The COVID-19 pandemic has brought an onslaught of irrepable damage to individuals and society as a whole. Additionally, the pandemic also exposed gaps in society that can no longer be ignored. One such gap is the role of labor unions on the workforce. Labor unions have been on the decline in recent decades in the US. But, amidst the recovery from the pandemics, more and more workers are demanding fair wages, comprehensive benefits, and better working conditions.
Recent headlines on the unionization of the first Starbucks in the US sparked a conversation on the politicization of care work. The act of caring, being a caregiver, and care in itself is hyper political. Care, for the welfare state, is a means to sustain the system of capitalism. As concerns the investments of the capitalist state in the act of caring, feminist economist Nancy Folbre explains, “Capitalist institutions create powerful incentives to maximize short run profits by exploiting unpriced public goods crucial to the sustainability of the social and natural environment.” Capitalism exploits workers to sustain itself, with the promise of providing care for them in return. Care workers – from Starbucks employees that serve us the coffee to start our days to the teachers that educate the next generation of leaders to the domestic workers that maintain our homes – are severely underpaid and ignored in the grand scheme of the political economy. Service industry carers, from companies like Starbucks, Kellogg’s, and Amazon, are rejecting the forced silence imposed on them by the welfare state and are fighting to de-coerce the hyper politicization of their existence by unionizing. Despite capitalist backlash, these care workers are changing the game for carers across the world.
These service industry carers are exposing a truth that feminist migration experts have been grappling with for decades, how to gain workers’ rights for domestic workers. In the United States, labor laws and constitutionally protected rights have explicitly excluded agricultural workers, prison laborers, and domestic workers. This has complicated domestic workers’ fight for de-coercion, but it does not make the fight impossible.
Care workers face coercion through the welfare state that traps them in a system of exploitation. To solve this issue, care work must be de-coerced. Undoing the ties of coercion allows care workers to tackle the politicized nature of care work and demand their own rights. The process of de-coercion can mean many things for the multiple intersectional identities and populations that make up care workers. But all in all, they must all center care workers. South African sociologist Shireen Ally has described how South Africa’s landmark legislation Sectoral Determination Seven for the Domestic Worker Sector gave domestic workers rights and privileges that they never had before, but it all came in vain because the legislation was not passed with domestic workers at its core. De-coercion must be centered around the day-to-day realities of domestic workers throughout the world and incorporate their opinions and beliefs. As political scientist and sociologist Emma Dowling states, “Care workers are experts. Their experience, knowledge and skill are crucial to designing and developing better care infrastructures that give care workers more control over their work. This requires a real democratization of workplaces and a voice for care workers.” The domestic workers that raise our children, clean our homes, and sustain the capitalist economy deserve a seat at the table of their own lives. They deserve to proclaim their wants and needs and feel like the world at least hears them. While the welfare state has shown it does not care, the rest of us should.
(By Evelyn Boateng-Ade)
(Photo Credit 1: Red Pepper / The Voice of Domestic Workers) (Photo Credit 2: Women’s Strike)