http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/ruling-in-john-leopold-trial-expected-today/2013/01/29/36ec7680-6a47-11e2-ada3-d86a4806d5ee_story.html

A few excerpts (out of the order in the story, to restore chronological order):

“The trial’s most compelling testimony came from Medlin, 63, who described how several times a day over nearly a year, her boss would summon her to drain urine from his catheter bag. Leopold required the catheter after back surgery in February 2010.

Medlin cried as she detailed how she had to follow him into a restroom and get on her hands and knees to empty the urine into a coffee can kept under the sink. In early 2011, she became upset after seeing Leopold bend down to tie his shoelace, and she realized that he had been making her do it even though he was able to do it himself.”

“Sweeney [the judge who rendered the verdict in the non-jury trial] described the behavior of the second-term Republican as “outrageous, egregious and wildly beyond” any authority he has as county executive and said his treatment of his scheduler, Patricia Medlin, in particular was “predatory and cruel.””

“Andrew O’Connell at the Harvard Business Review, cited in Resnikoff’s piece, looked at the actual pay rates for emotional labor in 2010:

When men move to jobs that require increased cognitive labor, they get an 8.8% wage boost, on average. But when they shift to positions demanding higher emotional labor, they take a 5.7% cut in pay relative to occupations with lower emotional demands, according to Devasheesh P. Bhave of Concordia University and Theresa M. Glomb of the University of Minnesota. (With women, the story is similar, but different: They get no financial reward for greater emotional labor either, but they don’t get a penalty—their wages stay flat when they make a transition to higher emotional labor.)”

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14535/grin_and_abhor_it_the_truth_behind_service_with_a_smile/

Is it possible that as we all grow older, and we see more clearly that the quality of life in the last ten years relies so heavily on good–I mean good–help, that this profession will become more valued, and better paid?

But maybe not. Because most of us won’t have much money to pay them.

Children should be born to be loved and nurtured toward independence — but that’s not how it is in most of the world, so I’m just positing a first-world pie-in-the-sky belief.

Joanna Russ, in What Are We Fighting For, made the point that, if all the intimate care (here including housework), currently provided for ‘free’, were paid at the rate prevailing in the money economy, the entire money economy would have to be transformed. She turned the reasoning around — it’s not that intimate body care (which is unpredictable in its moments, but chronic and long-term, requires attention and judgement, but does not allow of career advancement, and is not bound to any reasonable shift schedule) traditionally falls to low-status people because $reason. It’s that whole swathes of the population have been assigned low status precisely to make them available for this low-status work, which the more powerful factions really wanted to receive but really did not want to pay fairly for.

Daniel makes a great point about the supernatural or spiritual contagion of the sick. The only think I would add to his comment is that care of the sick was also taken on by women religious, who embraced their work as a kind of ultimate debasement and humility. IOW, their work was as much about humiliating themselves by taking on the most disgusting and degrading work as it was about charity for those who were too poor or alienated from family who would otherwise be expected to provide care for free (the women in the family, anyway, as Daniel notes.)

I also wonder about status w/r/t the care of people who need more intimate body care. Most of those people are either very old, very young, and/or very sick–IOW, relatively low-status people. So is it the intimacy of the care required, or the fact that it’s performed on low (or lower) status people that degrades the work?

Nursing, like teaching, was first undertaken outside of the family context by women religious (for the most part. Men religious also taught, but I know of no male religious orders whose apostolate was nursing, like the many orders of Augustinian nuns.) This is just an observation–I welcome everyone’s further comments on this.

I think another reason intimate care of the sick is denigrated (and hence heavily gendered female) is because of the phenomenological recoil that the healthy able-bodied often experience from the sick.

Sick bodies represent a rupture with the order of the world, and there is a danger, a sense of contagion that goes above and beyond that which flows from infectious disease. (Consider why small children are often afraid of hospitals even when they lack a clear sense of communicability, and many an adult fears hospitals precisely because of what happens therein).

Coming into contact with the house of sickness, with wounds, putrescence, and with death is therefore in many Judeo-Christian contexts a task left for the disenfranchised. Moreover, because sickness is deeply connected to notions of desert (the Latin root for pain is punishment), caring for the wicked is the province of she who is responsible for original sin itself.

I think some scholars estimated in 1999 the value of informal caregiving — overwhelmingly provided by women, of course — at in the neighborhood of $300 billion, which is both a conservative estimate and is almost completely un or underreimbursed.