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Caring for America - Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Paperback)
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Caring for America - Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Paperback)
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In this sweeping narrative history from the Great Depression of the
1930s to the Great Recession of today, Caring for America rethinks
both the history of the American welfare state from the perspective
of care work and chronicles how home care workers eventually became
one of the most vibrant forces in the American labor movement.
Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein demonstrate the ways in which law
and social policy made home care a low-waged job that was
stigmatized as welfare and relegated to the bottom of the medical
hierarchy. For decades, these front-line caregivers labored in the
shadows of a welfare state that shaped the conditions of the
occupation. Disparate, often chaotic programs for home care, which
allowed needy, elderly, and disabled people to avoid
institutionalization, historically paid poverty wages to the
African American and immigrant women who constituted the majority
of the labor force. Yet policymakers and welfare administrators
linked discourses of dependence and independence-claiming that such
jobs would end clients' and workers' "dependence" on the state and
provide a ticket to economic independence. The history of home care
illuminates the fractured evolution of the modern American welfare
state since the New Deal and its race, gender, and class fissures.
It reveals why there is no adequate long-term care in America.
Caring for America is much more than a history of social policy,
however; it is also about a powerful contemporary social movement.
At the front and center of the narrative are the workers-poor women
of color-who have challenged the racial, social, and economic
stigmas embedded in the system. Caring for America traces the
intertwined, sometimes conflicting search of care providers and
receivers for dignity, self-determination, and security. It
highlights the senior citizen and independent living movements; the
civil rights organizing of women on welfare and domestic workers;
the battles of public sector unions; and the unionization of health
and service workers. It rethinks the strategies of the U.S. labor
movement in terms of a growing care work economy. Finally, it makes
a powerful argument that care is a basic right for all and that
care work merits a living wage.
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