Negotiating Flexibility with Security in Los Angeles’s In-Home Supportive Services

This chapter focuses on California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). At the labor market level, both the Direct Funding Program (DF) in Ontario and the IHSS gave “consumers” the flexibility to hire their own “providers,” yet in IHSS the state was more involved in the employment relationship because it paid the provider rather than giving funding directly to the consumer. Many elderly IHSS consumers hire family, but when family is not available, immigrant seniors hire others from their language and ethnic group, and this goes for Pilipinx. Like in DF, labor market flexibility shaped negotiations in the labor process, but in IHSS it shaped it differently. While DF self-managers forged and embraced a friendly employment relationship, consumers in the IHSS context of paying family or co-ethnic fictive kin were more ambivalent about their employer role and used family ideals and family-like practices to negotiate possible tensions at the intimate level. The state's reliance on filial duty and ethnic community through IHSS may bolster flexibility and security at the intimate level in terms of mutually respectful negotiations of what is done, when, where, and how. Yet, as suggested in the previous chapter, collective backing is also important if the goal is flexibility with security. Indeed, another difference between DF and IHSS is that IHSS providers have a union.

Gender, Migration, and the Pursuit of Security

This chapter discusses how dynamic processes of gendering, racialization, and precarization make diverse people into personal support workers who lack security at the labor market and intimate levels. Enduring gendered inequalities that relegate more women than men to unpaid domestic work serve to structure and justify the concentration of women in this paid domestic work and its devaluation. What immigrant women from professional and working-class backgrounds had in common that shaped their eventual location in personal support was the marginal place of their nation of origin in the global economy vis-à-vis the United States, Canada, and by extension Britain. Gendered and racialized migration shaped the location of immigrant workers in North America, but their entry into personal support had as much to do with dynamics in the local labor markets of Toronto and Los Angeles, namely the intersection of racialization, gendering, ageism, and precarious employment, supported by the state. Social networks certainly opened up jobs to immigrant workers with few other options, but these jobs were precarious.

Tensions Between Flexibility and Security

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between workers and recipients of domestic, or home-based, personal support services. Recipients and workers develop close and meaningful work relationships, yet they experience different “faces of oppression,” which can bubble up in the relationship and generate tension. Recipients face marginalization vis-à-vis a state and society that values independence. This marginalization fuels recipients' quest for flexibility in their current services. Meanwhile, workers experience different axes of oppression, namely devaluation and lack of recognition within class and gender inequalities, which shapes their pursuit of security. The majority of personal support workers in the urban areas of industrialized nations are immigrant women from less industrialized countries, and their economic insecurity is infused with racialization through nation of origin, language, accent, religion, culture, or skin color. What exacerbates tensions or encourages solidarity between recipients and workers? This book answers this question with a multilevel comparative study of in-home, old age, and disability support programs in Los Angeles and Toronto.

Managing Flexibility Without Security in Toronto’s Direct Funding

This chapter examines the Direct Funding Program of Ontario's Self-Managed Attendant Services. The evident willingness of self-managers and personal attendants to engage in relational work and the still unmet labor market security of workers were both necessary for self-managers to realize the Direct Funding Program's promise of flexibility. However, within a context of insufficient funding and little to no collective backing, this program produced labor market insecurity for workers, in the form of insufficient hours, earnings, and protection. Moreover, the position of workers in the broader racialized and gendered labor market shaped their labor market choices, or lack thereof, and shaped their experience at the intimate level. Failing to address broader racialized and gendered labor market insecurity not only has implications for workers who are less able to negotiate what they do and how. It also limits the progressive potential to value all forms of intimate labor and to rethink skill.

Toward Flexible Care and Secure Work in Intimate Labor

This chapter highlights the importance of deeply democratic alliances between domestic personal support workers and recipients that negotiate tensions at the intimate level of the labor process. Disabled people have long had support from their own advocacy organizations, like independent living centers (ILCs), on ways to be a fair employer and attain quality services. Yet, despite such support, informality can creep in to individual relationships due to the complexity of labor legislation in this sector and to the lack of enforcement. Alliances between recipient organizations and the labor movement could address these issues in creative ways. If the goal is security with flexibility, workers need critical education about how the locations of disability and age shape people's quest for ongoing input into their services, and they need training and support on how to negotiate this. What kinds of organizing models can engage deeply and continuously with workers and recipients to address tensions in the labor process? Community-based labor organizing provides inspiration.