In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford 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 Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she 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.
In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford 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 Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security. Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics. What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she 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.
Recent scholarship examines multiple types of emotion management but these efforts are limited by the absence of service recipients' perspectives. Using interviews with personal home care clients in ...Toronto, this article extends discussions of emotion management. Both management and recipients expect the worker to respectfully meet and anticipate clients' individual needs but this is relational service, not emotional labour, because it is motivated by relationship building. Most clients also want caring work but it is unclear if and when this is part of the job. This preferred emotion management stems neither from explicit organizational rules nor implicit social rules, but from organizational signals informally communicated to workers by recipients. Some recipients send social signals for care beyond the job, which can take the form of unpaid labour or friendship. The article offers an extended typology of emotion management that can incorporate clients, managers and workers as actors in service work.
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This article utilizes a multilevel intersectional framework to analyze how Asian immigrant women workers in state-funded care provisioning make sense of and contest the relations of servitude that ...have long plagued low-paid domestic work. Our research, which draws on in-depth interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Filipina/o/x women in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program, shows that workers across all three groups face coercive labor conditions in private homes that severely constrain their ability to refuse excessive demands on their time and tasks, including when care is publicly funded and means tested, provided by paid relatives, managed by the state, and regulated under union collective-bargaining agreements. Yet, our comparative analysis also shows that workers from different groups have varying understandings of what constitutes servitude and how it can be challenged, especially when care receiver–employers are similarly marginalized and are part of workers’ families and ethnic communities. Meso-level institutions such as labor markets, immigrant networks, community organizations, and labor unions play a significant role in mediating workers’ subjective understandings and group-level responses to ongoing conditions of de facto servitude.
Many scholars have conceptualized immigrant social networks as “social capital” and have focused on the benefits of social ties. However, the concept of “social capital” is unable to explain who ...benefits from social networks, to what degree, and under which circumstances. Based on an ethnography of Mexican and Central American undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles janitorial industry, I argue that immigrant social networks may also become exploitative. Decentralized employment relations, hostile immigration and labor legislation, and a working-class community created a context in which recruitment through social networks facilitated restructuring. Within this context, benefits from the workers' networks accrued not to the workers themselves but to building owners. In this way, ties to family and friends constitute networks of exploitation rather than resource networks. This case suggests that more analytical attention be paid to how the benefits of social networks may change when the jobs themselves change. More broadly, it calls for attention to the contexts within which social networks become mechanisms for downgrading rather than platforms for upward mobility.
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Drawing on an ethnography of organizing among Latina/o immigrant janitors in Los Angeles, I argue that constructing workplace solidarity between women and men is a dynamic, gendered project. I ...demonstrate both how this project unfolds and how it can be halted, with varying implications for gender and class inequality at work. Organizational restructuring upsets gender‐segregated divisions of labour making solidarity between women and men possible but restructuring also allows workers to reinforce gendered divisions and cultural distinctions. The mechanism pushing workers one way or the other is the degree to which the process of organizing recognizes gender inequalities.
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Through case studies of newspaper carriers, rural route mail couriers, personal care workers, and freelance editors - four groups who have led pioneering efforts to organize - the authors provide a ...window into the ways political and economic conditions interact with class, ethnicity, and gender to shape the meaning and strategies of working men and women and show how these strategies have changed over time. They argue that the experiences of these workers demonstrate a pressing need to expand collective bargaining rights to include them.
Based on an ethnography of a Latina/Latino immigrant union, the author examines changes in gender inequality along five dimensions. Union renewal weakened the structural division of union labor, ...allowing women on staff to realize feminist values of leadership development in concrete goals. These changes made space for women members to engage in new leadership practices that undermined gender inequalities in interactions with men and empowered and politicized women at the individual level. Feminist values of caring for children, however, were not realized in specific goals thus limiting the leadership practices and politicization of women with children. The ethnography shows the need to move from the study of women and unions to an analysis of how gendered transformations intersect with economic restructuring and immigration within social movement organizations.
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Summary
This article examines the relationship between gender, forms of employment and dimensions of precarious employment in Canada, using data from the Labour Force Survey and the General Social ...Survey. Full-time permanent wage work decreased for both women and men between 1989 and 2001, but women remain more likely to be employed in part-time and temporary wage work as compared to men. Layering forms of wage work with indicators of regulatory protection, control and income results in a continuum with full-time permanent employees as the least precarious followed by full-time temporary, part-time permanent and then part-time temporary employees as the most precarious. The continuum is gendered through both inequalities between full-time permanent women and men and convergence in precariousness among part-time and temporary women and men. These findings reflect a feminization of employment norms characterized by both continuity and change in the social relations of gender.
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Issue Title: Special Issue: Constructing Workers The literature recognizes the need for unions to change their strategies in order to organize women but whether these strategies reinforce or ...undermine gender inequality is insufficiently examined. An ethnography of the Los Angeles Justice for Janitors movement demonstrates how women can mitigate unequal gender relations tied to social reproduction through unions. Secondary documents, participant observation and in-depth interviews with Latina/o immigrant janitors and with union staff show how women janitors constructed a union motherhood that undermined the invisibility and devaluation of caregiving generally performed by women. As they moved into union leadership, women worker leaders made caregiving more visible in union practice and recognized its value in the way they framed a broader unionism for the family. Attention to how unions contend with social reproduction extends our understanding of the consequences of union renewal for gender inequality.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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