Meet the Researcher: Dr. Caroline Murphy
My research centres on building effective labour market policies that support people to live well while sustaining their work and careers.
The provision of long-term care is one of the defining societal challenges of our era. Much of my research now sits at the intersection of precarious employment, job quality and care, encompassing both the unpaid care people provide to family members and the work of health and social care assistants in home care settings.
It struck me that these two groups were usually studied in isolation, when, in reality, they are connected within the labour market, with each shaping the other’s job quality and careers.
Broadly, my work does two things. I examine how people combine paid work with informal caregiving responsibilities and how this affects their income, wellbeing and careers. Depending on the estimate, 300,000–500,000 people in Ireland are unpaid carers, 57% of whom are also in employment. That’s one in eight people providing unpaid care to a family member, saving the state €20 billion annually.
As part of my work at the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre, I examine how technology is reshaping the relationship between care and time for people who combine informal caregiving with paid employment, and whether it genuinely eases that balancing act.
In conjunction, I examine the working conditions of home care assistants who provide essential support with daily living yet whose work remains deeply undervalued in economic terms. Since 2024, I’ve led and worked on two European funded research projects examining both how digital platforms are being introduced in home care in Europe: how they're changing the way care is
My current focus is on identity: care work’s lack of visibility doesn't just undervalue the labour itself it also tends to erode the identity of the people doing it. How people’s identity is affected by care influences their decision making for example in the UK its estimated that 600 informal carers exit the labour market everyday while paid care workers remains one of the sectors with the highest level of vacancies.
I think long term care is something that touches every household at some point in a personal way, but most of us never think about the macro level implications. Students are genuinely surprised to learn the scale of the workforce and value of the sector. It reframes how they think about "the labour market" and which forms of work are valued. It also unearths a global dimension since Ireland's long-term care needs are increasingly met by a largely migrant workforce, so what looks like a domestic policy issue is tied into global labour flows.
Irish labour market policy has largely neglected care provision, built on the assumption that long-term care is low-cost, or simply a free choice families make. It's neither. Every major labour market transformation to date has treated long-term care as an afterthought. As AI and technology reshape the labour market, we have a narrow window to design labour markets differently. We can either repeat that pattern or use this moment to build long term care needs explicitly into how we think about job design, working time, and workforce planning.
The decisions made about workforce investment now won't just shape the labour market, they'll determine the kind of care available to all of us, when we're the ones who need it.
