Do We Really Care?

Prepared by Alicia Lee

3 November 2026

Care, or more specifically, care work as a sector, has been under the microscope over the past few years—gaining more attention in policy spaces and piquing the interests of investment leaders. Care work—the invisibilised and under-recognised labour from raising children, caring for the elderly, to supporting people with disabilities and those with chronic illnesses—has been repositioned as a growth driver of Malaysia’s economy. Most evidently, the care economy positioning was cemented through the Malaysia Care Strategic Framework and Action Plan 2026–2030. Many welcomed this decision and deemed it progress, as care work has finally been acknowledged as an employment sector with value—an economic one at that.

However, there is something we need to keep in mind: when care is repackaged as a growth driver, what exactly are we valuing—and what and who are we leaving behind?

The Lens Dominating the Malaysian Care Landscape

The mainstream framing of care today is almost entirely economic, demonstrated by the catch-all term “Care Economy”. Policies thus far have been designed around what care can produce: a stronger workforce, higher birth rate, increasing female labour participation rate, and higher GDP. In Malaysia, this shows up in recurring conversations about getting women back into the workforce, addressing an ageing population before it strains fiscal planning, making care work more attractive to the younger generation, outcomes measured in profits, industries popping up as “solutions” to address existing gaps—whether these gaps are by design or otherwise.

To be clear: none of these conversations is wrong to have; the economic consequences of devalued care work are real and should be addressed. Evidently, care work—whether unpaid or underpaid—continues to fall disproportionately on women; this places them further in existing precarious conditions. Thus, legitimising care by getting it onto the economic agenda is seen as a necessary strategy for an issue that has long been ignored.

Reframing it through an economic lens also addresses a practical problem: how do you attract interest—and perhaps more importantly, investment—into a sector long dismissed as 3D: dirty, dangerous, and difficult? This reframing approach makes sense as we operate within a neoliberal system. If the only language that moves people in decision-making spaces is return on investment, then care must learn to speak it.

The gendered dimension further sharpens this argument, where care as labour sits at the intersection of formal employment barriers, household economic pressures, and gaps in social protection for those who do it. For the masses, the argument to make care economically visible might be the only realistic path to structural change.

However, this economic approach is not the same as valuing care. When this becomes the only framework or lens we have, we are no longer asking about what care is; rather, we are only asking what care is worth—measuring its answers in ringgit and productivity gains.

And at What Cost?

The danger of reducing or understanding care merely by its economic utility is not abstract. It shapes the foundation we are trying to build in Malaysia, and the ideas or narratives about care that we are reinforcing, whether subconsciously or otherwise.

Premilla Nadasen makes the case, in her work “Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism”, that how we talk about care actively obscures what is truly at stake, and that this obscuring has direct consequences in our ability to develop solutions that are genuinely just:

“It is crucial to understand care as a site of economic extraction, the role of the state in the care economy, and how the discourse around care obscures what’s at stake, because a lack of attention to these issues has hindered our ability to address the care crisis and to develop effective solutions for a more just economy.”

If care is understood primarily as a production mechanism—a strategy to generate labour, manage population decline, cushion the strain on a country’s health and economic systems—then the policies that follow are designed to optimise that objective. Consequently, the people within it are decentred and will not be protected.

Over time, what this produces is a cascade of uncaring. Uncaring policies shape uncaring institutions—and uncaring institutions, in turn, produce the conditions for uncaring policies to be normalised. Uncaring institutions produce uncaring employers. And uncaring employers, over time, shape uncaring people—which is not necessarily out of malice; rather, because within a system that has never offered an alternative, harmful values and practices simply get reproduced. This compounds, and those with the fewest resources, the least recourse, and the least institutional support, will suffer the most. It is these people that a genuinely caring society would place at the centre of its thinking. Yet they are the ones most likely to fall through the cracks under the current framing of care.

Care as a Human Right Care should not have to justify itself through economic means to be considered valuable. Approaching care like any other industry, subject to the same neoliberal logic of returns and efficiencies, is a path that leads us further from the thing we are trying to protect. We cannot extract value from care and centre human dignity at the same time. These are not compatible goals.

So what would it look like to build from a different premise—one where care is understood as a right, and not a resource?

A caring state is not difficult to imagine. It looks like cities designed around those who cannot drive: the elderly, children, the disabled. Public transportation that is dependable enough to actually be depended on. Healthcare that does not require you to be wealthy enough to access. Schools where children’s safety is the non-negotiable principle—where bullying is taken seriously, and online risks regulated before harm accumulates rather than after. A caring employer does not ask employees to schedule their lives around office hours. A caring community does not leave its most vulnerable to manage in isolation and in silence.

None of this is utopian. These are conscious, caring policy choices. If we are genuinely serious about care—not rhetorically and theoretically—then our policies, workplaces, public spaces, and national budgets should reflect that. The question is not whether they are possible; rather, it is whether we are willing to ask a fundamentally different question—who does this protect and are we willing to follow through?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Ultimately, creating roadmaps for care without addressing the premise underneath them is not the reform needed. We can redistribute resources, formalise labour categories, and publish national care strategies, and still produce a society that does not actually care.

For a brief moment, we had seen what a different premise looks like. During the COVID-19 pandemic, what held society together became suddenly and viscerally visible—and so did the cracks. The gaps in our institutions and social protection, the sheer number of people one crisis away from having nothing: all of it collapsed into a crushing reality that none of us were prepared for. In Malaysia, Kita Jaga Kita (we take care of each other) was a slogan communities knew well and practised effectively—or perhaps, out of desperation. It became a glaring example and recognition that without care, nothing else functions.

When that moment passed, corporations returned to their KPIs, governments to their economic recovery targets, essential workers to their invisibility. Pandemic lessons and systemic rethinking were a hot topic—until that, too, faded. We are a society that believes it learns from crisis, yet history repeats itself precisely because we keep returning to systems that were never designed to protect us in the first place. Mutual aid as survival does not emerge from thriving societies; it emerges where institutions have failed the people they exist to serve. Kita Jaga Kita should not have been necessary. Nonetheless, the fact that it was tells us everything.

Authors in the “Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence” ask: what would happen if we were to put care at the very centre of life? The honest answer is that we have not yet tried. What we have built instead are systems that treat care as an input and people as outputs, yet we know what the current path looks like. The harder question, one worth asking of every institution, every policy, every budget, is simple: who does this protect? That answer will tell us everything about the kind of society we actually want to be.