Health care workers are essential yet underappreciated. Janette Dill, Associate Professor in the Division of Health Policy & Management at the University of Minnesota, is researching why. Her work studies racial and gender disparities, the rewards for professional certification, and the realities of unionization in the health care workforce.
Join Janette and Grant as they ask: Why is social mobility difficult in direct care positions? What unique challenges do men, women, and minorities face in this field? How have the constitution and appreciation of working-class jobs changed since the 1970s? How do we achieve justice in the health care sector?
2:17 - Direct care jobs are good jobs in that they have high job satisfaction due to its meaning, but they can be categorized as even terrible jobs in terms of the extrinsic rewards: wages, benefits, hours, paid leave, etc.
4:17 - Upward mobility within direct care jobs is challenging because it requires credentials, which demand time and money unavailable to these workers. Large health care systems provide more opportunity and organizational support for upward mobility.
5:54 - Increasing credentials in women-dominated occupations has not shown to decrease the gender-wage gap.
9:15 - In some cases, like nursing, increased professionalization of a field has made it more accessible to white women, who can access higher education, than black women.
12:50 - It is difficult to unionize home health care workers, who constitute a large portion of low-wage workers, because they are loosely employed.
13:56 - Black workers are more likely to unionize, while white workers are more likely to increase their wages through credentialing. Men are more likely to unionize than women because men are more likely to work in larger health care systems.
17:31 - While decreasing healthcare costs and increasing wages for healthcare employees seem to be inversely related, money could be redirected toward direct care workers by reorganizing the direction of health care dollars.
20:36 - The decrease in working-class men might relate to the decrease in male-dominated, industrial jobs and an increase in female-dominated health care positions.
22:01 - Society feels much more comfortable with women taking on male attributes and roles than the reverse.
25:34 - Prosocial motivation is socially acceptable for women in the work force. People who enter direct care work for these prosocial reasons experience more burnout than those who separate their identity from their “work.”
29:22 - While in the 1970s, manufacturing work was respected and provided a pathway to the middle class, direct care work does not provide a pathway for upward mobility. These jobs can achieve greater cultural appreciation through increased pay, benefits and protections than through increased media portrayal.