Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work

Chapter 4- Managing Nurturant Care in the New Economy

75 Managing Nurturant Care Chapter 4 in the New Economy By the middle of the twentieth century, the notion of expert care was well established, and a range of occupational roles had been defined (or redefined) to provide that care. In the second half of the century, population growth and demographic trends continued to expand the demand for care services, and paid care grew exponentially. Paid nurturant care work is not only crucial for meeting the needs of contemporary society in the United States, but also a vital part of the economic engine of the country. Nevertheless, nurturant care workers at the dawn of the twenty-first century operate largely in a context of constraints. Since the 1980s, economic restructuring and political retrenchment have once again redefined the boundaries of paid care, limiting the autonomy and control workers are able to exercise as well as squeezing out the relational aspects of their jobs. In the process, related gender, racial-ethnic, and class hierarchies have both persisted in recognizable patterns and taken on new shapes. The Market, the State, and Care During the course of the twentieth century there have been a number of watershed moments in U.S. economic and political life. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent expansion of social welfare policies as the New Deal increased the government’s responsibility to protect workers and provide them with a safety net. The social movements of the 1960s opened the door to legal rights and expanded material opportunities for Blacks, women, and other disenfranchised groups. And in the 1980s the Reagan revolution proscribed the role of government in social welfare and business, extolling free markets and an ethic of individualism. 76 making care count Ronald Reagan’s philosophy was part of a global phenomenon of which Margaret Thatcher was another vocal advocate. Sometimes referred to as “neoliberalism,” it is an approach premised on the primacy of individual responsibility and the undermining of collective identification. In fact, Thatcher is famously reported to have said that there “is no such thing as society.”1 In practice, Reagan and Thatcher followed similar paths, cutting government spending on social welfare and deregulating business (including loosening government protections of workers), in addition to implementing large tax cuts. In the neoliberal worldview, the free market was to be as unfettered by government interference as possible. The consequences for workers in this new economy were the loss of regulatory protection and an undermining of union organizing by the emphasis on individualism (among other forces working against unionism). For care workers, the impact of neoliberalism on their work environments was exacerbated by the direct cuts to publicly funded care enterprises—public schools, health care (through Medicare and Medicaid), and publicly provided social services. The combination of funding cuts, declining worker protections, and an ideological commitment to proscribing the limits of public responsibility for care changed the landscape of paid care. An increase in bureaucratic and managerial control that has eroded the autonomy of many groups of nurturant care workers is part of an overall process of routinization and deskilling. As Ilene Philipson interprets Harry Braverman’s classic analysis, deskilling is “the process by which work requiring the exercise of conceptual and judgmental abilities is separated off from that requiring only routine execution.”2 In manufacturing industries, mechanization and automation had facilitated the process of turning many jobs into the performance of a series of routine tasks, a shift that allowed employers to hire unskilled workers at lower wage rates. For workers, this shift meant a considerable loss of autonomy and control over the labor process. In the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the burgeoning service sector also became vulnerable to deskilling. Scholars who have critiqued Braverman’s use of the concept have argued that the very notion of skill is socially constructed and historically tied to the status of the primary group of workers in an occupation.3 If skill is considered a measure of the complexity of the demands of a job, occupations require different levels of a range of skill sets—cognitive, manual, social, verbal, visual, or emotional. Advocates of comparable worth have demonstrated that the skills most usually associated with female-dominated jobs are less recognized and less well compensated than those associated with male-dominated jobs.4 Numerous studies of male occupations that have become female dominated, including teaching and clerical work, demonstrate that as the gender composition of an [3.15.229.164] Project MUSE (2024...