Negotiating Flexibility with Security in Los Angeles’s In-Home Supportive Services

Abstract

This chapter focuses on California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). At the labor market level, both the Direct Funding Program (DF) in Ontario and the IHSS gave “consumers” the flexibility to hire their own “providers,” yet in IHSS the state was more involved in the employment relationship because it paid the provider rather than giving funding directly to the consumer. Many elderly IHSS consumers hire family, but when family is not available, immigrant seniors hire others from their language and ethnic group, and this goes for Pilipinx. Like in DF, labor market flexibility shaped negotiations in the labor process, but in IHSS it shaped it differently. While DF self-managers forged and embraced a friendly employment relationship, consumers in the IHSS context of paying family or co-ethnic fictive kin were more ambivalent about their employer role and used family ideals and family-like practices to negotiate possible tensions at the intimate level. The state's reliance on filial duty and ethnic community through IHSS may bolster flexibility and security at the intimate level in terms of mutually respectful negotiations of what is done, when, where, and how. Yet, as suggested in the previous chapter, collective backing is also important if the goal is flexibility with security. Indeed, another difference between DF and IHSS is that IHSS providers have a union.