About this Issue
Gisela Fosado
In essence, Valuing Domestic Work is a reframing and a call to
action. As a number of the contributions show, increasing the social
value attributed to domestic work is crucial to creating justice for
domestic workers. Celebrating some of the most
powerful and innovative organizing work being done in New York
State and across the country, this issue highlights the contributions that
scholars have made in establishing domestic work and other types of care work as
an important area of feminist studies. Our contributors call on all of
us to raise our awareness of the process by which we devalue and
overlook this sector of our economy—a sector that affects each and
every one of us, often on a daily basis.
Valuing Domestic Work brings together scholarly essays on gender
and care labor, as well
as documentation of campaigns by New York's Domestic Workers United and the National
Domestic Workers Alliance to gain visibility and legitimacy
for domestic work, as well as basic legal protections for these workers. The
issue also features contributions made by allies and partners of these
organizations, including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Third
World Newsreel, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, who have
all created their own documents aiming to value domestic work in the United States.
Valuing Domestic Work weaves individual stories from workers and
employers with other ways of analyzing the role race, gender and
nationality play in care work in the U.S. and abroad.
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