Care Work in Massachusetts: A Call for Racial and Economic Justice for a Neglected Sector

By Anne Calef and Luc Schuster

Edited by Dr. Mignon Duffy, UMass Lowell; Sandy Kendall and Danubia Camargos Silva, The Boston Foundation; Andre Green and Kaitlyn Bean, Skillworks

September 7, 2022

Care work has forever been critical to the health and basic functioning of our society. With the steady aging of our population, care jobs are also among the fastest growing in our economy. These jobs are staffed predominantly by immigrant women and women of color, so despite their societal importance, racial prejudice and gender discrimination have led to a systematic devaluation of this sort of labor. In this paper, Boston Indicators and SkillWorks provide a demographic profile of care workers in Massachusetts and pairs that with a job quality analysis for a few key subsectors.