Confronting Servitude: Asian Immigrant Women Workers in State-Funded Homecare

Abstract

This article utilizes a multilevel intersectional framework to analyze how Asian immigrant women workers in state-funded care provisioning make sense of and contest the relations of servitude that have long plagued low-paid domestic work. Our research, which draws on in-depth interviews with Chinese, Korean, and Filipina/o/x women in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program, shows that workers across all three groups face coercive labor conditions in private homes that severely constrain their ability to refuse excessive demands on their time and tasks, including when care is publicly funded and means tested, provided by paid relatives, managed by the state, and regulated under union collective-bargaining agreements. Yet, our comparative analysis also shows that workers from different groups have varying understandings of what constitutes servitude and how it can be challenged, especially when care receiver–employers are similarly marginalized and are part of workers’ families and ethnic communities. Meso-level institutions such as labor markets, immigrant networks, community organizations, and labor unions play a significant role in mediating workers’ subjective understandings and group-level responses to ongoing conditions of de facto servitude.