“YOU'RE NOT JUST IN THERE TO DO THE WORK”

Abstract

Community care for frail elderly people rests heavily on the work of low-status, paraprofessional home care workers. Home care workers describe their work as highly personalized caring labor that often seeps out of its formal boundaries into informal, unpaid activities. Although these activities are valued by workers, their supervisors, elderly clients, and family members, they represent uncompensated and exploited labor. Cost-cutting trends in home care management that seek to depersonalize home care labor are likely to increase its exploitative potential for paid care workers and, simultaneously, to disadvantage and jeopardize elderly home care clients and their unpaid family caregivers.