The Next Shift : : The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America / / Gabriel Winant.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
• VerfasserIn: Winant, Gabriel,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

Men in hardhats were once the heart of America’s working class; now it is women in scrubs. What does this shift portend for our future? Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy—particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization. As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- The Pittsburgh area -- Introduction: When Workers Disappear -- 1. Down in the Hole: Steelmaking Pittsburgh in the 1950s -- 2. Dirty Laundry: Labor and Love in the Working-Class Home -- 3. “You Are Only Poor If You Have No One to Turn To”: Race, Geography, and Cooperation -- 4. Doctor New Deal: Social Rights and the Making of the Health Care Market -- 5. Enduring Disaster: The Recycling of the Working Class -- 6. “The Task of Survival”: The Commodification of Care and the Transformation of Labor -- Epilogue -- List of In-Text Abbreviations -- List of Bibliographical Abbreviations -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index