Home Care Fault Lines: Understanding Tensions and Creating Alliances

by Cynthia J. Cranford

Overview

In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security.

Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics.

What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501749278
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2020
Series:	The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Cynthia Cranford is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the co-author of Self-employed Workers Organize. Follow her on X @Cranford1971.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Tenions between Flexibility and Security
1. Gender, Migration, and the Purist of Security
2. Disability and the Quest for Flexibility
3. Managing Flexibility without Security in Toronto's Direct Funding
4. Negotiating Flexibility with Security in Los Angeles's In-Home Supportive Services
5. Agency-Led Flexibility and Insecurity in Toronto's Home Care
6. Bargaining for Security with Flexibility in Toronto's Attendant Services
7. Toward Flexible Care and Secure Work in Intimate Labor

What People are Saying About This

Mary Romero

Cynthia Cranford presents a compelling and nuanced analysis of the multifaceted conflict arising from inadequate support programs. Recognizing both provider and receiver are potentially vulnerable populations, Home Care Fault Lines is a must-read for coalition building with the elderly, disabled and immigrant workers.

Eileen Boris

Home Care Fault Lines takes a well-grounded research design, evaluates it in light of a wide interdisciplinary reading of care, labor, disability, immigration, race, social movements, and other related literatures, and comes up with a model for change that builds upon what already has happened to envision new possibilities.

Editorial Reviews

Home Care Fault Lines provides an innovative and essential analysis of the politics of community-based personal and attendant care and demonstrates the power of sociological analysis to inform policy and promote social justice.

American Journal of Sociology

In Home Care Fault Lines, Cynthia Cranford has written an ambitious and pathbreaking book. More than ever before, we cannot ignore the glaring need to invest in the home care sector in a way that is responsive to the needs of both care workers and recipients of care. Luckily, just in time, Cranford's book has provided us with an insightful analysis of how to do just that.

Contemporary Sociology

Cranford's in-depth, thought-provoking, and insightful work is an important read not only for scholars of care work and labor, but also for activists, social workers, and organizers outside of academia who are interested in building alliances of care.

New Books Network

We can expect Home Care Fault Lines to become a pivotal reference for international care scholarship.

International Journal of Care and Caring