Becoming Homecare Workers: Chinese Immigrant Women and the Changing Worlds of Work, Care and Unionism

Abstract

This article examines how the intersectional dynamics of gender, migration, and labor shape the trajectories of immigrant women into home-based elder care and how unions and community organizations mediate its conditions. Our analysis, which uses interviews with In-Home Supportive Services workers in California’s Oakland Chinatown, shows that the growth of publicly-subsidized homecare jobs has created an occupational opportunity for workers who face restrictive labor markets due to declining factory jobs and discriminatory hiring. Workers acknowledge the daily stress of working in low-paid, precarious jobs characterized by high levels of informality and coercive gender and racial-ethnic dynamics but the quasi-public nature of these jobs complicates a facile depiction of it as domestic servitude. Ethnic community organizations and labor unions open up institutional pathways to empowering forms of collective voice. Our findings contribute to the growing effort to understand how the social organization of care work both draws upon and exacerbates existing inequalities.