The Conservative Challenge to Caring for Compensated Caregivers

As more households seek home care workers to provide care for elderly and disabled family members, conservative attacks on workers’ unionization efforts threaten to destabilize the industry. This article discusses the supply and demand concerns within the industry, and considers the conservative attack on home care workers. It concludes by exploring the proposed federal domestic workers bill of rights and recommends proactive measures for states to help fortify the industry

Welfare, Child Care, and the People Who Care: Union Representation of Family Child Care Providers

This is the published version

Parental-Status Employment Discrimination: A Wrong in Need of a Right?

This Article evaluates strategies to challenge employment discrimination based on parental status. Specifically, it examines proposals put forth by some commentators to establish parental status as a protected class. While such a suggestion is attractive, the Article argues that it ultimately offers few practical advantages and remains wedded to a limited conception of equality, requiring only that employment decisions not reflect differences based on parenthood. Consequently, such a strategy would satisfy anti-discrimination legislation so long as both men and women with parental obligations are equally ill-treated. The Article concludes that a shift in perspective from gender to parental status will not foster meaningful change in the situation of working parents without a parallel shift in legal strategies to resolve work-family conflicts. The model must change from one of formal equality to one that requires the workplace to accommodate the parenting obligations of workers