Shaping regional economies to sustain quality work
January 1, 1999
Hard Labor: Women and Work in the Post-Welfare Era. – M.E. Sharpe Publications
This chapter chronicles a creative response to social retrenchment, a saga of strategic deployment of accessible resources and reshaping of regional economic forces for the benefit of targeted labor markets. The cooperative network reflects a worker-centered model that links the quality of healthcare services with the quality of paraprofessional home care work — where a stable workforce strengthens the enterprise in the health care market and better jobs are created in a growing low-wage labor market. The network strategy involves women in the transition from welfare to work and provides them with ongoing training counseling, career upgrading, and an opportunity for participation in ownership and governance of the home health care enterprises.
