Advertising a Particularly Precarious Occupation: Nanny Ads on Craigslist

Domestic work has long been a particularly precarious occupation in that it is subject to certain risks and vulnerabilities that make it a highly insecure, unstable, uncertain form of work that often provides very limited economic and social benefits to those who engage in it. In this article we explore whether employers are willing to advertise the particularly precarious aspects of domestic work in job advertisements for nannies. Based on a content analysis of nanny ads posted on the Craigslist pages for San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Chicago, we find that nearly half (45%) of the ads in our population contained an actual and/or potential indicator of one or more particularly precarious aspects of domestic work. While these indicators came in many specific forms, they can be grouped into two general categories: (1) ads that are actually or potentially discriminatory and (2) ads that indicate an employer may not see being a nanny as a “real” job.     

‘More like a daughter than an employee’: the kinning process between migrant care workers,elderly care receivers and their extended families

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the intersections of formal and informal care in the relationships that develop between elderly care receivers and their families and migrant domestic care workers and their families. The domestic migrant care literature has tended to focus on two main ‘hidden costs’ of this ‘care-chain’: the ‘care exploitation’ of paid carers by their employers and the ‘care drain’ impact on the family members left behind by the migrant. In this paper, we employ a care circulation framework to examine the process of becoming kin-like – or ‘kinning’, which remains relatively under-explored and warrants further research. An analysis of this process of kinning helps to highlight how the domestic space of care receiver homes are transformed – through the negotiation of relationships with migrant care workers – into transnational social fields that bring the diaspora worlds of the migrants into the everyday worlds of the locals.     

Sustaining Low Pay in Aged Care Work

This article examines the ways in which employers in the Australian aged care sector justify and sustain low pay for work that is both highly skilled and in high demand. We build on a large body of feminist research that analyses why care work is devalued by showing how such devaluing is produced at the level of the organization. To do so we examine some of the specific discursive mechanisms that sustain low pay. We show that aged care employers actively reproduce a familial logic of care that represents paid aged care work as unskilled and natural for women and therefore not deserving of higher pay. We argue that in order to achieve their goals employers must develop and sustain an opposition between care as love‐centred and work as money‐centred, while upholding the notion that they provide quality care for care recipients.     

"They Have More Money but I Speak Better English!" Transnational Encounters between Filipina Domestics and Taiwanese Employers)

This article explores how Taiwanese employers and Filipina migrant domestic workers negotiate their class locations and identities, with an emphasis on the symbolic struggles surrounding linguistic exchanges in transnational contexts. Taiwanese newly rich employers validate their middle-classhood with the consumption of migrant labor service and the investment of English tutoring for their children. Filipinas flee underpaid middle-class occupations in their stagnant national economy to work as foreign maids; they maneuver their linguistic capital, inherited from the American colonizer, to enhance their status vis- -vis Taiwanese employers. This South-to-South employment relationship illustrates the ambiguous micropolitics of producing class boundaries. The English language serves as a means of symbolic domination and resistance in their daily communication and job negotiation.     

The workplace perspective on supporting family caregivers at end of life: evaluating a new Canadian social program

There is a growing realization that employers need to accommodate the issue of work-life balance for employees who are also providing care for family members or friends in palliative or end-of-life situations, as this phenomenon is only expected to increase within developed nations in the future given demographic trends and health care restructuring. This research aims to uncover the expectations that Canadian employers/human resources (HR) professionals have of the Compassionate Care Benefit (CCB), in addition to their experienced realities of having staff utilize this social program. The CCB provides employed family/informal caregivers with a job-secured work leave and six weeks of employment insurance benefits while they take time off to provide care to a dying family member or close other, often at home (in the community). Five focused discussions were implemented with employers/HR across Canada. Using thematic analysis, the data reveal how well (or not) the CCB meets caregivers' needs, as well as the informational and procedural needs of workplaces. In light of these findings, suggestions for program improvement, with respect to the CCB, are made in order to advocate for continued support of family/informal caregivers whose voices are rarely heard.     

Work–Family Balance and Tenure Reasonableness: Gender Differences in Faculty Assessment

Abstract

Perceptions of work–family balance and of the reasonableness of tenure expectations are key faculty retention factors. Using a national job satisfaction survey with 2438 tenure-track assistant professors, we explore whether faculty assessment of departmental and institutional support for family–work balance and their satisfaction with family-friendly policies influence their perceptions of the reasonableness of tenure expectations. We pay attention to the importance of gender in our models. Results reveal that women are less likely than men to report tenure expectations as scholars are reasonable and that departments and institutions are supportive of family–work balance. Departmental support for family–work balance, caring for an ill family member, satisfaction with family-friendly policies, and workload have the strongest association with reasonableness. Satisfaction with family-friendly policies has a significant relationship with reasonableness of tenure expectations only for faculty with family care responsibilities. Implications for family-friendly policies and practices in academia are discussed.     

Partners’ overwork and individuals’ wellbeing and experienced relationship quality

In this paper, using high quality data from the Work, Family, and Health Network in a sample of IT workers in the US (N?=?590), we examine whether partners’ long work hours are associated with individuals’ perceived stress, time adequacy with partner, and relationship quality, and whether these relationships vary by gender. In addition, following the marital stress model, we investigate whether any negative correlation between partners’ long work hours and relationship quality is mediated by time adequacy or perceived stress. We find that women partnered to men who work long hours (50 or more hours per week) have significantly higher perceived stress and significantly lower time adequacy and relationship quality compared to women partnered to men who work a standard full-time work week (35–49 hours). Further, the increased stress associated with being partnered to a man who overworks, not lower time adequacy, mediates the negative relationship between overwork and relationship quality. Conversely, we find that men partnered to women who work long hours report no differences in stress, time adequacy, or relationship quality than men who are partnered to women who work a standard full-time work week.     

Labor Market Information and Selection in a Local Restaurant Industry: The Tenuous Balance Between Rewards,Commitments, and Costs

The restaurant industry is characterized as having high turnover, skill homogeneity, and distrust of standard sources of labor market information. We examine how in this context employers seek and evaluate information on potential job candidates (extensive search) and the hiring criteria they use to select new employees (intensive search). We find that employers in the restaurant sector are often passive or reactive about recruitment, distrust standard sources of information, and reject the use of educational credentials and work experience as hiring criteria. They do, however, find ways to signal workplace information to potential job candidates, develop schemes to gather reliable information, and closely evaluate job history data when hiring. Some develop signaling strategies to alert potential employees that their stores are sufficiently different from apparently similar stores to make them unusually attractive places to work. To help secure a sufficiently motivated work force, managers eschew standard measures of potential productive capacity or skills and adopt instead indicators of a modicum of employee motivation. Even under conditions of high turnover, skill homogeneity, and distrusted information, employers find ways to secure effort and commitment from potentially recalcitrant employees.     

Expectations,education, and opportunity

Using a long panel of youths, we establish a causal link between parental expectations regarding education and educational attainment. In particular, we use an instrumental variables approach to find that the child’s chances of obtaining a high school or college degree are increasing in the parent’s expectations of the likelihood of these events. We then use differences between the objective likelihood of a child’s educational attainment and the parents’ subjective probabilities to consider the hypothesis that lower educational outcomes among certain groups are driven by a “culture of despair,” where children are low-achieving because they are expected to underachieve. While we do find that children from households with lower levels of income, wealth, and parental education are less likely to attain high school and college degrees, we reject the hypothesis that this is driven by low subjective expectations of educational success. Rather, we find that parents from disadvantaged groups have expectations for the educational outcomes of their children that differ more from the statistical likelihood of these outcomes than do parents of children from advantaged households. That is, we find that parents in more disadvantaged households are more optimistic about the educational outcomes of their children than those from more advantaged households.     

Podiatrists in a Weberian Spirit: Medical Care Specialists Seeking Full Professional Status and Recognition

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which teaching strategies provide socialization experiences to young women that foster the skills needed to promote their early careers. The study is guided by literature on formal social relations in schools and workplaces. Data from three methods are examined: classroom observations of female students preparing for work, personal interviews with the students and discussions with their teachers, and a mail survey of their employers. Noncollege women who can demonstrate to employers that they can successfully manage workplace rules and regulations are more likely to be rated as successful at work and obtain available promotions than are their peers without these skills. However, the work organizations they enter provide little formal access to power, and teachers do not socialize all female students for work in ways that will help them be successful in situations involving employers and clients. Further research clearly is needed on how success in work settings is influenced by the type of organizational skills acquired in formal settings such as schools. Particular attention should be paid to the preparation of women and other socially disadvantaged groups.     

Backing Australia's Future: Teaching and Learning in Social Work

Abstract

It is universally expected that universities will strive for quality in teaching and learning. Over the past 25 years, massive changes to higher education have impacted on these institutions. We now have a mass higher education system, a knowledge-based economy, increased technology, and the internationalization of education accompanied by increased student enrolments and political expectations of enhanced graduate outcome measures. These changes pose challenges to developing, updating, and improving the quality of teaching and learning. This new policy environment confronts social work educators as they determine how best to deliver quality professional education. The present paper discusses the concepts underpinning the Australian government's paper Our Universities: Backing Australia's Future as a background to exploring the tensions arising in current professional expectations and criteria for social work programs as they make the transition from old to new paradigms in classroom teaching and field education.     

Creating Community: Latina Nannies in a West Los Angeles Park

Drawing on 1 year of ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles, this article examines how Latina nannies create workplace solidarity in a public park. This article reveals how nannies use public spaces in the neighborhoods in which they work to establish ties similar to co-worker relations in other settings. This paper demonstrates how nannies create a community at the park by incorporating park staff into their activities, reinforcing group values such as sharing and reciprocity, and distinguishing themselves from their employers. Adding to previous research which highlights the atomization and stigmatization that comes with domestic employment, this article shows how nannies create co-worker relationships that are buffers against unfavorable job conditions such as solitary work settings and unappreciative employers.

Predictors of Family Support and Well-Being Among Black and Latina/o Sexual Minorities

ABSTRACT

Sexual minorities are receiving an increasing amount of attention within sociological research on families. However, much of the existing work on these families has been limited to largely White, middle-class, and highly educated individuals. Using national data from the Social Justice Sexuality Project, this study fills a much-needed gap by exploring predictors of family support and the relationship between family support and well-being among Black and Latina/o sexual minorities. We find that sexual identity, how out one is to one's family, and relationship status predict levels of family support. In addition, we find that among Black and Latina/o individuals, family support is an important factor influencing health and well-being. Other social statuses such as gender identity, sexual identity, and relationship status are associated with happiness and self-rated health as well. Our work suggests that sexual minorities of color have unique family dynamics that should be studied from an intersectional perspective. Further investigation into the family dynamics of sexual minorities of color should pay particular attention to individuals' positionality within systems of gender, racial, and sexual identity disadvantage to help understand their health and well-being.     

Non-parental childcare,time pressure and the gendered division of paid work,domestic work and parental childcare

What impact does out-sourcing childcare have on the time parents spend on paid work, domestic work and childcare, and how they share these tasks between themselves? Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) 2006 we investigate the effects of formal and informal non-parental childcare on the time use of couples with children aged 0–4 years (N=348). We examine associations between non-parental care and (1) couples' combined time in paid work, domestic work and childcare, (2) parents' time separately by gender in paid work, domestic work and childcare (subdivided by activity type) and (3) parents' self-reported time pressure. Total workloads (the sum of paid work, domestic work and childcare) are neither higher nor lower when non-parental care is used, either for households combined or for each gender separately. The way time is spent, and how activities are divided by gender does differ, however. For mothers the use of any non-parental care and more hours in formal care is associated with more paid work hours, less childcare time and higher self-reported time pressure. Fathers' time is more constant, but they report higher subjective time pressure with increasing hours of formal non-parental care.     

How state exceptions to employment-at-will affect wages

Little research has been conducted on the effects of state adoption of exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment-at-will, which states that both employees and employers have the right to terminate an employment relationship at any time for any reason. I examine how these exceptions affect wages and find that, as predicted, the two are inversely related. All three commonly adopted exceptions are negatively related to the wage rate, with state adoption being associated with up to a three percent reduction in wages.     

Paradigm wars: Some thoughts on a personal and public trajectory

It is often said that research methods are a matter of rational choice: it is the research question, or problem, which ought to dictate the method to be used. This may be true to some extent, but there are other more powerful reasons why social scientists choose the research methods they do. Underlying philosophies of social science and long-held and much cherished tenets about epistemology are prime among these. Moreover, such an interplay between epistemological position and methodological decision is enormously affected by social context. We pay attention to what other social scientists are doing, to fashions in both methodology and topic - the things it is considered proper for social scientists to study; we are affected by research funding and publishing opportunities, by the material resources available to support our work, by intraprofessional rivalries and difference, and by politics - both in its commonly understood sense and as applied to power relations between academics and those who take part in research. Apart from what we do, there is the whole issue of how others construct our work. And this is only some of what goes on. In short, it is a very complicated business.     

Work satisfaction in a rapidly feminized profession: assessing the intersection of gender,parenting and support resources among veterinary doctors

Abstract

Women typically hold jobs in which they experience less pay and less favorable working conditions than men in comparable positions. Despite these differences, women report similar or even higher levels of work satisfaction. Most studies explaining work satisfaction and gender focus on workplace rewards as potential explanatory variables. Little is known about the relevance of support resources from the family domain in relation to women’s and men’s work satisfaction. Finally, the relevance of support resources has not been studied in high-status professions where women have quickly become more highly represented numerically. Using quantitative survey data from a sample of married veterinary doctors (N?=?311), we explore the influence of work and family-based support resources. Specifically, we examine the relationship between work satisfaction and three sources of support: coworkers, family, and spouses. We also explore whether parental status has moderating effects for women and men with these resources in association with work satisfaction. We find that mothers are more satisfied than fathers. Parenthood and supportive family engagement are strong predictors of women’s work satisfaction. Coworker support is a salient predictor of work satisfaction for all, especially for men who are fathers. Implications for men and women working in high-status professions are discussed.     

When Emotion Work is Doomed to Fail: Ideological and Structural Constraints on Emotion Management

This paper explores how workers try to manage their emotions under conditions that doom them to fail. The workers in question—floor instructors at a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities—were expected to infuse clients with positive feelings about work and to help transform them into committed workers. But structural conditions—boring, poorly paid assembly work and long gaps between contract jobs—forced them to obtain clients' compliance through coercive and confrontational emotion management techniques that contradicted their ideological beliefs. The floor instructors sought to peacefully increase their control over clients through “preventive emotion management” but most often they experienced a loss of control, leading some of them to experience “burnout.” This paper defines burnout as “occupational emotional deviance” that workers experience when they cannot manage their own and other's emotions according to organizational expectations.     

A dynamic model of public sector employer response to unionization

We model the response of public sector employers to unionization using the response of public school boards to teacher unionization as an example. While it is generally believed that public sector employers pay unionized workers more than nonunion workers, there is less consensus about where the money comes from. We model two cases which are possible employer reactions to unionization: re-allocating resources among types of expenditures and modifying the way in which services are provided. The model contains a political equilibrium that determines the union’s preferences and an economic equilibrium that reflects labor market conditions. We compare the predictions of the two cases regarding the effect of unionization on wages, turnover, allocation of expenditures, and productivity. We interpret existing empirical research on public sector unionization in light of these predictions and make recommenda-tions for future empirical work.