A Lack of Reciprocity

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-238
Author(s):  
Cati Coe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Home Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Workplace Conditions ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Service Agencies

This chapter examines how workplace conditions and benefits shape care workers’ national belonging. It discusses the home care field, including its historically unregulated character due to its categorization as domestic service. Agencies are currently responding to new regulations regarding overtime and health insurance, which have had contradictory effects on workers. It also discusses the amount of profit agencies are making from care workers. Care workers feel that they are denied reciprocities to which they are entitled through their labor. This is thus a complicated sense of belonging, in which they belong enough to feel entitled to reward, but not enough belonging to feel that they can work in unison against this system. Many, instead, decide that this state of affairs confirms that they belong in their home countries rather than in the United States. It is there that they imagine that they will reap the rewards of their labor and attain a dignity that is denied in the United States.

Care Falls Apart

2018 ◽  
pp. 176-200
Author(s):  
Elana D. Buch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Family Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Care Workers

Across the United States, home care faces perpetual worker shortages and endemically high turnover levels estimated at between 60% and 90% per year. This chapter examines cases of turnover in rich ethnographic detail, arguing that the inability of agency and public policy to recognize the interdependence of older adults, workers, and their families contributes to this startling statistic. In observed cases of turnover; job loss stemmed from workers’ inabilities to sustain both their own households and those of their older adults without blurring the boundaries between them. Workers lost jobs because of conflicts with family care and because they engaged in unsanctioned reciprocities with clients. Current attempts to protect vulnerable older adults from possible exploitation actually exacerbate the exploitation of care workers and increase instability in home care.

scholarly journals Filipino Home Care Workers: Invisible Frontline Workers in the COVID-19 Crisis in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110004
Author(s):  
Katherine Nasol ◽  
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Assisted Living ◽  
Elder Care ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
Home Care Workers

Filipino home care workers are at the frontlines of assisted living facilities and residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs), yet their work has largely been unseen. We attribute this invisibility to the existing elder care crisis in the United States, further exacerbated by COVID-19. Based on quantitative and qualitative data with Filipino workers before and during the COVID-19 crisis, we find that RCFEs have failed to comply with labor standards long before the pandemic where the lack of state regulation denied health and safety protections for home care workers. The racial inequities under COVID-19 via the neoliberal approach to the crisis puts home care workers at more risk. We come to this analysis through Critical Immigration Studies framing Filipino labor migration as it is produced by neoliberalism and Racial Capitalist constructs. Last, while the experiences of Filipino home care workers during the pandemic expose the elder care industry’s exploitation, we find that they are also creating strategies to take care of one another.

“Anyone Who Is Not African”

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-80
Author(s):  
Cati Coe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Status ◽  
Agency Staff ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
American Economy

Home care is a portal to the American economy for African migrants, but it is one in which they are racialized as African and Black. When Africans come to the United States, they encounter a racialized employment market, in which their Blackness and immigrant status plays a major role in how they are perceived. Because they are desperate for work to support their families, they are valued by agency staff as dedicated and hard-working, patient and respectful. Africans also highlight these qualities when they seek employment. However, their cultural capital as “African” is not considered valuable by patients, who often express a preference for “white” or “American” care workers. This chapter analyzes the ways that care workers are recognized and positioned within the care labor market, and how this recognition makes African care workers vulnerable to exploitation and humiliation.

Fat as a Floating Signifier

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-163
Author(s):  
Sabrina Strings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Fat Phobia ◽  
Fat Stigma

Studies on the development of fat stigma in the United States often consider gender, but not race. This chapter adds to the literature on the significance of race in the propagation of fat phobia. I investigate representations of voluptuousness among “white” Anglo-Saxon and German women, as well as “black” Irish women between 1830 and 1890—a time period during which the value of a curvy physique was hotly contested—performing a discourse analysis of thirty-three articles from top newspapers and magazines. I found that the rounded forms of Anglo-Saxon and German women were generally praised as signs of health and beauty. The fat Irish, by contrast, were depicted as grotesque. Building on the work of Stuart Hall, I conclude that fat was a “floating signifier” of race and national belonging. That is, rather than being universally lauded or condemned, the value attached to fatness was related to the race of its possessor.

scholarly journals Ice-Breaking Fleets of the United States and Canada: Assessing the Current State of Affairs and Future Plans

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 703
Author(s):  
Megan Drewniak ◽  
Dimitrios Dalaklis ◽  
Anastasia Christodoulou ◽  
Rebecca Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Maritime Transportation ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Polar Ice ◽  
Northwest Passage ◽  
Ice Cap ◽  
Ice Coverage ◽  
Current State ◽  
State Of Affairs

In recent years, a continuous decline of ice-coverage in the Arctic has been recorded, but these high latitudes are still dominated by earth’s polar ice cap. Therefore, safe and sustainable shipping operations in this still frozen region have as a precondition the availability of ice-breaking support. The analysis in hand provides an assessment of the United States’ and Canada’s polar ice-breaking program with the purpose of examining to what extent these countries’ relevant resources are able to meet the facilitated growth of industrial interests in the High North. This assessment will specifically focus on the maritime transportation sector along the Northwest Passage and consists of four main sections. The first provides a very brief description of the main Arctic passages. The second section specifically explores the current situation of the Northwest Passage, including the relevant navigational challenges, lack of infrastructure, available routes that may be used for transit, potential choke points, and current state of vessel activity along these routes. The third one examines the economic viability of the Northwest Passage compared to that of the Panama Canal; the fourth and final section is investigating the current and future capabilities of the United States’ and Canada’s ice-breaking fleet. Unfortunately, both countries were found to be lacking the necessary assets with ice-breaking capabilities and will need to accelerate their efforts in order to effectively respond to the growing needs of the Arctic. The total number of available ice-breaking assets is impacting negatively the level of support by the marine transportation system of both the United States and Canada; these two countries are facing the possibility to be unable to effectively meet the expected future needs because of the lengthy acquisition and production process required for new ice-breaking fleets.

The Impact of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansions on the Sources of Health Insurance Coverage of Undergraduate Students in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 107755872110158
Author(s):  
Priyanka Anand ◽  
Dora Gicheva
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Insurance Coverage ◽  
Health Insurance Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Percentage Points ◽  
The Affordable Care Act ◽  
Medicaid Expansions

This article examines how the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions affected the sources of health insurance coverage of undergraduate students in the United States. We show that the Affordable Care Act expansions increased the Medicaid coverage of undergraduate students by 5 to 7 percentage points more in expansion states than in nonexpansion states, resulting in 17% of undergraduate students in expansion states being covered by Medicaid postexpansion (up from 9% prior to the expansion). In contrast, the growth in employer and private direct coverage was 1 to 2 percentage points lower postexpansion for students in expansion states compared with nonexpansion states. Our findings demonstrate that policy efforts to expand Medicaid eligibility have been successful in increasing the Medicaid coverage rates for undergraduate students in the United States, but there is evidence of some crowd out after the expansions—that is, some students substituted their private and employer-sponsored coverage for Medicaid.

Class Politics, American-Style

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Waddell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Political Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Rich ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Winner Take All ◽  
Take All

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class is both a work of political science and a contribution to broad public discussion of distributive politics. Its topic could not be more relevant to a US polity wracked by bitter partisan disagreements about taxes, social spending, financial regulation, social insecurity, and inequality. The political power of “the rich” is a theme of widespread public attention. The headline on the cover of the January–February 2011 issue of The American Interest—“Inequality and Democracy: Are Plutocrats Drowning Our Republic?”—is indicative. Francis Fukuyama's lead essay, entitled “Left Out,” clarifies that by “plutocracy,” the journal means “not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others.” Fukuyama makes clear that he believes that this state of affairs obtains in the United States today.Readers of Perspectives on Politics will know that the topic has garnered increasing attention from political scientists in general and in our journal in particular. In March 2009, we featured a symposium on Larry Bartels's Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. And in December 2009, our lead article, by Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page, starkly posed the question “Oligarchy in the United States?” and answered it with an equally stark “yes.” Winner-Take-All Politics thus engages a broader scholarly discussion within US political science, at the same time that it both draws upon and echoes many “classic themes” of US political science from the work of Charles Beard and E. E. Schattschneider to Ted Lowi and Charles Lindblom.In this symposium, we have brought together a group of important scholars and commentators who offer a range of perspectives on the book and on the broader themes it engages. While most of our discussants are specialists on “American politics,” we have also sought out scholars beyond this subfield. Our charge to the discussants is to evaluate the book's central claims and evidence, with a focus on three related questions: 1) How compelling is its analysis of the “how” and “why” of recent US public policy and its “turn” in favor of “the rich” and against “the middle class”? 2) How compelling is its critique of the subfield of “American politics” for its focus on the voter–politician linkage and on “politics as spectacle” at the expense of an analysis of “politics as organized combat”? 3) And do you agree with its argument that recent changes in US politics necessitate a different, more comparative, and more political economy–centered approach to the study of US politics?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

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