In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 formalizing the Informal Highly Skilled Filipina Caregivers and the Pilipino Workers Center anna romina guevarra and lolita andrada lledo Angel Roxas is a forty-year-old Filipino woman whose dream job is to manage finances and do accounting work.1 She holds a master’s degree in business administration , and for several years before coming to the United States in 2001, she worked as an assistant to the dean of a college in the Philippines. She had a staff that supported her daily work and a personal assistant who ran her errands and was at her beck and call. She woke up every morning with the security of a job and the closeness of family. Now, she works tirelessly as a home-care worker, and her daily routine revolves around providing services to the elderly. Not only does she feed them and administer their medication, she also cleans and handles intimate parts of their bodies, often with disbelief and fear. She also ensures that her patients’ houses are tidy and visitor-ready.2 She has learned to work through her loneliness, fatigue, and loss of sleep. In addition to her broken heart as a result of the dissolution of her marriage and her estrangement from the children she left behind in the Philippines, she bears emotional scars inflicted when some of her patients lost their minds. Moreover, her downward occupational mobility sometimes renders her emotionally paralyzed. Roxas’s experiences are representative of those in the informal economy of home-care workers in southern California, which has resulted in an ethnic labor niche occupied by Filipino caregivers. Home-care workers—that is, personal attendants and home-care aides—are part of the direct-care workforce of frontline paid caregivers that is expected to be the second-fastest-growing occupation in the United States between 2006 and 2016 (Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute 2008). These figures do not adequately account for the “gray” market that profits primarily from the labor of immigrants, many of whom have residency and citizenship status that renders them ideal candidates for unscrupulous private home-care agencies or enterprising individuals who provide viable albeit precarious employment.3 But Roxas and many other Filipinos in this informal economy are highly educated with experience in higher-paying and prestigious positions as teachers, nurses, engineers, and administrators before becoming caregivers. In this industry, like any other, wages and employment arrangements are defined by one’s level of training. What happens when teachers, engineers, nurses, and administrators become caregivers and perform work that is often considered to be demeaning? Many of them would simply say that they are only caregivers, as if to signal that they see themselves as having very little social worth. And even when they may internalize their added export value (Guevarra 2003, 2010) as “ideal,” they may still envision themselves as unskilled caregivers. However, despite experiencing downward occupational mobility, these same professional backgrounds may lead them to approach their work skillfully. They may not have received formal training in doing home-care work, but how they perform and deliver caregiving suggests a different framework for viewing skill and which aspects of such performativity count as skilled work. Their stories certainly highlight the social construction of skill and challenge the naturalization paradigm (Collins 2002) that may label certain types of work as inherently appropriate for a particular gender. Developing, cultivating, and performing such high-quality care is a skill, whether it is self-taught or derived from expert advice provided by social networks . This framework also governs the grassroots organizing of the Pilipino Workers Center (PWC) through its COURAGE campaign. As a key advocate of Filipino caregivers’ rights that is dedicated to ridding the industry of unscrupulous profit-making actors, the PWC also provides a community of support where workers can systematically share knowledge and caregiving techniques that can be institutionalized and harnessed in the worker-owned caregiving cooperative that the PWC seeks to establish. Caregiving in demand The demand for home-care workers is fueled by the aging U.S. population. The total number of people over age sixty-five is projected to double from 35 million in 2000 to 71.5 million by 2030, when it will account for 20 percent of the total U.S. population. In California, the cohort of adults age sixty and over is projected to grow from 4.7 million in 2000 to 12.8 million by 2050, a 172 percent increase. The number of people over age sixty in the Los Angeles...

Share