Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State
"Caring for Americais a remarkable achievement.  At once a simple story of how a large and growing sector of disadvantaged women fought for dignity and the right to be treated as workers, it is simultaneously a subtle analysis of the tension between private needs and state intervention.  This inspiring tale is, in important ways, the story of modern America." --Alice Kessler-Harris, author ofIn Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America"This long awaited book is the definitive historical account of the growth of employment and unionization in publicly funded home care work. Boris and Klein provide a powerful, deeply researched analysis of this burgeoning type of 'intimate labor,' past and present.Caring for Americais a must-read for anyone interested in low-wage work, the labor movement, and the future of the massive and rapidly expanding carework sector of the U.S. economy." --Ruth Milkman, City University of New York, and author ofL.A. Story:  Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement"Caring for Americais an outstanding study of an industry, social movements, and the people who compose them.  It is fundamentally an analysis of a fight for social and economic justice and a tribute to a workforce that has emerged out of invisibility and become a source of energy for a workers' movement operating both inside and outside organized labor. Boris and Klein introduce the reader to a decades old struggle for dignity which has witnessed twists and turns but in order to sustain itself must rely on its own energy rather than the good-will of outsiders." --Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-author ofSolidarity Dividedand Visiting Scholar, CUNY Graduate Center"Is caring for the ill and the elderly real work or purely a labor of love? Engaging and deeply insightful, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein'sCaring for Americadraws on historical record to make an irrefutable case for the social, economic, and political significance of carework. Scholars, policy-makers, and all of us who provide or require care should pay notice." --Viviana A. Zelizer, Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology, Princeton University"Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein'sCaring for Americainvestigates the history of the home health care crisis.  The study makes a significant contribution to labor history, welfare history, and the history of health care. ...Caring for Americais thoroughly researched, sophisticated study by top scholars who have produced an important exploration of home health care in the United States."  --The Journal of American History"Caring for Americais an important, difficult, and timely book... [it] will be a tremendous asset to legal historians, labor historians, and scholars of the United States welfare state." --Law and History Review"Boris and Klein's study is exemplary... and is one of the finest studies anywhere of the complex political and economic interests that are associated with care." --Labour/Le Travail"Caring for America[is] part feminist critique of the welfare state, part labor history, part organizing case study... Boris and Klein meticulously trace the role of government policy in the creation of home care as a low-wage occupation." --DISSENT