National Care Experts and Public Daughters: Navigating Publicly Funded Eldercare Jobs in South Korea and the United States

Abstract:Both the United States and South Korea have implemented publicly funded long-term care programs intended to cope with the rapid aging of their populations. These programs provide market-based solutions that depend on cheap labor supplied by women from marginalized groups. Drawing upon comparative ethnographic data collected in Los Angeles’ Koreatown and Seoul, this study illuminates the mechanisms by which publicly funded long-term care programs systematically devalue care through a combination of state policy and racialized labor markets. These programs not only sort and channel marginalized women into the low-paid care sector through targeted forms of recruitment, but they also do so by promoting an idealized care worker subject. However, workers do not passively accept their subjectivation. Instead, they selectively choose to embody some aspects of the imposed idealized care worker subject to help navigate their precarious working conditions. In doing so, they give meaning to their work and thus empower themselves.