There’s No Place Like Home

Event Details

Long-Term Care and the Growth of Low-Wage Labor in the U.S. Welfare State

Yale History Professor JENNIFER KLEIN will discuss the emergence of home-care work as a critical part of the U.S. health-care system and welfare state. Klein will explain how the public and private sectors interacted to turn home care into a low-wage job at the lowest rungs of the American medical system – a job that was often stigmatized through both its long association with the labor of poor women of color and its more recent links to welfare-to-work programs. Yet Klein will also show how home care has emerged as a dynamic part of the American labor movement in recent decades. 

• Introduction from Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• Chapter 6: The Union is Us from Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2012)

JENNIFER KLEIN is professor of history at Yale University. She earned her Ph.D. at U.Va. and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow in Health Policy.  Klein’s publications include Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, co-authored with Eileen Boris, which was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association; and For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State, which was awarded the Ellis W. Hawley Prize in Political History/Political Economy from the Organization of American Historians and the Hagley Prize in Business History from the Business History Conference.

This colloquium is part of the Fall 2013 Miller Center Colloquium Series, Historical Perspectives on the Health Care Crisis, organized by GUIAN MCKEE, associate professor of public policy at the Miller Center.  Support for the series comes from the Claude Moore Foundation.

This event will be live-streamed and archived, and lunch will be served.  Please RSVP to gage@virginia.edu by noon on Wednesday, October 23.