IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v27y2021i1-2p173-187.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Essential Workers and Care Penalties in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Nancy Folbre
  • Leila Gautham
  • Kristin Smith

Abstract

The new category of workers officially labeled “essential” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States includes a large percentage of women working in care services. In many of these services, health risks are often considered part of the job and are uncompensated by hazard pay. Building on previous feminist research explaining the devaluation of care work, this paper uses the most recent available data from the US Current Population Survey to show that workers in essential care service jobs – especially women – earn less than other essential workers. This pattern cannot be explained by differences in unionization rates and points to other differences in bargaining power, including institutional factors influencing the earnings of doctors and nurses. Care penalties have significant implications for the future supply of care services as the pandemic persists, highlighting the need to develop broad coalitions to challenge the undervaluation of care work.HIGHLIGHTS Care workers are half of all essential workers in the US and mostly women.Essential care workers pay a wage penalty.Features of care work contribute to disempowerment by encouraging commitment over bargaining.Pay penalties contribute to burnout, high turnover, and reduced entry into essential care jobs.Industry-level unionization coalitions should form to contest devaluation of care provision.

Suggested Citation

  • Nancy Folbre & Leila Gautham & Kristin Smith, 2021. "Essential Workers and Care Penalties in the United States," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(1-2), pages 173-187, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:27:y:2021:i:1-2:p:173-187
    DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2020.1828602
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2020.1828602
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13545701.2020.1828602?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zdravka Todorova, 2024. "Social processes of oppression in the stratified economy and Veblenian feminist post Keynesian connections," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(1), pages 25-54, January.
    2. Shahra Razavi, 2022. "Making the Right to Social Security a Reality for All Workers," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 65(2), pages 269-294, June.
    3. Janna Klostermann & Laura Funk & Holly Symonds-Brown & Maria Cherba & Christine Ceci & Pat Armstrong & Jeanette Pols, 2022. "The Problems with Care: A Feminist Care Scholar Retrospective," Societies, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-15, March.
    4. Emma K. Tsui & Marita LaMonica & Maryam Hyder & Paul Landsbergis & Jennifer Zelnick & Sherry Baron, 2021. "Expanding the Conceptualization of Support in Low-Wage Carework: The Case of Home Care Aides and Client Death," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(1), pages 1-16, December.
    5. Elena CAMILLETTI & Zahrah NESBITT‐AHMED, 2022. "COVID‐19 and a “crisis of care”: A feminist analysis of public policy responses to paid and unpaid care and domestic work," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 161(2), pages 195-218, June.
    6. Mark Setterfield, 2024. "Integrating the Social Reproduction of Labour into Macroeconomic Theory," Working Papers 2405, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics.
    7. Corsi, Marcella & Ilkkaracan, Ipek, 2022. "COVID-19, Gender and Labour," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1012, Global Labor Organization (GLO).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:27:y:2021:i:1-2:p:173-187. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.