Abstract
Home health care is a growing occupation in the United States which calls for significant emotional labor. On the basis of interviews and participant-observation with home health workers from Ghana, this paper argues that home health work is different from other kinds of emotional labor in that living and working in the client’s house are central to the conditions of work and the dignity assaults workers experience. Among their strategies for responding to these dignity threats is to long for a house and to direct their energy towards an alternative social field through house construction “at home” in Ghana. Thus, the dignity threats experienced by immigrant home health workers raise concerns about the occupation’s ability to retain workers as well as immigrants’ sense of worth and belonging in the United States.