ABSTRACT
The extended example that I begin to explore in this chapter, the organization of home-based child-care workers, underscores how changes in the social production and provision of child-care in the late twentieth century have led less to a “demise of domesticity” than a resurgence of home-based work by a new working class of predominantly women of color. In examining the organization of these workers, who include licensed and unlicensed child-care workers, or so-called “family daycare providers,” who take care of their own and other people’s children in their own homes, I link the contemporary shift of the home from a privatized space of social reproduction to a socialized and politicized home/work place to the transformation of unpaid domestic labor, in this case child-care, into low-paid homework.1 As with the classification of homeworkers in general, the classification of home-based child-care workers can be confusing. Home-based child-care includes the paid and unpaid provision of care by parents, grand-parents, siblings, other relatives, neighbors, friends, nannies, maids, other domestic workers, as well as licensed and unlicensed family daycare providers. While much of the focus of this chapter will be on the so-called family daycare provider, this is at best a tenuous distinction given that many such workers are unlicensed and officially uncounted. Moreover, many others provide paid care for children in their own home, as well as in children’s own homes. Finally, a still greater number (mostly of parents and relatives) provide unpaid care at a variety of social and economic costs.
