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VULNERABLE458 so. Volunteers also assist in care work and receive training, but this requires additional supervision and integration work for staff. This is also the case with privately paid companions. The coordination and search for information are more complicated during a pandemic, espe- cially when family, volunteers, and paid companions are locked out. Nursing homes are often called long-term residential care because, even with stricter admission criteria, residents spend a long time in the home. Staff get to know them, and often their families, well. When death happens, staff must deal with their own grief, with that of families, and with that of other staff. Multiple deaths and threatened deaths during this time multiply the grief and dealing with the dead necessarily involves not only additional work with families and staff but also touching the dead, creating new risks. The growing complexity of resident care needs means there is a growing demand for more and different skills, skills specific to the variety of physical conditions that are combined with cognitive demands particular to nursing home care. The overwhelming major- ity of nursing home workers are women. Their different skills are often assumed to be work that any woman can do. That these places are usually called homes encourages the association of the work with what most women do in the home, too often rendering the skills invis- ible and undervalued.32 In sum, nursing home work is physically and emotionally demanding and requires a range of skills in all job categories, skills that are often undervalued and low-paid. Instead of supporting a skilled and resourced labour force, privatization has been undermin- ing and intensifying it. This created a powder keg when COVID-19 hit. Privatization and the Conditions of Care during COVID-19 The conditions of work are the conditions of care.33 Care can only be as good as the conditions that allow care providers to do their work. The same conditions shape the health of those who provide and those who need care. The conditions of work in nursing homes had already 32. Pat Armstrong, “Puzzling Skills: Feminist Political Economy Approaches” (2013) 50:3 Canadian Review of Sociology 256. 33. See Re-imagining Long-term Residential Care Project, “Re-imagining Long- term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices” (last vis- ited 14 May 2020), online: Re-imagining  Long-term  Residential  Care <https://reltc. apps01.yorku.ca/>.