Unionization of home care has depended on the state location of the occupation. Government social policies and funding created home care, shaping the structure of the industry and the conditions of work. The welfare nexus, linking old age, disability, health, and welfare policies, however, also transformed care hidden in the home into a public service. Through case studies of California and Oregon, leaders in deinstitutionalizing care of the elderly and disabled, we explore the social struggles that forced the state to recognize its invisible workforce. The home location of personal attendants and other health aides has entailed not only organizing challenges but policy innovation as well. Using the welfare state location of the labor, workers allied with consumers to develop the public authority as a newstructure of representation. The history of home care shows that social welfare and health policy have long been entangled with labor policy.

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What constitutes 'sex' and defines 'labor' has varied across time and space, we have learned over the last 35 years through an explosion of monographs and articles in the history and sociology of sexuality and labor studies. But rarely has the new labor studies, with its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity and its consideration of unpaid as well as paid work, put sexual labors at the center of its focus. Even the rich literature on prostitution more likely has come out of women's studies than labor studies. Similarly, scholarship on sexuality focuses more on sex acts and identities than on markets, work culture, labor standards, collective action, and occupational segregation -the stuff of labor studies. The referents and literature for these fields stand apart -despite the growth of LGBTQ caucuses in the labor movement, renewed feminist debates over sex work, and the commercialization and proliferation of sexual services and unionization of exotic dancers.To situate our discussion of sex work within discourses of labor studies, we insist on using the term 'sexual labor'. We move away from the term 'sex work', which is a politically laden concept that seeks to argue against the notion that prostitution is inherently harmful to women. By problematizing the term 'sex work', the essays in this volume refuse to fall prey to the debate on whether sex work is a legitimate form of labor or prostitution is a form of sexual slavery (

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