In his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021), Gabriel Winant explains how the social reproductive labor sustaining the US's industrial economy was institutionalized in response to steelworker layoffs, aging, and sickness beginning in the 1960s. The result was a recomposition of the American working class, from a predominantly white male industrial one, to a meagerly paid and socially devalued pool of care workers comprised mostly of women, and especially women of color. Neoliberalism's insecure labor regime is not a reversion to an earlier period of inequality but a consequence of midcentury welfare policy, the partial security it offered and the race and gender hierarchies it remade.
Patrick Reilly studies history at Vanderbilt University
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