Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances
Cynthia J. Cranford
Abstract
This revealing look at home care illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As the book shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. The book analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and argues that workers and ... More
This revealing look at home care illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As the book shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. The book analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from the book's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, the book argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.
Keywords:
home care,
disabled people,
elderly people,
immigrant women workers,
inequalities,
inequality,
flexible care,
secure work
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501749254 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2021 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501749254.001.0001 |
