Caring Beyond Borders : Assessing Home Care Policies and Workers? Rights in Europe and the Americas

Through in-depth case studies, this collection assesses the efficacy of home care policies for delivering decent work and workers’ rights. Together, authors reach across the Atlantic, heeding the call for perspectives beyond the North to study border-transcending dynamics and interdependencies. The lens of the pandemic reveals why care systems proved so inadequate for mitigating the contagion and why some countries fared better than others. Broadening the focus through international comparisons inform lessons in the medium and long-term and can provide a better understanding of systemic vulnerabilities and capacities for ensuring resilience and positive outcomes before, during, and after disasters.

Contributors are: Louisa Acciari, Ana Andrada, Eileen Boris, Javier Pineda D., Sabah Boufkhed, Suelen E. Castiblanco-Moreno, Anju Mary Paul, Anne Eydoux, Chiara Giordano, Heidi Gottfried, Nadya Araujo Guimarães, Virginie Guiraudon, Helena Hirata, Clémence Ledoux, Sofia Mortara, Lorena Poblete, Claire Sonnet, Camila Vega-Salazar, and Regina Stela Corrêa Vieira.

Heidi Gottfried is a retired Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Wayne State University and author of Gender, Work and Economy. Her publications span the political economy of care, Japanese capitalism, and gender, migration and work in comparative perspective.

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of Caring for America. She writes on the home as a workplace, intimate labors, the racialized gender state, and domestic workers’ struggles for freedom, past and present.

Nadya Araujo Guimarães is Senior Professor at the Sociology Department, University of São Paulo, and author of Care and Care Workers: A Latin American Perspective. Her body of research examines the care economy, care workers’ rights, and labor market theories.