Alana L Glaser | St. John's University (original) (raw)

Papers by Alana L Glaser

Anthropology of Work Review, 2021

The emergence of hailing and platform labor applications across industries has generated producti... more The emergence of hailing and platform labor applications across industries has generated productive theorizing on new forms of worker control, exploitation, and data commodification. Yet, despite their significant use of labor brokerage platforms, care workers are overlooked in political and scholarly analyses of the current platform-based economy. In this article, I describe two facets of the United States home health-care industry to identify how the problems of platform labor-namely, loss of employee status coupled with decentralized oversight and routinization-germinated in the highly exploitative realm of home health care for decades prior to uberized and gig-economy capitalism. In so doing, I consider how technological oversight of remote care workers codifies care in accordance with managerial priorities and reimbursement protocols and I argue that forprofit home-care jobs in the United States presaged processes of precarity, decentralization, surveillance, codification, and data generation that now appear nearly ubiquitous across industries.

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2020

In 2010 New York passed the first legal protections for in-home care workers in the United States... more In 2010 New York passed the first legal protections for in-home care workers in the United States. Amid these legal changes, care workers deploy collective complaint as a community-building strategy, allowing immigrant women domestic workers--often isolated in private homes--to commiserate with one another through shared criticisms of their, mostly women, employers. Based on fieldwork among activist nannies in New York between 2010 and 2012, I argue that collective complaint is a critical source of solidarity and community for childcare providers while caregivers' rhetorical and affective strategies offer insight about the potential limitations of rights-based legislation in this and other informal sectors. [labor law, care work, complaint, performance, race, gender] Domestic Workers United (DWU) is a women of color volunteer-led nonprofit activist organization based in New York City. The organization aims to bring dignity and respect to home-based childcare, home healthcare, and cleaning jobs. During my fieldwork, most active DWU members worked full-time as nannies. 1 In concert with their long-term allies , DWU successfully campaigned for passage of the nation's first legislation protecting home-based workers. The Domestic Worker Bill of Rights (BOR) took effect in New York in November 2010 after a decade of lobbying. It extends minimum wage and workplace safety and harassment laws to domestic workers, mandates overtime pay, and provides one day of rest per week. Advocates regard these provisions as the floor on which to establish fuller protections, such as collective bargaining rights. Members of Domestic Workers United meet on the third Saturday of every month in a Brooklyn church, where they share stories, debate, perform, vote on internal matters, and strategize about the new labor law's implementation in caregivers' isolated workplaces across New York City. During my fieldwork from summer 2010 to autumn 2012, I attended these monthly meetings regularly. On one Saturday in fall 2011, Jane, 2 a longtime DWU member, welcomed me to the meeting, and directed me to a nearby table stocked with meeting agendas available in multiple languages, informational handouts, and folders for newcomers. Between the translation equipment table-where members can check out individual receivers to facilitate real-time translation from English to Spanish-and the dues table that I occasionally helped run, small groups of women greeted one another. The church's large white-walled, hardwood-floored auditorium shone with a green glow from the Domestic Workers United T-shirts on display, arranged by size and language-half in Spanish and half in English. 3 A small cohort of DWU members-all Afro-Caribbean women between forty and sixty years old-gathered near the church entrance, reacting to an employment advertisement. The job posting advertised for a live-in nanny/housekeeper to care for four children, ages unspecified. The small group chortled at the posting's detailed description of extensive

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2019

There are approximately 4.4 million direct-care workers in the United States. Comprising the labo... more There are approximately 4.4 million direct-care workers in the United States. Comprising the labor of nurses, home health aides, certified nursing assistants, personal attendants, and companions to the elderly, direct-care work constitutes one of the fastest-growing labor niches in the United States. Within the commodified caregiving sector, cost-cutting imperatives to subdivide care labor introduce insalubrious complications for patients by cleaving-or attempting to do so-their physical needs from their emotional and relational needs, a process that I label 'rationalized aging'. In this essay, I reflect on my experiences as a paid elder companion in New York City to argue that this process of subdivision combines earlier nineteenth-century rationalization strategies with neoliberal regimes of flexible accumulation and to highlight the consequences of subdivision in this sector both for care workers and for the patients in their care.

Journal for the Anthropology of North America (formerly North American Dialogue), 2017

Extensive literature on care work or domestic work-childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning-in the... more Extensive literature on care work or domestic work-childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning-in the United States and internationally has highlighted how the sector's affective aspects, e.g., intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships, extract "surplus emotional labor" (Hochschild 1983) from women workers, who, in turn, often justify their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation. In this article, I draw on three women's narrative framings of their domestic work jobs to argue that immigrant women in New York City emphasize structural, practical, and contextual elements of their domestic/caregiving labor, challenging constructions of care sector labor as evidence of innate caring aptitudes, womanly duty, or moral service. These characterizations have direct labor policy implications for paid care work-as evidenced in recent reforms. They also provide a theoretical basis for broader redistributive politics linking paid and unpaid caregiving labor.

Books by Alana L Glaser

Temple University Press, 2023

The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization—immigrant women of color employed a... more The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization—immigrant women of color employed as nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in New York City—formed to fight for dignity and respect and to “bring meaningful change” to their work. Alana Lee Glaser examines the process of how these domestic workers organized against precarity, isolation, and exploitation to help pass the 2010 New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first labor law in the United States protecting in-home workers.

Solidarity & Care examines the political mobilization of diverse care workers who joined together and supported one another through education, protests, lobbying, and storytelling. Domestic work activists used narrative and emotional appeals to build a coalition of religious communities, employers of domestic workers, labor union members, and politicians to first pass and then to enforce the new law.