Work & Daily Life in Global Capitalism

CARE WORK AND INFORMAL ECONOMIES IN GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Fall 2008

Instructor:
Myra Jones-Taylor

Care Work and Informal Economies will look at the daily lives of those who are often considered outside of the labor market, caregivers and people who work underground or off the books. Because care and work are so often at odds in many people's minds (in the sense that caring for someone shouldn't be considered work) their concerns as laborers and their daily existence are often overlooked. We will explore the contours of why that is and whether this might be changing, paying particular attention at new attempts to regulate certain forms of care work.

Workers in the informal economy -- street vendors, drug dealers, day laborers, sex workers -- are often under the radar because of the very hidden and, at times, illicit, nature of their work. We will consider what drives people to work in informal economies, paying attention to the social, political, economic and cultural reasons behind their labor status. We will be attentive to the ways informal work structures or falls short of structuring workers' daily lives.

Care work and work in the informal economy are particularly gendered forms of labor. We will explore how gendered work shapes daily life. Gender will be a central theme of many of the readings available to students.

Also, because care work and work in the informal economy are performed outside of spaces one expects to find labor, we will focus on the blurring of work and daily life for these workers.

Book Suggestions for First Essay

First Half of 20th Century
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, USA, 2000).

Emilie Stoltzfus, Citizen, Mother, Worker: Debating Public Responsibility for Child Care After the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Peter L Twohig, Labour in the Laboratory: Medical Laboratory Workers in the Maritimes, 1900-1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

20th Century Overview
Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (Cornell Univ Pr, 1989).

Maria De Los Reyes Castillo Bueno, Daisy Rubiera Castillo, and Anne McLean, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2000).

Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2001).

Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

Denise Brennan, What's Love Got to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Duke University Press, 2004).

Turn of 21st Century
Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, Paradise Laborers: Hotel Work In The Global Economy (ILR Press, 2004).

Alexa Albert, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women (Ballantine Books, 2002).

Javier Auyero, Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (Duke University Press, 2003).

Gracia Clark, Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (University Of Chicago Press, 1995).

Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers (Cornell University Press, 2007).

Leon Fink, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers' Union, Local 1199 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: Women, Work, and Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2000).

Thomas Edward Gass, Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide (Cornell University Press, 2004).

Michele Ruth Gamburd, The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids (Cornell University Press, 2000).

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, 1st ed. (Metropolitan Books, 1997).

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 200).

Ericka Johnson, Dreaming of a Mail-Order Husband: Russian-American Internet Romance (Duke University Press, 2007).

Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Steven Henry Lopez, Reorganizing the Rust Belt: An Inside Study of the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Jay MacLeod, Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Westview Press, 2008).

Rhacel Parrenas, Children of Globalization: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes, (Stanford University Press, 2005).

Rhacel Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Ngai Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Revised. (Duke University Press, 2005).

Karen Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (University of Illinois Press, 1987).

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Christian Zlolniski, Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley, (University of California Press, 2006).