Eileen Boris

Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State

Unionization of home care has depended on the state location of the occupation. Government social policies and funding created home care, shaping the structure of the industry and the conditions of work. The welfare nexus, linking old age, disability, health, and welfare policies, however, also transformed care hidden in the home into a public service. Through case studies of California and Oregon, leaders in deinstitutionalizing care of the elderly and disabled, we explore the social struggles that forced the state to recognize its invisible workforce. The home location of personal attendants and other health aides has entailed not only organizing challenges but policy innovation as well. Using the welfare state location of the labor, workers allied with consumers to develop the public authority as a newstructure of representation. The history of home care shows that social welfare and health policy have long been entangled with labor policy.

Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor

The waves metaphor to delineate feminist activism in the United States is troublesome, to say the least. Despite its problems, the waves model has tremendous staying power when it comes to understanding, analyzing, writing about, and teaching the history of U.S. feminism. In this collection of essays, historians revisit this model, highlighting the efficacy of feminist waves as we know them, but also challenging this model for eliding the experiences of women of color, men, young people, and others whose activist work falls under a capacious definition of feminism.

Sexual labors: interdisciplinary perspectives toward sex as work: introduction

What constitutes ‘sex’ and defines ‘labor’ has varied across time and space, we have learned over the last 35 years through an explosion of monographs and articles in the history and sociology of sexuality and labor studies. But rarely has the new labor studies, with its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity and its consideration of unpaid as well as paid work, put sexual labors at the center of its focus. Even the rich literature on prostitution more likely has come out of women’s studies than labor studies. Similarly, scholarship on sexuality focuses more on sex acts and identities than on markets, work culture, labor standards, collective action, and occupational segregation – the stuff of labor studies. The referents and literature for these fields stand apart – despite the growth of LGBTQ caucuses in the labor movement, renewed feminist debates over sex work, and the commercialization and proliferation of sexual services and unionization of exotic dancers. To situate our discussion of sex work within discourses of labor studies, we insist on using the term ‘sexual labor’. We move away from the term ‘sex work’, which is a politically laden concept that seeks to argue against the notion that prostitution is inherently harmful to women. By problematizing the term ‘sex work’, the essays in this volume refuse to fall prey to the debate on whether sex work is a legitimate form of labor or prostitution is a form of sexual slavery (Alexander, 1998; Barry, 1995; Clement, 2006; Duggan and Hunter, 1995; Outshoorn, 2005). Instead, we engage the concept of ‘sexual labor’ so as to expand discussions on commercial sex as an economic and labor enterprise in which workers Introduction

Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance

Desirable dress on the job, whether pants, sweaters, or mini-skirted uniforms, contains symbolic meaning, but whose sexual subjectivity it expresses is not always clear. Appearance may be a proxy for other forms of contestation or just be a conveyer of pleasure that makes work just a little more humane. This essay rethinks two cases where issues of self-fashioning, appearance, sexuality, employer strictures, and state policy intertwined: the shop floors of the Second World War and the flight cabins of postwar airlines: the first, male dominated manufacturing in which women labored “for the duration”; the second, a prototypical female service industry in which fierce competition led to selling sexual allure along with comfort and safety. However mediated, voices of wage-earning women in both the 1940s and 1960s announced new expectations of womanhood, beauty, and sexual expressiveness. But while management attempted to suppress womens bodies in the shipyards and other wartime workplaces, by the 1960s airlines promoted the body of the flight attendant. In both examples, state mediation—through sources available as well as actual public policies—complicates our attempt to unravel pleasure and constraint in dressing, grooming, and sexual presence on the job. Whether or not dress requirements disciplined employee bodies, served as a guarantee of efficiency or a check against accidents and the expense of worker compensation, or opened new possibilities for sexual or gendered identities was hardly predetermined. Employers could demand slacks, women could wear them, but what dress was desirable varied with the beholder.

Feminism and the Labor Movement: A Century of Collaboration and Conflict

New Labor Forum 20(1): 33-41, Winter 2011 Copyright ? Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.201.0000006 the labor movements. Still, the priorities of the womens movement for sex-based rights and those of the labor movement for class solidarity often diverged during the twentieth century. Working-class feminists struggled against middle-class feminists who focused primarily on achieving equality with male professionals and executives. They also battled men who sought to exclude women from unionized jobs and who denied organized women workers a full share of power in the labor movement.

Social Citizenship and Women’s Right to Work in Postwar America

According to political theorist T. H. Marshall, the right to work is an essential civil right.1 For women, however, exercising this right depends on acquisition of more rights. These include other civil rights, such as equal pay and freedom from discrimination, as well as the rights of social citizenship, such as child care and maternity leave. Such services or benefits neutralize the cultural assignment to women of child bearing and rearing, thus allowing them to participate in the labour force on an equal footing with men. Insofar as women’s struggle for equality in the workplace entails articulating their differences from men — establishing their rights as workers who are also, often, mothers — women become embroiled in the discursive paradox of sameness/difference.2 This formulation implicitly casts them as subordinate at the very moment it invokes their responsibilities to home and family.

Labor’s Welfare State: Defining Workers, Constructing Citizens

This chapter analyzes the emergence of labor law as a distinct field. It examines the discursive and political struggles that gave birth to state regulation of collective bargaining, the passage of employment standards legislation, and the growth of social provision during the first half of the twentieth century. Definitions of work and worker, embedded in legislation and upheld by courts, proved crucial not only for civil rights on the job but also for citizenship rights in the developing welfare state. These rights, whether to old age insurance and unemployment or to minimum wages and union representation, depended on an individual’s social as well as occupational position and, for those programs subject to discretionary implementation in the states, even geographical location. By equating work with wage labor, excluding motherwork and other forms of caregiving, law and social policy privileged the adult man in his prime as the ideal worker. The needs and experiences of the industrial worker, predominantly white men, constituted the norm; the woman, pregnant, immigrant, disabled, older, child, and African American worker was considered a special type, requiring protection when not prohibited from the workforce or relegated to lower paid and intermittent labor. The standard story told by generations of historians since the 1940s celebrates the New Deal and the labor law regime that nourished and was made possible by the rise of industrial unionism, especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But this veneration of collective bargaining and mass organization of basic industry obscures the larger contours of welfare state development for which constructions of work and worker were fundamental.

Mothers, household managers, and productive workers: The International Labor Organization and Women in Development

Focused on the International Labor Organization (ILO), this article historicizes the concept of ‘women in developing countries’ by looking at its own development through use by women researchers and others within the ILO context. It traces the construction of ‘women in developing countries’ as a distinct category of woman worker. In doing so, it advances the understanding of the very terms of policy that we take for granted, contextualizing a category that has managed to both justify first-world non-governmental organization (NGO) intervention and reflect the aspirations of women in the Global South for better lives. In capturing this tension, it suggests that we must complicate our analysis of global policymaking for, about, and by women. I begin to redirect attention from trends in the literature that either celebrate the generation who developed the Women in Development (WID) approach or critique their projects as hopelessly modernist. My goal is to underscore the institutional settings in which the contested terms of ‘women’ and ‘development’ became linked. What began as a definition of otherness, an objectification of a group defined by policymakers, turned into a subject position through which women activists within the ILO and on the ground in ‘Third-World’ nations demanded resources – and, as would become evident in conventions on home-based work, gained recognition as workers.

“Arm and Arm”: Racialized Bodies and Colored Lines

Commenting on the flap over George W. Bushs visit to Bob Jones University during the 2000 primary election campaign, journalist Hendrik Hertzberg claimed that even staunch conservatives decried the South Carolina colleges ban on inter-racial dating as “indefensible.” “This may seem unremarkable,” he noted, ”until one reflects how far it was from being the case a generation or two ago, when miscegenation was racisms trump card and even the most enlightened Americans, black and white, took it for granted that sexual fear was its unkillable heart.” Hertzberg seems unduly optimistic - violence against the bodies of racial “others’ continues to splatter across the American landscape, from the Rodney King beating to the Amadou Diallo shooting. The police rape of Abner Louima illuminates how power, not sexuality, informs such assaults.

Beyond Dichotomy: Recent Books in North American Women's Labor History

Alice Kessler-Harris. A Womans Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. xÃ1⁄4 + 168 pp. ISBN 0-8131-0551-X (cl); 0-8131-0803-9 (pb);