Neoliberalism and work-life balance among COVID-19 nurses

The COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges to healthcare workers: with rising COVID-19 cases, constantly changing guidelines, and an uncertain and rapidly unfolding situation, stress and burnout among nurses rose as well. In response, many hospitals and healthcare workplaces instituted measures designed to help nurses maintain their "work-life balance." This concept, under scrutiny here, suggests that there exists a separation between the "work" self (existing within the workplace) and the "life" self (existing outside the workplace) and that the worker should maintain this separation. We argue that narratives of increased stress, work and social challenges, nurse subjectivity, self-care, and burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, exemplify the neoliberalized construction of "work-life balance." This neoliberalization is revealed through nurses' lived experiences of their work interacting with their lives outside. We show how this construct and the nurses' employers emphasize individual responsibility rather than structural responsibility. By making visible these subtleties, better intervention into the conditions under which nurses are employed may be possible.