Publication Type: Invited Paper

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This Article is situated against the backdrop of one of the most challenging questions facing society in the coming years: Who will care for America’s aging elderly population? Home is the preferred setting of most elderly persons who require assistance because of health problems. As the baby boom generation sparks an unprecedented growth in the size of the elderly population, more and more households are ushering into their homes workers to help care for aging family members. While the demand for home care is staggering, the work is both low-wage and often hazardous, a lethal combination that makes it difficult to retain workers and improve the quality of care. Home care workers in the United States are at the very bottom of the economic ladder. As a group, they are poor women who are disproportionately of color, and who rarely receive job-related benefits such as health insurance, sick leave, vacation time, or retirement plans. Because of its close association with women’s unpaid work in the home and its location in the private sphere, home care does not fit comfortably within the existing legal framework for regulating work. That framework presupposes a world in which workers leave the confines of their own homes and travel to public workplaces. However, home care blurs the boundaries between private and public, home and market, and family and work. The Article examines the evolving status of home care workers in employment law and argues that home care’s viability as a decent job is impeded by a legal system that reinforces the workers’ precarious economic position.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: K. Sue Jewell
The Ohio State University




Disparities in Health Care and Urban Health Care Delivery Systems:
Maximizing Profits and Managing the Poor

The focus of this paper is on how disparities in health care and health care delivery systems in urban spaces are related to race, gender and class. African Americans who are poor and in the working class, as well as the poor in general, are more likely to utilize health care delivery systems, such as emergency rooms and clinics for their primary care. Frequently, patients who rely on these health care delivery systems and their medical staff do not receive the same quality of medical care as do individuals who are more economically advantaged and receive their primary care from private practitioners who accept patients who maintain their own private health insurance, have an employer-sponsored health insurance plan, or have resources to pay out-of-pocket. Ultimately, the policies and practices of these health care delivery systems, specifically clinics, and physicians in family practices and medical practices who are willing to treat patients who have some form of government sponsored health insurance such as Medicaid, Medicare or the like, all to frequently establish policies and practices that are designed to maximize their profits and to manage poor patients for whom they provide medical services.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Past studies have shown that women’s care work that involves nurturing, caring, and sympathizing is devalued across occupations (England et al 1994; Killbourne et al 1994). This is due, in part, to a process of “differentiation” (Reskin 1988), whereby dominants devalue the supposedly innate skills of subordinates. Yet, much of the ethnographic research on how women’s care work is devalued has taken place in settings where we might expect it, such as law firms, (Lively 2000, Pierce 1995), and engineering research firms (Fletcher 1999); or even in workplaces where the gender coding is mixed, such as academia (Bella 1999) or an alternative health organization (Kleinman 1996). Data collected from participant observation and in-depth interviews show that even in a “women’s” organization that explicitly valued care work, an agency that assists victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, the female staff still sought out to enhance the value of their labor by highlighting their proficiency with confusing civil and criminal legal procedures—work coded as masculine. This legal work offered them a readily available opportunity to counter implicit (and sometimes explicit) accusations that their services were merely intuitive, not technical or skillful.