ABSTRACT
This chapter offers background on growing need for better workplace policies, such as paid leave and fair scheduling laws, for working parents, particularly low-wage parents, as well as the burgeoning and increasingly successful movement mobilizing to establish such policies. Feminist theorists of labor should look closely at work/family and job quality movement as a site for gendered analysis of labor, as well as opportunities to theorize numerous other concepts central to feminist work, including the state, care, collective action, and others. The number of women occupying low-wage jobs and facing such challenges has grown in part as a result of major reforms to US welfare system. With time limits imposed and diversion tactics employed, thousands of women with children flooded the low-wage job market. Those who received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that replaced Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) after the passage of PRWORA, were now often expected to work in exchange for assistance.
