Overlooked, Overworked: Women's Unpaid and Paid Work in the Health Services' “Cost Crisis”

Abstract

Dewaging shifts work from the marketplace to the household. The shift seems a short-term strategy used by capitalists, governmental policy-makers, and managers to reduce the wage bill for service workers in such areas as schooling, retailing, health services, and banking. In health services, the expansion of women's unpaid nursing in the household and a new labor process among paid nursing workers are necessary for new corporate and federal cost-containment strategies. Registered and licensed nurses, nurse's assistants and aides see their jobs eliminated, expanded, or moved from one work site to another. Increased use of outpatient clinics, in-and-out hospital stays of less than one day, and shortened hospital stays mean sick people in their homes, not hospitals. The work of caring for the sick does not disappear, however, though people may go without. Much nursing work is shifted to patients and to their families, and even to friends and neighbors. Within the family, women's unwaged work is central, supporting the new labor process among paid nurses. Wives, mothers, daughters, friends, etc., do the work once done for pay in clinics and hospitals.