Blessing or Burden: Transitions Into Eldercare and Caregiver Mental Health

Caring for one’s parents can be good or bad for mental health. Guided by theories suggesting that caregiving work brings both demands and benefits, we examine if mental health outcomes depend on variations in caregiving arrangements. Using waves 5–17 from the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia Survey (16,802 respondents; 115,176 person-years), we divide men and women caregivers into four groups based on their responsibility (main vs. secondary caregiver) and the location of the care recipient (inside or outside the caregiver’s household). We also examine how caregivers’ experiences are moderated by the social support they have. On average, caregivers experience no change in mental health. However, women with low social support who become main caregivers for resident parents experience declines in mental health. Men with low social support who become main caregivers for non-resident parents experience improved mental health. These results suggest that caregiver outcomes reflect different caregiving arrangements.

HANDMADE HUSTLE: ETSY, WHITENESS, AND GENDERED PRECARITY

Since the e-commerce site’s launch in 2005, Etsy has branded itself as a platform for individuals to buy and sell unique, handmade, and vintage items. This project is interested in questions about gender, race, labor, and platforms and seeks to examine how Etsy articulates new formations of raced and gendered labor directly tied to The Great Recession. While scholars have analyzed Etsy’s relationship to historic craft movements (Krugh 2014; Luckman 2013) and to fan handicrafting (Cherry 2016), there is still relatively little published research on the platform. Situating Etsy within the literature on postfeminism and media culture (Gill 2007; McRobbie 2004), gender and passionate work (Duffy 2016; Duffy 2017; McRobbie 2018), and race and digital hustle economies (McMillan Cottom 2020), I analyze products sold on Etsy that rhetorically engage gendered labor dynamics and precarity through the language of hustling or entrepreneurship in ways that center white femininities. Utilizing a cultural studies framing and critical discourse and textual analysis, I identify three main threads: 1) White women on the platform have co-opted Black vernacular to address how economic insecurity has pushed them into gig labor 2) These products romanticize precarity by positioning feminized grit and individualized solutions to macro economic hurdles as female empowerment 3) The products discursively frame entrepreneurship as aspirational, liberatory, and, most centrally, compatible with white, domestic femininities. While hustling, and its new, white appearance, is celebrated on Etsy, we must be mindful of how hustling is always raced, gendered, and precarious.

Emotional labor dynamics as precursors to mundane violence in a Philippine city jail

This paper analyzes narratives on emotional labor among officers working in an overpopulated and undermanned city jail in the Philippines. Taking off from Hochschild (1983) and Crawley (2004) as theoretical departure points and using Sikolohiyang Pilipino as an approach in deploying institutional ethnography, I forward three arguments that enrich the understanding of emotion management dynamics in the carceral setting. First, emotional labor in the city jail is largely based on rank. Rank is a fixed navigation point where officers need to be in their “rightful place” (lugar) in interacting with and expressing emotions to others. Second, leadership regimes in forms of sistema (substandard yet acceptable ways of doing things) or kalakaran (corrupted sistema) also dictate emotion regimes among officers in the facility. And third, narratives of professionalism dominate accounts that normalize, reify, moralize, and even prize emotional laboring. In contrast to existing literature, data suggest that emotion management can be endowing, as it clarifies expectations and harmonizes relationships. Officers, in addition, claim that they are willing to endure emotional labor as it helps them to be more dutiful as a public servant. In fact, officers value emotional labor with a nationalist tone. With strong appreciation for emotional management in the narratives, I end with critical reflections and forwarded interrogations on the danger of moralizing emotional labor and recommend further investigation of its aspects that could lead to mundane violence.

Population and Labor Dynamics in Large Informal Markets: Implications for Pension Systems with Evidence from Ecuador

This paper reviews Ecuador’s population structure and labor market dynamics with a focus on the causes of inequality, particularly among older adults receiving contributory pensions. This serves as a basis for characterizing the main restrictions that the Ecuadorian pension system must address. This analysis is valuable for three key reasons. First, the population structure of many less developed countries is converging toward that of developed countries, with older age groups increasing in proportion. Second, Ecuador is among the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean with the highest degree of informality in the labor market, which lowers the coverage of contributory pension schemes. Third, regarding gender inequality, the rate of women’s labor participation in 2010 was among the lowest in South America. The findings suggest that a younger population structure will not be the main solution to financial problems and the pension inadequacy that are facing most pension systems worldwide. Improvements in labor market institutions are required to increase the pension system’s insurance. The study concludes by discussing several proposals aimed at increasing pension coverage and reducing inequality.

An Intellectual and a Peasant in Gleb Uspensky’s Cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor”: Dynamics of Interaction in Context of Idea of “Merging with People”

The cycle of essays by G. I. Uspensky “The Peasant and the Peasant Labor” in the aspect of the actual for Russian literature of the second half of the XIX — early XX centuries problems of relations between the people and the intellectuals are analyzed in the article. The crisis in the study of the “peasant” cycles of Uspensky, caused by the predominance of ideological interpretation, is stated. It is argued that Uspensky finds the key to understanding the peasantry not in the socio-economic conditions of his life, but in the field of aesthetics. The point of convergence, in which the peasant and the intellectual appear as equal subjects of communication, is, according to Uspensky, the aesthetic attitude to work. An implicit correspondence is established between peasant labor and the creative effort of the artist. Therefore, the intellectual turns out to be a necessary mediator in the process of the peasantry acquiring its own “voice”. It is proved that the aesthetic utopia in the cycle “Peasant and Peasant Labor” was crushed by the ethical maximalism of the writer. The peasant economy is represented by the Uspensky reasonably organized order, the anthroposphere, in which the working peasant was likened to the monarch and the Creator. In turn, the intellectual was declared an impostor, marked by the “antichrist” seal. In Uspensky’s creative consciousness, the aesthetic and ethical found themselves in a tragic and hopeless contradiction, and the prospect of “merging with the people” was illusory.

The influence of education on women’s well-being: Evidence from Australia

This study investigates the relationship between women’s education and their level of well-being, using data from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA). To take into account potential endogeneity, the instrumental variables (IV) approach is employed, with partners’ education as an instrument. The findings show that higher education levels lead to a higher level of eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being, positive affect, and reduced psychological distress, highlighting a non-monetary benefit of education. Thus, policymakers should continue to widely promote education, in order for women to achieve higher levels of future well-being. Additionally, the findings show that the connection between education and well-being is mediated by healthy behaviors, such as engaging in physical activity, abstaining from drinking and smoking, social interactivity, and higher income. Therefore, public health campaigns which promote healthy behaviors among women should potentially mitigate gaps in formal education.