What kinds of jobs help carers combine care and employment?

In an era in which policies aim to increase labour force participation in the context of an ageing population, an important question is how many employees will experience the competing demands of paid work and informal care responsibilities? Until recently, the only way of answering this question in Australia was to ask how many people were informal carers and employed at a single point in time, using cross-sectional data. According to the 2003 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC), at a single point in time, about 13% of employees combine informal caring and employment (Thomson, Hill, Griffiths, & Bittman, in press). However, using the narrower category of 'primary' carer - that is, the person who provides the 'most' informal assistance to a care recipient, as distinct from 'any' informal assistance - the answer is a much lower figure of 2%. The proportion of primary carers in this situation is important, because being a primary carer is one of the requirements that gives informal carers a claim on some state support for their caring. In other words, the primary caring role makes them eligible for Carer Payment (a tightly targeted pension) or Carer Allowance (financial assistance). Many of these carers are also employed; a study of Gray, Edwards, and Zmijewski (2008) found that almost a quarter of Carer Payment recipients and half Carer Allowance recipients in their sample were employed.