The global heart transplant and caring across national boundaries

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 46, Issue SUPPL, 2008, Pages 138-165

  Kittay, Eva Feder ^a  

^a STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149458828     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2008.tb00160.x     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 119.
2. Arlie Hochschild, "Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value, " in On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, ed. Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton (London: Vintage Press, 2001), 130-46.
3. In a letter to the editor, a researcher at Hunter College, Professor Rebecca Donovan, wrote that the results of a 1985 study in New York by the Hunter College School of Social Work, in cooperation with Local 1199 of the Hospital and Health Care Employees Union, found that of homecare workers: "99 percent of the workers are women 22 to 85 years old (median age is 47); 70 percent are black, and 26 percent are Hispanic; nearly half (46 percent) are immigrants, primarily from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The typical worker is the primary head of her household with three to four children. The most common salary is less than $5, 000 a year.... Not surprisingly, severe economic hardship was also found: 80 percent of the workers are unable to afford adequate housing, 35 percent are frequently unable to afford enough food for their families, while an additional 50 percent reported they sometimes lack money for food. Many workers struggle with the persistent threat of homelessness and hunger." Rebecca Donovan, "Poorly Paid Home Health Care Workers Subsidize an Industry, " New York Times, May 16, 1987.
4. We conclude that it is. Long Island Care at Home, Ltd., et al. Petitioners v. Evelyn Coke, 551 U. S. 06-593 (2007) More generally, those who work as paid home caregivers lack legal protection and benefits. Peggie Smith, a legal expert in employment law, writes: "For the most part, those government agencies responsible for enforcing labor laws, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have turned a blind eye to home health care workers." Donovan, "Poorly Paid Home Health Care Workers Subsidize an Industry, " A26.
5. See, for example: Diemut Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
6. Martha Albertson Fineman, The Illusion of Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
7. Martha Albertson Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995);
8. Nancy Fraser, "After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment, " in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition, ed. Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1997);
9. Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);
10. and Kittay, Love's Labor.
11. This is the first time I have introduced a distinction between dependency work and dependency responsibilities. I introduced the term "dependency work" in my Love's Labor: Essays in Women, Equality and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).
12. Eva Feder Kittay, "Dependency, Equality, and Welfare, " Feminist Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 32-43;
13. Eva Feder Kittay, "Taking Dependency Seriously: The Family and Medical Leave Act Considered in Light of the Social Organization of Dependency Work and Gender Equality, " Hypatia 10, no. 1 (1995): 8-29.
14. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development: Essays (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).
15. Linda Bosniak provides an analysis of the dilemma that I am presenting here as due, in part, to the normative construal of citizenship that one finds in much feminist and some philosophical literature and that is found my own work. But this conception of what should be owed to the citizen often stands in tension with the understanding of citizenship as formal national membership status. This is the citizenship that entitles one to a passport, to diplomatic protection abroad, and, above all, to enter and to remain in a nation's territory without constraint. This is the citizenship that is premised on a commitment to boundaries and closure rather than universalism. It is the citizenship which aliens, by definition, do not enjoy. Linda Bosniak, "Citizenship, Noncitizenship, and the Transnationalization of Domestic Work, " in Citizenship, Borders, and Gender: Mobility and Immobility, ed. Seyla Ben-Habib and Judith Resnick (New York City: New York University Press, forthcoming), manuscript, 14. In the same spirit as my own critique of my past position as well as those of the feminists who have argued similarly, Bosniak writes of the normative feminist discussions of citizenship: "Is a nationally-framed work-based economic citizenship even achievable in the absence of various protectionist measures such as trade tariffs, investment restrictions and plant-closing laws?" (Ibid.)
16. S. Jody Heymann found that the percentage of women with children under the age of six years in the labor force increased more than threefold, from 20 percent to 64 percent. For those with children between six and seventeen, the increase went from 42 percent in 1960 to 79 percent in 1999. S. Jody Heymann, The Widening Gap: Why America's Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 214.
17. See Eva Kittay, Bruce Jennings, and Angela Wasunna, "Dependency, Difference, and Global Ethic of Long-term Care, " Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (2005): 443-69.
18. Peggie R. Smith, "Elder Care, Work, and Gender: The Work-Family Issue of the 21st Century, " Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 25 (2004): 351-98. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports that The need for long-term care services is expected to increase dramatically in this country as the population ages. Changing demographics, along with other factors may reduce the ability of family members to take care of elderly relatives placing additional demands on public and private programs. In 2011, 77 million people will turn 65, and by 2025, the number of Medicare beneficiaries is expected to reach 69.3 million, representing 20.6 percent of the U.S. population. Over the same period, those over age 80 will comprise the fastest growing segment of the population. Four out of every 10 people turning age 65 will use a nursing home at some point in their lives, and many will need home care and other related services as well.
19. Irene Fraser, Long-Term Care: AHRQ Focus on Research (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2002); accessed 2008 from http://www.ahrq.gov/news/focus/focltcare.htm
20. See Michael Walzer, "Citizenship, " in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
21. Sarah Clark Miller, "The Global Duty to Care and the Politics of Peace, " International Studies in Philosophy 38, no 2 (2006): 116
22. Seyla Ben-Habib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.
23. For an account of human rights grounded in the conception of human welfare, see Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
24. See Parrenãs, Servants of Globalization.
25. Arlie Hochschild, "Love and Gold, " in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 22.
26. World Bank, Global Economics Prospect 2006: International Remittances and Migration (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006), 1.
27. Ben-Habib, The Rights of Others, 5. Ben-Habib cites Hania Zlotnik, "Past Trends in International Migration and Their Implications for Future Prospects, " in International Migration into the 21st-century: Essays in Honor of Reginald Appleyard, ed. M. A. B. Siddique (Boston, MA: Edward Elgar, 2001).
28. Pei-Chia Lan, "Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor, " Gender and Society: Global Perspectives on Gender and Careword (special issue) 17, no. 2 (2003): 192.
29. Lan writes: "This transition happened due to the decline of male-oriented construction and manufacturing jobs in the Middle East during and after the Gulf War, in contrast to the growing demands for domestic workers in other host countries." The author cites Cecilia Tarcoll, "Migrating 'For the Sake of the Family?' Gender, Life Course and Intra-Household Relations among Filipino Migrants in Rome, " Philippine Sociological Review 44, no. 1-4 (1996): 12-32.
30. In the United States alone, demographic statistics indicate a steadily growing demand for long-term care services that will peak around mid-century. Roy Amara et al., Looking Ahead at American Health Care (McGraw Hill Health Professions, 1988).
31. Parreñas writes that "the majority of migrant workers from the Philippines are women and the labor they provide to the citizenry of other nations is mostly carework." Approximately two thirds are engaged as domestics. Those professional women who migrate are largely nurses. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 22-23.
32. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 13.
33. Marketplace, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/, Wednesday evening, October 16, 2007.
34. Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 63.
35. Allison Weir similarly notes: "for careworkers, caregiving is not only labor: it is also something they desire, a source of identity and meaning" and thus that "caregiving must be recognized as an intrinsic good, a source of identity and meaning, which should be recognized as a human right." Allison Weir, "The Global Universal Caregiver: Imagining Women's Liberation in the New Millennium, " Constellations 12, no. 3 (2005): 313.
36. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 162.
37. For a discussion of U. S. immigration policy as it affects families in which both parents work as migrants, see Parreñas, Children of Global Migration, 144.
38. See also Human Rights Watch, Hidden in the Home: Abuse of Domestic Workers with Special Visas in the United States (Vol. 13, No. 2 (G)) (2001); available from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/usadom/.
39. See for example, Linda Bosniak, "Citizenship, " in Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies, ed. Peter Cane and Mark Tushnet (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
40. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "Civil Citizenship against Social Citizenship? On the Ideology of Contract vs. Charity, " in The Condition of Citizenship, ed. Bart van Steenbergen (1994);
41. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Question for Economic Citizenship in 20th Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
42. and Walzer, "Citizenship."
43. See for example Ben-Habib, The Rights of Others.
44. For a discussion arguing that women's freedom means, on the contrary, not having to make such a choice, see Weir, "The Global Universal Caregiver."
45. Furthermore, they are sexually suspect and feel the need to prove their sexual virtuousness. See Lan, "Maid or Madam?" 196.
46. Fisher and Tronto have given a particularly inclusive conception of caring as "a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible." We might insist that we seek a definition not for "caring" but rather "caring for." Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring, " Circles of Care, ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 40.
47. Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice.
48. Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7.
49. Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 39-40.