direct service provision—both organizations are shaped by gendered expectations that care labour requires little skill, will remain abundant and inexpensive, and is sustained by moralized narratives of women’s self-sacrifice. The dissertation argues that while the social intervention demanded by neoliberal austerity is increasingly borne by an underpaid and feminized non-profit workforce, their capacity to sustain this labour is structurally undermined by the persistent capitalist devaluation of social reproduction. At the same time, these actors constitute potential sites of resistance, challenging policy narratives that individualize and depoliticize care and revealing the political dimensions of non-profit care labour under neoliberalism.

Department dc:contributor.department

Global Development Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Mendelin, Meghan

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Hall, Rebecca

• feminist political economy
• care work
• early childhood educators
• non-profit organizations
• advocacy
• social reproduction
• child care policy

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/36305

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/36305