The Caring Class: Home Health Aides in Crisis

Richard Schweid ILR Press 3/15/2021, hardcover SKU:  9781501754104   The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people--almost always women--willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. The Caring Class takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx. Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, Schweid shows, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers wh