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Caring for America : Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State

ISBN: 9780195329117 | 0195329112

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 4/11/2012

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Summary Table of Contents Author Biography

Through a sweeping analytical narrative, from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of today,Caring for Americashows how law and social policy shaped home care into a low-wage job, stigmatized as part of public welfare, primarily funded through Medicaid, and relegated to the bottom of the medical hierarchy. Care work became a job for African American and immigrant women that kept them in poverty, while providing independence from institutionalization for needy elderly and disabled people. But while the state organized home ca... MOREre, it did not do so without eliciting contestation and confrontation from the citizens themselves who gave and received it. Authors Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein trace the intertwined, sometimes conflicting search of care providers and receivers for dignity, self-determination, security, and personal and social worth. This book highlights social movements of senior citizens for disability rights and independent living, 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 history of the American welfare state from the perspective of care work, all the while re-examining the strategies of the U.S. labor movement in terms of a growing care work economy. An unprecedented study,Caring for Americaserves as a definitive historical account of how public policy has impacted major modern movements and trends in class, race, and gender politics in the United States.

Caring for America is the definitive history of care work and its surprisingly central role in the American labor movement and class politics from the New Deal to the present. The authors create a narrative of the home care industry that interweaves four histories--the evolution of the modern American welfare state; the rise of the service sector-based labor movement; the persistence of race, class, and gender-based inequality; and the aging of the American population--andconsiders their impact on today's most dynamic social movements.

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.

Illustrations	p. ix
Preface: The Personal Is Prologue	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Abbreviations	p. xix
Introduction: Making the Private Public	p. 4
Neither Nurses nor Maids	p. 19
Rehabilitative Missions	p. 40
Caring for the Great Society	p. 68
Welfare Wars, Seventies Style	p. 94
"Take Us Out of Slavery"	... MOREp. 123
"The Union Is Us"	p. 149
"We Were the Invisible Workforce"	p. 183
Epilogue: Challenging Care	p. 211
Notes	p. 227
Index	p. 283
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor and Chair, Department of Feminist Studies, at UC-Santa Barbara.

Jennifer Klein is Professor of History at Yale University

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