This paper highlights the dynamics of workforce change in the context of welfare state restructuring and the institutional reorganisation of welfare service work. Social transformations towards flexible, cross-sector public services challenge the staff roles, raise new jurisdictional claims, and shake the anchors of professional identity. Stronger professional projects flourish, but deprofessionalisation and proletarisation occur in front line work in a situation of an impending labour shortage and the loss of attraction for entering welfare service work. The first focus highlights the process of reconfiguration of occupational groups. The interest is on the overlapping dynamics of welfare, labour market and education policy and the reshaping of professional groups. The second focus covers the reshaping of professional identities, modes for inclusion and exclusion and the boundary building. Trans-national claims on employability, flexibility and cross-sector competence change the position of 'old' professionals but make the position of a new-comer even more vulnerable. A reconfigured occupational order creates uncertanties in the form of temporary employment. and the loss of long term perspective erodes the commitment to care work. My question is, however, what kind of challenges does an occupational group face in a situation where they are supposed to download a variety of competencies but in practice they have restrictions when performing their work?Adopting a temporalized, context- and gender-sensitive approach this paper introduces a case study on Finnish practical nurses for social and health care by highlighting a unionist perspective. The occupational reform in 1990´s integrated social care and health care, and changed recruitment as to education, age, gender and ethnicity. This diversity is, however, neglected in the unionist arguments which hanker after an idealised homogeneity of proper health care professionals. According to Sennett (1998), the idea of this paper is to raise disussion on who are "we" as practical nurses and how this notion could be understood and articultaed.