A Lack of Reciprocity

This chapter examines how workplace conditions and benefits shape care workers’ national belonging. It discusses the home care field, including its historically unregulated character due to its categorization as domestic service. Agencies are currently responding to new regulations regarding overtime and health insurance, which have had contradictory effects on workers. It also discusses the amount of profit agencies are making from care workers. Care workers feel that they are denied reciprocities to which they are entitled through their labor. This is thus a complicated sense of belonging, in which they belong enough to feel entitled to reward, but not enough belonging to feel that they can work in unison against this system. Many, instead, decide that this state of affairs confirms that they belong in their home countries rather than in the United States. It is there that they imagine that they will reap the rewards of their labor and attain a dignity that is denied in the United States.