Exploitation to Liberation: Care Worker Kinship in New York City

Abstract

This project aims to identify the relationship between power and care in the home health industry and how who has the power (the worker or another entity) can drastically transform the embodied effect of care—either as overwhelming or emancipatory. Focusing on Home Health Aides (HHAs) in New York City, I apply geographies of care and labor geography to analyze how home health workers organize across disparate workplaces to regain their agency over their labor and care relationships. Through this research, I found that HHAs use kinships and care webs to mobilize and organize against care agency and patient surveillance and state failures. I conclude that HHAs depend on each other to mobilize using principles of inter-community solidarity and kinship to regain agency over their spatial productions. In this praxis of care, HHAs offer a unique insight into how care and power intersect, transforming the act of caring either into subjugation or liberation