We all have a stake in their struggle for dignity, respect, recognition, living wages and decent working conditions. We should join in coalition with home health, elder, and childcare workers, with domestic workers of all sorts—if not out of a sense of fairness and social justice than out of self-interest. Better work leads to better care. In the spirit of “Caring Across the Generations,” the initiative launched by the National Domestic Worker Alliance that brings together care providers with care receivers, she invites us to develop a care manifesto. Please bring your experiences as a caregiver or receiver, your visions of a more caring society and what we need to get there and what we in our own communities can do. This journey is not easy, given obstacles built from histories of race, gender, and class inequalities, violence and exploitation. But if the human condition is one of interdependence, it is a trip worth taking—together.

Eileen Boris is Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at UCSB, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice. An interdisciplinary historian, she specializes in women’s labors in the home and other workplaces and on gender, race, work, and the welfare state. Among her many books are Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (winner of the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History); Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, co-edited with Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford University Press, 2010) and, with Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2011). She has authored policy reports on the feminization of poverty, the wages of care, and welfare reform. Her non-academic writings have appeared in The Nation, the LA Times, New Labor Forum, Labor Notes, Salon, Dissent, Women’s Review of Books, and the Washington Post. Locally, she is on the Board of Directors of CAUSE, Coastal Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, a central coast social justice NGO.

Sponsored by the IHC series The Value of Care.