Chia Yu Lien
Grant Type
Dissertation Fieldwork GrantInstitutional Affiliation
Washington U.Grant number
Gr. 10429Approve Date
October 11, 2022Project Title
Lien, Chia Yu (Washington U., St. Louis) "Here Today, There Tomorrow: Exploring gig care in U.S. nursing homes"CHIA YU LIEN, then a graduate student at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, received a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “Here Today, There Tomorrow: Exploring Gig Care in U.S. Nursing Homes,” supervised by Dr. Rebecca Lester. Why have so many nurses left formal waged employment for gig work? What promise do they see in such an arrangement, what precarity do they perceive, and what are the impacts on care? This project explores these questions, delving into the labor politics of gig nursing both at the point of production and beyond. Through archival research, real-time observations of gig platforms, fieldwork in nursing homes, and interviews with nurses, managers, and care recipients, it posits that nurses are turning to gig work as an act of self-preservation in response to the harms experienced in nursing home employment, where worker exploitation is not an anomaly but a fundamental element of the industry. While individual acts of resistance, such as quitting, have a long history in the nursing home industry, the rise of gig nursing—driven by the advent of platform technologies, the growth of the on-demand economy, the lack of legal regulations for gig employment, and the exacerbation of nursing shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic—has transformed these isolated acts into collective action. In this regard, gig nursing also reflects broader political, economic, social, and cultural configurations in response to changing understandings of work and care in 21st-century America.