Why Improving Low-Wage Health Care Jobs Is Critical for Health Equity.

Health care workers earning low wages in the United States are positioned squarely at the intersection of class, race, gender, and migration fault lines. Commitment to health equity demands higher pay, improved benefits, and more workplace protections for these workers. Clinicians with higher status jobs must help dismantle stratifications created by racist, sexist, and classist histories of exclusion. Health equity is impossible without systemic and organizational responses to the needs of members of the health care workforce with low wages.

Structural Racism And Black Women's Employment In The US Health Care Sector.

The objective of this study was to describe how structural racism and sexism shape the employment trajectories of Black women in the US health care system. Using data from the American Community Survey, we found that Black women are more overrepresented than any other demographic group in health care and are heavily concentrated in some of its lowest-wage and most hazardous jobs. More than one in five Black women in the labor force (23 percent) are employed in the health care sector, and among this group, Black women have the highest probability of working in the long-term-care sector (37 percent) and in licensed practical nurse or aide occupations (42 percent). Our findings link Black women's position in the labor force to the historical legacies of sexism and racism, dating back to the division of care work in slavery and domestic service. Our policy recommendations include raising wages across the low-wage end of the sector, providing accessible career ladders to allow workers in low-wage health care to advance, and addressing racism in the pipeline of health care professions.