Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T21:08:45.235Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - The Fissured Welfare State

Care Work, Democracy, and Public-Private Governance

from Part V - Labor and Democracy Sectoral Case Studies: Platform Workers, Higher Education, and the Care Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2022

By
Gabriel Winant
Edited by
Angela B. Cornell  and
Mark Barenberg
Angela B. Cornell
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Mark Barenberg
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Get access

Summary

This chapter argues that the origins of the worsening exploitation of American labor lie in the social division of labor, in particular the rise of the care economy – the greatest factor in the growth of low-wage work. The care economy was organized politically at a deeper institutional level than labor market changes of the last forty years, on which pro-labor scholars and activists have often focused. Since the post-war years, care work has been governed at a distance, its terms set by the public sector and its administration carried out privately. The growth of care work under such conditions pits workers and clients against each other, but simultaneously creates the possibility of solidarity.

Keywords

carelaborfissured workplacewelfare state
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy , pp. 334 - 350
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Hospital Association. 1976. Taft-Hartley Amendments: Implications for the Healthcare Field. American Hospital Association.Google Scholar
Amin, Samir. 1974. Accumulation on a World Scale: Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Andrias, Kate. 2019. “An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act.” Yale Law Journal, 128, 3: 616–709.Google Scholar
Ashby, Steven, and Bruno, Robert. 2016. A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Autor, David H., Katz, Lawrence F., and Kearney, Melissa S.. 2006. “The Polarization of the US Labor Market.” American Economic Review 96, 2: 189–194.Google Scholar
Benanav, Aaron. 2019. “Automation and the Future of Work – 1.” New Left Review 119: 5–38.Google Scholar
Blanc, Eric. 2019. Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. Brooklyn: Verso.Google Scholar
Blewett, Mary H. 1988. Men, Women, and Work: Class and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
“Blue Cross Enrollment Affected by Steel: Collective Bargaining and Blue Cross.” 1959. Blue Cross Bulletin 1(8). Isidore Sidney Falk Papers, Sterling Memorial Library. Yale University.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen. 1994. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen, and Klein, Jennifer. 2012. Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boris, Eileen, and Michel, Sonya. 2001. “Social Citizenship and Women’s Right to Work in Post-war America.” In Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives, edited by Grimshaw, Patricia, Holmes, Katie, and Lake, Marilyn, 199–219. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Brenner, Robert. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence. Brooklyn: Verso.Google Scholar
Brooks, Chris. 2018. “How Massachusetts Healthcare Companies Defeated Question 1.” Jacobin. November 8, 2018. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/question-1-massachusetts-nurses-staffing-patient-ratiosGoogle Scholar
Budig, Michelle J., Hodges, Melissa J., and England, Paula. 2019. “Wages of Nurturant and Reproductive Care Workers: Individual and Job Characteristics, Occupational Closure, and Wage-Equalizing Institutions.” Social Problems 66, 2: 294–319.Google Scholar
Campbell, Andrea Louise, and Morgan, Kimberly J.. 2011. The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Canaday, Margot. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carré, Françoise, and Tilly, Chris. 2017. Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs across Countries and Companies. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Clark, Paul F., and Clark, Darlene A.. 2006. “Union Strategies for Improving Patient Care: The Key to Nurse Unionism.” Labor Studies 31, 1: 1–19.Google Scholar
Cobble, Dorothy Sue. 1996. “The Prospects for Unionism in a Service Society.” In Working in the Service Society, edited by MacDonald, Cameron Lynne and Sirianni, Carmen, 333–358. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Alan B., Colby, David C., Wailoo, Keith A., and Zelizer, Julian E., eds. 2015. Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Abby J. 1996. “A Brief History of Federal Financing for Childcare in the United States.” The Future of Children 6, 2: 26–40.Google Scholar
Cohodes, Donald R., and Kinkead, Brian M.. 1984. Hospital Capital Formation in the 1980s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Coontz, Stephanie. 1988. The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900. Brooklyn: Verso.Google Scholar
Cutler, Jonathan. 2004. Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. 1986. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. Brooklyn: Verso.Google Scholar
Derickson, Alan. 1994. “Health Security for All?: Social Unionism and Universal Health Insurance, 1935–1958.” Journal of American History 80, 4: 1333–1356.Google Scholar
Dubal, V. B. 2017. “Wage Slave or Entrepreneur: Contesting the Dualism of Legal Worker Identities.” California Law Review 105, 1: 65–124.Google Scholar
Dublin, Thomas. 1979. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Duffy, Mignon. 2011. Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Dwyer, Rachel E. 2013. “The Care Economy? Gender, Economic Restructuring, and Job Polarization in the US Labor Market.” American Sociological Review 78, 3: 390–416.Google Scholar
Dwyer, Rachel E., and Wright, Erik Olin. 2019. “Low-Wage Job Growth, Polarization, and the Limits and Opportunities of the Service Economy.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5, 4: 56–76.Google Scholar
Dyke, Erin, and Bates, Brendan Muckian. 2019. “Educators Striking for a Better World: The Significance of Social Movement and Solidarity Unionisms.” Berkeley Review of Education 9, 1.Google Scholar
Emmenegger, Patrick, Hausermann, Silja, Palier, Bruno, and Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin, eds. 2012. The Age of Dualization: The Changing Face of Inequality in Deindustrializing Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
England, Paula, Budig, Michelle, and Folbre, Nancy. 2002. “Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work.” Social Problems 49, 4: 455–473.Google Scholar
Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1999. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
“Exemption of Non-Profit Hospital Employees from the National Labor Relations Act: A Violation of Equal Protection.” 1971. Iowa Law Review 57, 2: 412–450.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Susan. 2019. Women and Work: Feminism, Labor, and Social Reproduction. London: Pluto.Google Scholar
Friedman, Sheldon, Hurd, Richard W., Oswald, Rudolph A., and Seeber, Ronald L., eds. 1994. Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 1999. “Globalization and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism.” Race & Class 40, 2-3: 171–188.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Givan, Rebecca Kolins. 2016. The Challenge to Change: Reforming Healthcare on the Front Line in the United States and the United Kingdom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs 18, 1: 1–43.Google Scholar
Glenn, Susan A. 1990. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. 1989. “Working-Class Feminism and the Family Wage Ideal.” Journal of American History 76, 1: 118–149.Google Scholar
Gustafsson, Siv., and Stafford, Frank P.. 1994. “Three Regimes of Childcare: The United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden.” In Social Protection Versus Economic Flexibility: Is There a Trade-Off? edited by Blank, Rebecca M., 333–362. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Other America: Poverty in America. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Harrington, Charlene, Olney, Brian, Carrillo, Helen, and Kang, Taewoon. 2011. Health Services Research 47, 1: 106–128.Google Scholar
Hartwig, Jochen. 2015. “Structural Change, Aggregate Demand, and Employment Dynamics in the OECD, 1970–2010.” Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 34: 36–45.Google Scholar
Hartzell, Dan. 1988. “Ritter Promises Help on Pensions.” Allentown Morning Call, May 16, 1988.Google Scholar
Health Policy Institute. 1984. “The Implications of a Changing Economy for the Hospital System in Southwestern Pennsylvania.” Records of the Health and Welfare Planning Association, 1908–1980, Library and Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center.Google Scholar
Hertel-Fernandez, Alex, Suresh, Naidu, and Adam, Reich. 2021. “Schooled by Strikes? The Effects of Large-Scale Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes toward the Labor Movement.” Perspectives on Politics 19, 1: 73–91.Google Scholar
Hunter, Tera W. 1997. To ‘Joy my Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Iversen, Torben, and Wren, Anne. 1998. “Equality, Employment, and Budgetary Restraint: The Trilemma of the Service Economy.” World Politics 50, 4: 507–546.Google Scholar
Iversen, Torben, and Cusack, Thomas R.. 2000. “The Causes of Welfare State Expansion: Deindustrialization or Globalization?” World Politics 52, 3: 313–349.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Meg. 2005. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, David K. 2004. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Juravich, Nicholas Albert. 2017. “The Work of Education: Community-Based Educators in Schools, Freedom Struggles, and the Labor Movement, 1953–1983.” PhD diss., Columbia University.Google Scholar
Kahlenberg, Richard D., and Marvit, Moshe Z.. 2013. “Architects of Democracy: Labor Organizing as a Civil Right.” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 9, 2: 213–246.Google Scholar
Kalleberg, Arne L. 2009. “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition.” American Sociological Review 74, 1: 1–22.Google Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. 1989. “Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?” In The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, edited by Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, 185–211. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1983. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 2001. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, Jennifer. 2003. For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Korstad, Robert, and Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1988. “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75, 1: 786–811.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1989. “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Post-war era.” In The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, edited by Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, 122–152. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lichtenstein, Nelson. 1995. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lopez, Steven Henry. 2004. Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Marmor, Theodore R. 1970. The Politics of Medicare. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Press.Google Scholar
Marmor, Theodore R., Mashaw, Jerry L., and Harvey, Philip L.. 1990. America’s Misunderstood Welfare State: Persistent Myths, Enduring Realities. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
May, Martha. 1985. “Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage.” In Women, Work, and Protest: A century of US Women’s Labor History, edited by Milkman, Ruth, 1–21. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McAlevey, Jane. 2016. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McCartin, Joseph A. 2011. Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McEnaney, Laura. 2014. “A Women’s Peace Dividend: Demobilization and Working Class Women in Chicago, 1945–1953.” In Gender and the Long Post-war: The United States and the Two Germanys, 1945–1989, edited by Hagemann, Karen and Michel, Sonya, 73–94. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Michel, Sonya. 2000. Children’s Interests/Mother’s Rights: The Shaping of America’s Childcare Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Milkman, Ruth. 1987. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Mittelstadt, Jennifer. 2015. The Rise of the Military Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Edward A., and Davis, Otto A.. 1990. “Private Income Security Schemes in Times of Crisis: A Case Study of US Steel.” Labor and Society 15, 1: 75–88.Google Scholar
Morris, Charles J. 2005. The Blue Eagle at Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Musselwhite, James C. Jr., Katz, Rosalyn B., and Salamon, Lester B.. 1985. Government Spending and the Nonprofit Sector in Pittsburgh/Allegheny County. The Urban Institute Press.Google Scholar
Nordhaus, William D. 2008. “Baumol’s Diseases: A Macroeconomic Perspective.” The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics 8, 1. 1–39.Google Scholar
Offner, Amy C. 2019. Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Paul, Sanjukta M. 2016. “The Enduring Ambiguities of Antitrust Liability for Worker Collective Action.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, 47, 3: 969–1048.Google Scholar
Paul-Shaheen, Pamela, and Carpenter, Eugenia S.. 1982. “Legislating Hospital Bed Reduction: The Michigan Experience.” Journal of Health Policy, Politics, and Law 6, 4: 653–675.Google Scholar
Rachleff, Peter. 1993. Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
“Researchers Examine Steelworkers’ Benefits.” 1986. Latrobe Bulletin. May 9, 1986.Google Scholar
Retiree Health Benefits: The Fair-Weather Promise: Hearings before the Special Committee on Aging of the US Senate, 99th Congress, 2nd sess. (1987).Google Scholar
Rosen, Ruth. 1982. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Rosenblat, Alex. 2018. Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Rosenblum, Jonathan D. 1995. Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Jake. 2014. What Unions No Longer Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schirmer, Eleni, and Apple, Michael W.. 2018. “Struggling for the Local: Money, Power, and the Possibilities of Victories in the Politics of Education.” In The Struggle for Democracy in Education: Lessons from Social Realities, edited by Apple, Michael W., 41–68. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schwartz, William P., and Mendelson, Daniel N.. 1991. “Hospital Cost Containment in the 1980s – Hard Lessons Learned and Prospects for the 1990s.” New England Journal of Medicine 324, 15: 1037–1042.Google Scholar
Slater, Joseph E. 2017. Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Stapleford, Thomas A. 2009. The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stevens, Robert, and Stevens, Rosemary. 1974. Welfare Medicine in America: A Case Study of Medicaid. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Stoltzfus, Emilie. 2003. Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Childcare after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Storm, Servaas. 2018. “The New Normal: Demand, Secular Stagnation, and the Vanishing Middle Class.” International Journal of Political Economy 46, 4: 169–210Google Scholar
Storrs, Landon. 2013. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Sugrue, Thomas J. 1996. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-war Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Swinth, Kirsten. 2018. Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Temin, Peter. 2017. The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Torassa, Ulysses. 1988. “Director of PBGC Turns Optimist.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. January 23, 1988.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan C. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Tuominen, Mary. 1994. “The Hidden Organization of Labor: Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Childcare Work in the Formal and Informal Economy.” Sociological Perspectives 37, 2: 229–245.Google Scholar
Weil, David. 2014. The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Winant, Gabriel. 2019. “‘Hard Times Make for Hard Arteries and Hard Livers’: Deindustrialization, Biopolitics, and the Making of a New Working Class.” Journal of Social History 53, 1: 107–132.Google Scholar
Windham, Lane. 2017. Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Woloch, Nancy. 2015. A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wren, Anne, ed. 2013. The Political Economy of the Service Transition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×