In this revealing look at home care, Cynthia J. Cranford illustrates how elderly and disabled people and the immigrant women workers who assist them in daily activities develop meaningful relationships even when their different ages, abilities, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds generate tension. As Cranford shows, workers can experience devaluation within racialized and gendered class hierarchies, which shapes their pursuit of security.

Cranford analyzes the tensions, alliances, and compromises between security for workers and flexibility for elderly and disabled people, and she argues that workers and recipients negotiate flexibility and security within intersecting inequalities in varying ways depending on multiple interacting dynamics.

What comes through from Cranford's analysis is the need for deeply democratic alliances across multiple axes of inequality. To support both flexible care and secure work, she argues for an intimate community unionism that advocates for universal state funding, designs culturally sensitive labor market intermediaries run by workers and recipients to help people find jobs or workers, and addresses everyday tensions in home workplaces.

Cynthia J. Cranford's profile page

• Winner, John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award
• Winner, Section on Labor and Labor Movements Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Award
• Winner, Errol Sharpe Book Prize

Cynthia Cranford is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the co-author of Self-employed Workers Organize. Follow her on X @Cranford1971.

In Home Care Fault Lines, Cynthia Cranford has written an ambitious and pathbreaking book. More than ever before, we cannot ignore the glaring need to invest in the home care sector in a way that is responsive to the needs of both care workers and recipients of care. Luckily, just in time, Cranford's book has provided us with an insightful analysis of how to do just that.

Contemporary Sociology

We can expect Home Care Fault Lines to become a pivotal reference for international care scholarship.

International Journal of Care and Caring

Home Care Fault Lines provides an innovative and essential analysis of the politics of community-based personal and attendant care and demonstrates the power of sociological analysis to inform policy and promote social justice.

American Journal of Sociology

Cranford's in-depth, thought-provoking, and insightful work is an important read not only for scholars of care work and labor, but also for activists, social workers, and organizers outside of academia who are interested in building alliances of care.

New Books Network