#winant

Decades after the collapse of its steel industry, Pittsburgh exemplifies how the trace memory of an old identity can live on in a football team (the Steelers), a nickname (Steel City) and even a local beer (Iron City), while the industry that actually flourishes there now — health care — garners no such reverence or recognition. The fastest growth in the sector isn’t for anesthetists or X-ray technicians but for poorly paid caregiving jobs; most of these care workers are women, and many of them are Black.

During the pandemic, these workers have been called “essential” — but as the historian Gabriel Winant explains in “The Next Shift,” remuneration and job protections haven’t kept up. “Care workers are at once everywhere and nowhere,” Winant writes. “They are responsible for everyone, but no one is responsible for them.”

The replacement of blue-collar work by pink-collar work has been much discussed, but what makes this book stand out is Winant’s argument that two seemingly distinct phenomena are in fact inextricably connected: “It was not a coincidence that care labor grew as industrial employment declined.” In the 1970s, deindustrialization pushed an ailing and aging population into unemployment, toward the welfare state — always tentative, in the American case — for their survival. Unlike other social institutions, which buckled under political pressure and austerity cuts, the American health care system flourished, having grown already in response to the rise of collectively bargained health insurance during the flush postwar years.

[...] Winant notes that the two social institutions that have prospered since the 1980s have been prisons and health care delivery: “Like the expansion of the prison system in the final decades of the 20th century, the rise of the health care industry afforded an economic fix to the social crisis brought about by deindustrialization.”

Hospital work was labor intensive, and it opened a job market for those Black Americans, including domestic workers, who were the first to be displaced by automation and industrial decline. Their exploitation, Winant says, “formed the basis of the bonanza for everyone else.” This work force was largely excluded from the midcentury prosperity and security it helped to create, and the ensuing cycle was vicious: “Caregiving could be offered at large volume to the insured fractions of the working class because its costs were passed on in such significant proportion to hospital employees via low wages.”

kusc.org - Pacific Standard Time

Carl Stone in conversation with William Winant and Gordon Mumma

LISTEN  [00:20:32]

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