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/ 65 Chapter 4 Paid Care Work Candace Howes, Carrie Leana, and Kristin Smith T hat most people enter caring occupations in order to earn a living and help support their family members does not diminish the importance of the moral values, caring norms, and personal attachments that often infuse their performance on the job. In this chapter, we call attention to the motivational commitments and institutional similarities of care work across very different occupations because these are relevant to the development of political alliances and sectoral labor force development policies. However, we focus on two sets of care occupations that parallel the unpaid tasks described in the preceding chapter: child care and adult care. The first section provides an overview of paid care work, reviewing the existing literature and providing empirical details based on analysis of the 2010 Current Population Survey. We highlight commonalities across care occupations but also focus on important differences between high- and low-wage interactive care jobs. The next two sections, focusing on child care and adult care jobs, explore the institutional features of these jobs and the economic and demographic characteristics of the workers who fill them. These jobs represent an important subset of all low-wage jobs because they provide earnings and potential economic mobility for workers in many African American, Latino, and immigrant communities. We also explore links between poor job quality and poor service quality and build a case for a sectoral high-road strategy, which we outline in the conclusion and return to in more detail in the final chapter. EMPLOYMENT IN PAID CARE Labor force statistics in the United States categorize workers according to the type of goods or services produced (“industry”) and the type of work they do (“occupation ”). Such categorizations are necessarily approximate, but nonetheless useful. A 66 / For Love and Money number of major care industries help produce, develop, and maintain the nation’s human resources. Workers in interactive care occupations—where concern for the well-being of others is likely to affect the quality of the services provided—are primarily but not exclusively located in care industries. While these interactive occupations also share some common characteristics, they differ widely in skill requirements, pay, and unionization rates. Care Industries Our categorization of care industries encompasses several industrial categories, predominantly in health, education, and social assistance (see figure 4.1). Our categorization is based on minor revisions to previous research (Albelda, Duffy, and Folbre 2009).1 Private household services, which include some child and adult care services provided in homes, amount to only about 2 percent of total employment but may not be fully captured by existing labor force surveys. The previous chapter on unpaid care distinguished between interactive and support care. Making an analogous distinction here, we can characterize all workers in care industries as providing either interactive or support care. By this definition , employment in the paid care sector amounts to 24 percent of all employment (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2010b). Employment in care industries depends heavily on public spending. More than 34 percent of all employees in these industries work in the public sector , a significantly higher percentage than any other grouping. Many public dollars are also spent to help pay for private-sector employees in hospitals, nursing homes, private homes, community settings, and schools. Only 6 percent are self-employed (see table 4.1).2 Employment in care industries is also distinctively female. In 2010 women represented 47 percent of all employees, but 75 percent of all those in education and health services—a far higher percentage than in any other major sector. Employees in education and health services are also more likely to be African American (14 percent compared to 11 percent for all employees) and less likely to be Hispanic (10 percent compared to 14 percent for all employees; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2010c). Care Occupations Our categorization of interactive care occupations—those in which concern for the well-being of others is likely to affect the quality of services provided—also builds on previous research (Albelda, Duffy, and Folbre 2009) (see box A.4 in the appendix). Some of these interactive occupations, such as teachers, nurses, child care workers, and personal aides, clearly entail high levels of interactive personal care. Others, such as pharmacists and dieticians, may entail lower or more intermittent interactions. By the same token, some workers who provide interactive [3.137.218.230] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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