- English
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About this book
Winner of the 2024 Senior Book Prize from the Association of Feminist Anthropology
A compelling analysis of social inequality through the perspective of pregnant, low-wage service workers
The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers' ability to care for themselves and their dependents.
Pregnant at Work examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers' struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people's time is less valuable than that of other people.
Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: Time and the Reproduction of Inequality in the Low-Wage Service Sector
- 1. Service Labor and Temporal Governance in the “City That Never Sleeps”
- 2. Working While Pregnant: Conflicts between Labor, Clinical, and Gestational Time
- 3. Clinical Time and Racialized Inequality in Safety Net Prenatal Care
- 4. Cosmologies of Care: Temporal Justice and the Politics of Value
- Epilogue: Time to Care
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author