Home-Care Workers Aren’t Just ‘Companions’
On July 1, The New York Times published an Op-Ed by Barnard Alumna and BCRW contributor Jennifer Klein about domestic workers’ rights in America. Klein and her co-author Eileen Boris historicize the legislative marginalization of in-home work and address President Obama’s proposal to revise Labor Department regulations on home attendants and aides by placing domestic help under the Fair Labor Standards Act:
Establishing the legitimacy of care as productive, necessary labor — a real job — would recognize the realities of both our aging society and our service economy. It would also begin the long-overdue work of updating labor standards for the workplaces of a new century… This fight isn’t simply about the ability to earn the minimum wage or slightly more for working even longer hours; that would still keep home-care workers poor. Its deeper possibility is the potential to re-establish some notion of labor standards, rights and security after decades of gutting them.
Klein and Boris delve further into the history, growth, and activism of the home care labor sector in their book, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.
Related:
- New Feminist Solutions, Volume 5: Valuing Domestic Work
- The Scholar & Feminist Online: Valuing Domestic Work
- The Labor of Care: Rethinking Gender, Work, and Rights in the American Welfare State, a lecture by Jennifer Klein ’89
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