Quits and Job Changes Among Home Care Workers in Maine: The Role of Wages, Hours, and Benefits

This chapter also tackles how to build power under challenging conditions. It analyzes the case of home health care, which stands outside New Deal labor laws and is one of the largest and fastest-growing low-wage occupations. Building on decades of organizing, persistent political action, and mobilization with clients, home-care workers' unions won legislative battles enabling states to take on the role of employer and winning the right to engage in collective bargaining. But anti-union groups are now aggressively encouraging union disaffiliation through door-to-door campaigns, though home-care unions are fighting back. A critical component is deep member training and education, including “leadership academies” to cultivate workers' political education and skills. This chapter is a reminder that members make the union—with or without state recognition.

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Obscuring the costs of home care: restructuring at work

Work Employment and Society ◽

10.1177/0950017006061272 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 27-45 ◽

Cited By ~ 31

Author(s):

Jane Aronson ◽

Sheila M. Neysmith

Keyword(s):

Home Care ◽

Work Force ◽

Managed Competition ◽

Role Of Government ◽

Political Processes ◽

Unfair Treatment ◽

Care Workers ◽

Local View ◽

Home Care Workers

This study of displaced home care workers reveals how managed competition serves to produce a flexible and atomized work force. Laid off when their nonprofit employer could not compete in the local home care market, workers blamed their employer and their union for their jeopardy. Obscured from local view was the role of government policy in offloading services to the market, benefiting privileged participants in the hospital, professional and market health care sectors. Workers’ indignation at their own and their elderly clients’ unfair treatment dissipated: they had to attend to the practical imperatives in their lives, and were unable to locate a target for their protest. Resolving to be flexible and self-sufficient in the future, they struggled to rework identities as committed carers. The study illuminates how particular organizational and political processes render services more meagre and labour more flexible, and suggests particular possibilities for both accommodating and disrupting those trends.

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Family and family-like interactions in households with round-the-clock paid foreign carers in Israel

Ageing and Society ◽

10.1017/s0144686x09008393 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 29 (5) ◽

pp. 671-686 ◽

Cited By ~ 36

Author(s):

LIAT AYALON

Keyword(s):

Home Care ◽

Qualitative Interviews ◽

Family Members ◽

System Of Care ◽

Care Recipient ◽

Social And Emotional ◽

Care Givers ◽

Care Workers ◽

Home Care Workers

ABSTRACTThis paper reports a study of family and family-like interactions and transfers, or exchanges of goods and resources, between paid, round-the-clock, Filipino home carers and those they care for in a sample of households in Israel. Qualitative interviews about their experiences and attitudes concerning the care role were conducted with 22 family members and 29 Filipino home-care workers. A thematic analysis of the interview data identified three major themes: the structure and internal dynamics of the adapted family or family-like system of care; the role of family members; and the role of Filipino home-care workers in the new system of care. Sons and daughters tended to appropriate the care-management positions and to reduce their social and emotional support for the care recipient. In contrast, spouse care-givers continued to provide some of the personal and emotional care even when a Filipino home-care worker was employed. Filipino home-care workers were made responsible for daily care and domestic routines and provided emotional and social care. It was found that family members do not relinquish their role as care-givers when round-the-clock foreign carers are on hand, but the nature of their role changes. The results suggest that foreign home-care workers' job description needs to be redefined to acknowledge the substantial social and emotional care that they provide.

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Interlude

The New American Servitude ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479831012.003.0010 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 194-202

Author(s):

Cati Coe

Keyword(s):

Home Care ◽

End Of Life ◽

Social Actions ◽

Ritual Space ◽

Childhood And Youth ◽

Care Workers ◽

Cultural Script ◽

The Dead ◽

Home Care Workers

This coda explores the role of home care workers in helping patients and their kin establish rituals and meaning at the end of life. Kin often find themselves having difficulty creating the proper ritual space or sense of union and communion with the dead and with each other. They do not have a cultural script of what to do, which leads to greater grief. This lack of ritual around home deaths speaks to the cultural desire to avoid death as long as possible, the expertise of medical authorities in structuring the dying process in hospitals, and the fact that aging in general is somewhat unstructured, with relatively few rituals in comparison to the transitions of childhood and youth. Given the lack of structure in home deaths, kin are amenable to guidance about new kinds of social actions from others, including from home care workers, who become experts in dying. Such moments draw patients’ kin and home care workers closer together.

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Foreign Home Care Workers in Israel – The Role of Human Rights Organisations

Transnationale Sorgearbeit ◽

10.1007/978-3-531-92516-5_12 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 277-288 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Liat Ayalon

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Home Care ◽

Care Workers ◽

Home Care Workers

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The Effects of Social Support on the psychological Well-being of In-Home Care Workers : With a focus on the mediating effects of job satisfaction

Korea Academy of Care Management ◽

10.22589/kaocm.2019.31.5 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 31 ◽

pp. 5-28

Author(s):

Seong Min Lee

Keyword(s):

Social Support ◽

Job Satisfaction ◽

Home Care ◽

Well Being ◽

Mediating Effects ◽

Psychological Well Being ◽

Care Workers ◽

Home Care Workers

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“Then They Trust You …”

NEW SOLUTIONS A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy ◽

10.1177/1048291117712544 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 225-245 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Marsha Love ◽

Felipe Tendick-Matesanz ◽

Jane Thomason ◽

Davine Carter ◽

Myra Glassman ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Home Care ◽

Long Term Care ◽

Care Needs ◽

Term Care ◽

Team Members ◽

Physical Independence ◽

Care Workers ◽

Communications Skills ◽

Home Care Workers

The home care workforce, already at 2.7 million caregivers, will become the nation’s fastest growing occupation by 2024 as the senior boom generation accelerates the demand for in home services to meet its long-term care needs. The physically challenging work of assisting clients with intimate, essential acts of daily living places home care workers (HCWs) at risk for musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs); yet, HCWs typically receive little formal job training and may lack appropriate assistive devices. In this qualitative pilot study, HCW focus groups described workplace MSD risk factors and identified problem-solving strategies to improve ergonomic conditions. The results revealed that HCWs rely on their behavioral insights, self-styled communications skills and caring demeanor to navigate MSD risks to themselves and increase clients’ physical independence of movement. We suggest changes in employer and government policies to acknowledge HCWs as valued team members in long-term care and to enhance their effectiveness as caregivers.

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