Becoming Homecare Workers: Chinese Immigrant Women and the Changing Worlds of Work, Care and Unionism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the intersectional dynamics of gender, migration, and labor shape the trajectories of immigrant women into home-based elder care and how unions and community organizations mediate its conditions. Our analysis, which uses interviews with In-Home Supportive Services workers in California’s Oakland Chinatown, shows that the growth of publicly-subsidized homecare jobs has created an occupational opportunity for workers who face restrictive labor markets due to declining factory jobs and discriminatory hiring. Workers acknowledge the daily stress of working in low-paid, precarious jobs characterized by high levels of informality and coercive gender and racial-ethnic dynamics but the quasi-public nature of these jobs complicates a facile depiction of it as domestic servitude. Ethnic community organizations and labor unions open up institutional pathways to empowering forms of collective voice. Our findings contribute to the growing effort to understand how the social organization of care work both draws upon and exacerbates existing inequalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".