Doing Care Work in Korea Town: Korean In-Home Supportive Service Workers in Los Angeles

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 20: Social Service Workers Navigating Race

Abstract

Immigration scholars view ethnic economy either mobility trap where immigrants with limited human and social capital are exploited by their co-ethnics or refuge that provides alternative paths for upward mobility. In either view, women in the ethnic economy have been epitomized co-ethnic expiation both in paid and unpaid work. Using an in-depth case study of Korean immigrant In-Home Supportive Service (IHSS) workers in Los Angles, this paper illuminates how the ethnic economy becomes a double-edged sword for Korean immigrant women workers. In Los Angeles, gendered immigration experience and a racialized labour market set a context in which middle-aged Korean immigrant women were funnelled into publicly-funded quasi-governmental yet precarious care job in LA Koreatown, where tacit cultural norms replaced government regulations. When the IHSS operates within an ethnic economy, what makes appropriate “Korean ways” of care and who can provide it become subjects of contestations. Documenting how these workers, who are pushed to care work as their last resort, utilize oppressive cultural norms around appropriate care for their labour protection and self-mobilization that center on broadly-defined Korean ethnicity, I highlight workers’ capacity to develop alternative protection strategies even when they are heavily constrained in an insular community. By examining workers in the publicly funded program, this case study also allows us to draw the state in the analysis of the ethnic economy. Presenting how workers’ perceptions of the cultural appropriateness, quality care and negotiations with their recipients become a core of organizing principle of their work in the stateless conditions in the publicly-funded program, I argue that the ethnic economy in LA Korean town maintains throughout the production of Koreanness. By locating the case in the nexus of gender and immigration rather than cultural particularity, this study allows us to see how the social cost of care burdens the ageing ethnic communities.

Author

• Yangsook Kim, University of Toronto