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Introduction
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
/ xi Introduction Nancy Folbre C are represents a distinctive form of work with important implications for living standards, economic opportunities, and quality of life. Primary responsibility for the care of children, the frail elderly, and people experiencing sickness or disability has traditionally been assigned to women, reinforcing the economic significance of gender (Blau, Brinton, and Grusky 2006). As market provision of care services has increased in the United States in recent years, women have continued to play a predominant role. Low-income African American and immigrant women are heavily overrepresented in the most poorly paid care jobs, and they face particularly serious problems balancing the demands of paid employment and family care. But everyone is affected by the organization of care work. All of us begin life as helpless infants, and most of us require assistance during periods of sickness and infirmity before we die. People who take responsibility for the unpaid care of family members and friends often reduce their participation in paid employment and experience pay penalties, incurring substantial lifetime earnings losses (Waldfogel 1997; Budig and england 2001), and workers who enter care occupations typically pay a penalty in reduced earnings (england, Budig, and Folbre 2002). Whether paid or unpaid, care work is often shaped by moral obligations, social norms, and personal preferences that greatly complicate its remuneration. Families , communities, and government policies all provide forms of implicit or explicit insurance for care over the life cycle. The distribution of these costs remains complex, contested, and often unclear. Family care work often creates benefits for society as a whole that are not captured by family members. For instance, when parents successfully rear children, employers and taxpayers are able to claim a share of the future returns on the human capital created (Folbre 2008a). When adult children are able and willing to care for elderly parents, costs to public health insurance systems for nursing home expenses are reduced (Wolf 1999). Yet our economic accounting systems do not measure, much less credit, unpaid family care. As family stability has declined and paid employment among women has increased, both public and market provision of care services has expanded, creating new economic anxieties and raising pointed questions: Why do women continue to do most care work, both unpaid and paid? Who provides care for our most vulnerable dependents, and at what cost? How do paid care workers— especially those employed in low-wage jobs caring for children, the frail elderly, and people with disabilities—fare compared to other workers? How do unpaid and paid care combine to shape the process of economic development and the xii / Introduction distribution of well-being? How effective and equitable are public policies toward care of children, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly in the United States? This book, the joint effort of interdisciplinary researchers, addresses these questions from a vantage point of particular concern for low-income families and lowwage workers. We provide an overview of care provision in the United States, with a special focus on the problems emerging in the interactive care of children, the frail elderly, and people with disabilities outside of the more studied arenas of health care and education. We break with the traditional intellectual division of labor by examining both unpaid and paid care within a unified framework and emphasizing their joint contribution to economic well-being. This unified framework holds important implications for social theory and public policy. CARE POLICY DILEMMAS Some of the most vital social policy debates of the last twenty years reflect underlying ambivalence regarding both the definition of care work and appropriate rewards for performing it. Consider the following three care policy dilemmas that span the fields of child care and adult care. 1. Our current cash and tax assistance programs for low-income parents consider care work to be “work” only when it is conducted for pay. TemporaryAssistance to Needy Families (TANF) imposes strict paid work requirements and time limits on people (primarily single mothers) receiving assistance, whether or not recipients have access to subsidized child care to facilitate their employment. Receiving a wage for caring for someone else’s children is considered work, but caring for one’s own children is not. The earned Income Tax Credit (eITC), essentially a work- and income-tested family allowance, provided a subsidy of as much as $5,028 to a single mother of two earning between about $12,000 and $15,000 in 2009.1 No earnings, no subsidy. Note that if two single mothers...