Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  6. Angela Y. Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1998), 116; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 12–23, 230; Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 28; Carmen Teeple Hopkins, “Mostly Work, Little Play: Social Reproduction, Migration, and Paid Domestic Work in Montreal,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 144–145; Patel and Moore, A History of the World, 130.

  7. Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5, 16–17, 20. As Angela Davis noted, racism and sexism were mutually reinforcing: “As racism developed more durable roots within white women’s organizations, so too did the sexist cult of motherhood creep into the very movement whose announced aim was the elimination of male supremacy.” Davis, Women, Race and Class, 94, 96, 122. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Kindle.

  8. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 3, 21–22, 27–32, 59–61, 228; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), loc. 2986–3007, 3017, Kindle.

  9. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 26, 50–53, 56–58, 60, 62, 74–88; Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 46.

  10. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111, 148, 169, 185–186.

  11. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 229, 231. Saidiya Hartman quotes the superintendent of the reformatory at Bedford Hills: “In placing a woman [in a reformatory] there is just one avenue open to her and that is domestic service. The present economic conditions are such that there is a larger demand for domestic help than we can supply. I usually have waiting lists for cooks, general housework girls and domestic servants of every kind. So great is the demand, particularly for general housework, that one lady said to me, ‘I don’t care if she has committed all the crimes in the Decalogue if she can only wash dishes.’” Hartman, Wayward Lives, loc. 3283–3301. Angela Y. Davis, “Race and Criminalization,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 70.

  12. Historian Phyllis Palmer argued, “I hope to clarify the postulate that gender is never an identity formed in isolation from other identities that have significance in twentieth-century America, but is an amalgam of race and class with gender.” Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 5, 7, 14–15; Mohandesi and Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” 44.

  13. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 55; Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 58–59, 66; Premilla Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy and Contestation,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 207.

  14. Phyllis Palmer wrote, “Over a third of women homemakers working as domestics were heads of households.” Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 71–72, 75–77, 86–87.

  15. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 103, 119, 120.

  16. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 73, 122, 125, 134. See also Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015); Hartman, Wayward Lives, loc. 4214–4217; Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Slave Market,” The Crisis 42 (November 1935), https://caring labor.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/ella-baker-and-marvel-cooke-the-slave-market.

  17. Belabored Podcast #84: Domestic Workers Unite, with Premilla Nadasen, Dissent, August 21, 2015, www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-podcast-84-domestic-workers-unite-with-premilla-nadasen; Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy and Contestation,” 206.

  18. The intimacy of domestic work, Premilla Nadasen wrote, “fostered a work environment where employees’ character, not only their ability to complete specified chores, became a measure of one’s job performance.” Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy and Contestation,” 204, 207, 208; Belabored Podcast #84. See also Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt; Nadasen, Household Workers Unite.

  19. Belabored Podcast #84; Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy and Contestation,” 205–207, 211–212.

  20. Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy and Contestation,” 204.

  21. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 156; Barbara Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 108.

  22. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 73–74, 99, 138, 139–144, 146–147.

  23. Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), loc. 685–689, Kindle; Angela Y. Davis, “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 97; Angela Y. Davis, “Surrogates and Outcast Mothers: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, 218; Magdalene Laundry survivor Mary Norris told reporters: “We worked long hours every day, scrubbing, bleaching and ironing for the whole of Limerick—hotels, hospitals, schools, colleges—for which the nuns charged, of course, though we never saw a penny. It was an industry and they were earning a fortune from our labour.… When you went inside their doors you left behind your dignity, identity and humanity. We were locked up, had no outside contacts and got no wages, although we worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. What else is that but slavery? And to think that they were doing all this in the name of a loving God! I used to tell God I hated him.” “A Very Irish Sort of Hell,” The Age, April 5, 2003, www.theage.com.au/world/a-very-irish-sort-of-hell-20030405-gdvhr9.html. Ed O’Loughlin, “These Women Survived Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. They’re Ready to Talk,” New York Times, June 6, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/world/europe/magdalene-laundry-reunion-ireland.html; Patsy McGarry, “Magdalene Laundries: ‘I Often Wondered Why Were They So Cruel,’” Irish Times, June 6, 2018, www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/magdalene-laundries-i-often-wondered-why-were-they-so-cruel-1.3521600; “‘I Wasn’t Even 15. I Hadn’t Even Kissed a Boy’—A Magdalene Survivor’s Story,” RTE, June 5, 2018, www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2018/0605/968383-magdalene-elizabeth-coppin.

  24. Belabored Podcast #38: Caring for America, with Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Dissent, January 24, 2014, www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/belabored-podcast-38-caring-for-america-with-eileen-boris-and-jennifer-klein; Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “Making Home Care: Law and Social Policy in the U.S. Welfare State,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 188–190. See also Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  25. Boris and Klein, “Making Home Care,” 188–197.

  26. Boris and Klein, “Making Home Care,” 192; Ai-jen Poo, Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America (New York: New Press, 2015), 83; Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in the Welfare State,” Politics and Society 34, no. 1 (March 2006): 81–107, https://caringlabor.word press.com/2010/11/11/eileen-boris-and-jennifer-klein-organizing-home-care-low-waged-workers-in-the-welfare-state.

  27. Boris and Klein, “Making Home Care,” 187, 188.

  28. Boris and Klein, “Making Home Care,” 188–197; Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2019), loc. 2941–2943, 2936–2938, 3053–3056, Kindle; Kittay, Love’s Labor, 116; Ronald Reagan, “Proclamation 5913—National Home Care Week, 1988,” Reagan Library, November 19, 1988, www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/111988d.

  29. Poo, Age of Dignity, 90; Kittay, Love’s Labor, 65; Lynn May Rivas, “Invisible Labors: Caring for the Independent Person,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, loc. 1323.

&n
bsp; 30. Rivas’s full comment is worth including here: “I believe that the transfer of authorship is a negative phenomenon even for those who consciously work to make it happen. To be made invisible is the first step toward being considered nonhuman, which is why making another person invisible often precedes treating them inhumanely. To use Marxist terms, invisibility is the most extreme form of alienation—the ultimate manifestation of self-estrangement.” Rivas, “Invisible Labors,” loc. 1314, 1347, 1379, 1410, 1416.

  31. Folbre, For Love or Money, 83; Boris and Klein, “Making Home Care,” 197–200; Belabored Podcast #84; Tamara Draut, Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 135; Douglas Martin, “Evelyn Coke, Home Care Aide Who Fought Pay Rule, Is Dead at 74,” New York Times, August 9, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/nyregion/10coke.html; Long Island Care at Home v. Coke, 551 U.S. 158 (2007).

  32. Draut, Sleeping Giant, 136; Bob Woods, “Home Health-Care Workers in US at Tipping Point amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” CNBC, April 14, 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/home-health-care-workers-at-tipping-point-amid-coronavirus-outbreak.html. As I wrote in In These Times at the time: “The Harris case was brought in 2010 by Pamela Harris, an Illinois homecare worker who received Medicaid money as wages for caring for her son, who has a disability. An executive order issued by Illinois governor Pat Quinn the previous year had designated personal assistants caring for disabled adults as state employees, allowing them to be represented by a collective-bargaining agent. Harris and the other plaintiffs were backed in the suit by the well-heeled anti-union group National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, and argued that she and other workers should not have to pay the costs of representing her to SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana (SEIU–HCII), the union that represents homecare workers who are paid by the state for their work. The suit claimed that paying representation costs amounted to a forced association that is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.” Sarah Jaffe, “Why Harris and Hobby Lobby Spell Disaster for Working Women,” In These Times, June 30, 2014, https://inthesetimes.com/article/scotus-rules-against-female-workers; Harris v. Quinn, 573 U.S. 616 (2014).

  33. Poo, Age of Dignity, 151; Andrea Marie, “Women and Childcare in Capitalism, Part 3,” New Socialist, 2017, https://newsocialist.org.uk/women-and-childcare-in-capitalism-part-3; Bernadette Hyland, “From Factory Workers to Care Workers,” Contributoria, March 2014, www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-03/52c98327a94a824a25000004.html.

  34. Boris and Parreñas, “Introduction,” 8; Belabored Podcast #84; Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 76; María de la Luz Ibarra, “My Reward Is Not Money,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 117.

  35. Briggs, “Foreign and Domestic,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 50–51; Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 66–69; Briggs, Reproductive Politics, 81, 95; Rivas, “Invisible Labors,” loc. 99; Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order,” loc. 126.

  36. Briggs, Reproductive Politics, 79.

  37. Briggs, Reproductive Politics, 79.

  38. Briggs, Reproductive Politics, 79; Joy M. Zarembka, “America’s Dirty Work: Migrant Maids and Modern-Day Slavery,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 182; Anderson, “Just Another Job?,” 132; Melissa Gira Grant, “Human Trafficking, After the Headlines,” Pacific Standard, April 3, 2017, https://psmag.com/news/human-trafficking-after-the-headlines; Nicole Constable, “Filipina Workers in Hong Kong Homes: Household Rules and Relations,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 170–172; Hopkins, “Mostly Work, Little Play,” 137. Arlie Russell Hochschild draws attention to the way love itself is alienated: “Just as we mentally isolate our idea of an object from the human scene within which it was made, so, too, we unwittingly separate the love between nanny and child from the global capitalist order of love to which it very much belongs.” Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Love and Gold,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 33.

  39. Hochschild, “Love and Gold,” 33; Kittay, Love’s Labor, 157–160.

  40. Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order,” 109; Qayum and Ray, “Traveling Cultures of Servitude,” 114.

  41. Rosa Silverman, “Does Asking Your Cleaner to Work Make You a Bad Feminist? Negotiating the Covid-19 Rule Change,” The Telegraph, May 14, 2020, www.telegraph.co.uk/women/work/does-asking-cleaner-work-make-bad-feminist-negotiating-covid; Sarah Ditum, “The Underlying Sexism of the Conversation About Cleaners and Covid,” The Spectator, May 14, 2020, www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-underlying-sexism-of-the-conversation-about-cleaners-and-covid.

  42. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Blowups and Other Unhappy Endings,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 72; Constable, “Filipina Workers in Hong Kong Homes,” 167.

  43. Roc Morin, “How to Hire Fake Friends and Family,” The Atlantic, November 7, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/11/paying-for-fake-friends-and-family/545060.

  44. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 121.

  45. Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order,” 116; Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), 6.

  46. Lenz, “These 12 Apps.”

  47. Valerio De Stefano, “Collective Bargaining of Platform Workers: Domestic Work Leads the Way,” Regulating for Globalization, October 12, 2018, http://regulating forglobalization.com/2018/12/10/collective-bargaining-of-platform-workers-domestic-work-leads-the-way.

  48. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “More Intimate Unions,” in Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors, 281.

  49. Cobble, “More Intimate Unions,” 281–286.

  50. “Facts for Domestic Workers,” New York State Department of Labor, https://labor.ny.gov/legal/laws/pdf/domestic-workers/facts-for-domestic-workers.pdf; Carney Law Firm, “New Massachusetts Law Expands Rights of Domestic Workers,” January 30, 2015, www.bostonworkerscompensationlawyerblog.com/new-massachusetts-law-expands-rights-domestic-workers.

  51. Sarah Jaffe, “Low Benefits, Temporary Jobs—Work Is Getting Worse… But Hope for Labor Rights Is Emerging from a Surprising Place,” AlterNet, August 28, 2012, www.alternet.org/2012/08/low-benefits-temporary-jobs-work-getting-worse-hope-labor-rights-emerging-surprising-place; National Domestic Workers Alliance homepage, accessed August 5, 2020, www.domesticworkers.org.

  52. Alexia Fernández Campbell, “Kamala Harris Just Introduced a Bill to Give Housekeepers Overtime Pay and Meal Breaks,” Vox, July 15, 2019, www.vox.com/2019/7/15/20694610/kamala-harris-domestic-workers-bill-of-rights-act.

  CHAPTER 3: WE STRIKE BECAUSE WE CARE

  1. John L. Rury, “Who Became Teachers? The Social Characteristics of Teachers in American History,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 9–10; Megan Erickson, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood (New York: Verso, 2015), 146.

  2. Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” 11–12, 14; Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York: Anchor, 2014), loc. 315, Kindle.

  3. Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 12–13; Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 402–428, 635.

  4. Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” 15–27; Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 446–456, 717; Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 14.

  5. Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 913–1037. Historian Michael Fultz wrote that African American teachers were “burdened with a spate of extracurricular expectations which they could not possibly fulfill.” Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies of Expectations and Protest,” History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 401–402.

  6. Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” 23, 28–29; Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 1; Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 589, 631.

  7. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 12–15.

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bsp; 8. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 20–24.

  9. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 36, 43–45.

  10. Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1283–1349; Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 46.

  11. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 47–59.

  12. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 59–60, 67, 72.

  13. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 90–95; Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South,” 410–420.

  14. Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1616–1648; Eleni Schirmer, personal communication with author.

  15. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 97–98, 100, 102, 118, 119, 122.

  16. Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1716–1766.

  17. Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1840; Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), loc. 87, Kindle; Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 133, 148, 154–157.

  18. Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” 34.

  19. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 154–157; Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 3, 12, 15–16; Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1817.

  20. Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 29–33, 43, 73, 78, 287–288. Historian Marjorie Murphy points to an article by Howard University professor Doxey Wilkerson about segregation, which made a Black child feel “he is not an integral part of the social group with which he is thrown, but rather, that he is a thing apart, isolated, ostracized, somehow not quite like his classmates.” Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 164.

  21. Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 277; Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” 37.

  22. Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 184; Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 104–115, 126, 151–153, 290.

  23. Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 104–115, 126, 151–153, 290; Murphy, Blackboard Unions, 190; Goldstein, The Teacher Wars, loc. 1945–1955.

  24. Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 153–173, 126, 151–153, 290.

  25. Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard, loc. 204–213.