This Article offers a new analytical framework for understanding the distributive role of legal regulation in the interaction of “home ” and “work. ” Using this framework, the Article maps the “double exceptionalism ” of the family in U.S. federal employment law. It suggests that employment law treats familial care responsibilities as exceptional in two different ways: first, through family leave benefits that affect the primary labor market, labeled here “affirmative exceptionalism”; and, second, through the exclusion of inhome care workers from protective employment legislation in the secondary labor market, labeled here “negative exceptionalism. ” This double exceptionalism of the family in employment law serves as a basis for an assessment of the distributive outcomes of employment law across class and gender lines. The Article shows that the combined study of affirmative and negative exceptionalism—of how employment law affects the availability of labor, as well as the working conditions, of both care workers and their employers—is crucial to a holistic understanding of the formative and distributive effects of employment law on markets of care. A central implication is that employment law should be understood as an accessible, if obdurate, legal tool which holds the potential for achieving distributional shifts from current social and political divisions of power among members of households and classes alike.

Between Home and Work

The Paper offers a new analytical framework for the study of the regulation of family relations. The framework builds on distributive models of the welfare state, and goes beyond the family-state dyad to include the market as a sphere in which the family is meaningfully regulated. The offered framework challenges the traditional boundaries of family law and suggests an understanding of the institution of the family as defined through its interaction with the institutions of the labor market and the welfare state. The framework is applied to welfare state regimes of familial care in the United States and Israel-child care in the United States (federal), and long-term care for the elderly in Israel. The comparative distributive analysis shows that viewing the family from outside traditional Family Law leads to a relaxation of some of the exceptional characteristics of the legal concept of the family, as well as to a realization that family regulation is intimately connected to broad social policy debates about citizenship, social status, labor market, and wealth distribution.

The State of Care

Achieving Accountability for Migrant Domestic Worker AbuseDomestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers’ remittances constitute a rich source of revenues for their countries of origin, while their labor ameliorates the “care deficit” experienced in wealthier countries of destination. Despite the importance of their work, migrant domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers in the world. They are often discriminated against based on their gender, class, race, nationality, and immigration status, and they are excluded from labor law protections in most countries of destination.

This Essay examines some of the underlying reasons for this mistreatment and neglect. After describing the scope and framework of the global domestic work market, it explains why the domestic work sector remains highly resistant to formal recognition as a form of labor entitled to worker protections under international and national laws. It explores the roots of resistance to accountability for migrant domestic worker abuse, drawing from sociological studies that have examined the social construction of demand for trafficked migrant domestic workers’ labor. Building upon these findings, this Essay turns to a case study of the trafficking of migrant domestic workers into the United States by foreign diplomats. The study underscores the challenges to achieving accountability for this devalued worker population.

The current wave of international migration is larger than ever before. It is also “feminized” both in that approximately half of the world‟s migrants are now women and in that the work that many of them engage in is traditional “women‟s work” such as cleaning; taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled; and sex work. The workers migrate to the “receiving” countries through formal (legal) as well as informal (illegal) routes, some temporarily and others with the hope of settling permanently. While these jobs do not necessarily have to be exploitative, unskilled migrant workers tend to be employed in low-wage secondary market jobs that are characterized by weak legal regulation and/or problems of enforcement, which often lead to high degrees of vulnerability and exploitation. Read the article here: shamir whats the border 2011 FINAL