Abstract
Since the late 19th century, as the world’s labor movement took shape, most activists and scholars have focused on struggles that seemed winnable—usually, involving male workers in factories, mineshafts, or ports, where workers had a collective ability to disrupt production to back up their demands. Although feminist scholars have repeatedly pointed out that millions of people—mainly women—who work as cleaners, cooks, or childcare workers also deserve protection, there seemed little hope of regulatory intervention. Given that workers are usually hired through informal arrangements and are isolated and vulnerable to abuse, domestic work has tended to be treated as a gray area of precarity and submission.
But that perspective has finally begun to change. Feminist labor scholars view paid domestic work as a key site of struggle, not only because so many women workers are vulnerable and exploited but also, as Jacklyn Cock pointed out decades ago in her pathbreaking Maids and Madams, because domestic servitude reflects and reproduces colonial patterns of racialized, gendered inequality.
Labor activists were perhaps less eager to take up the fight, viewing domestic work as outside the reach of labor inspectors and government regulation. Domestic work takes place in private homes, and domestic workers’ tasks must correspond to the very specific needs of employers’ families. Trained to focus on large employers like factories or mines, labor regulators have shied away from intervening in household relationships—a pattern reinforced by gendered assumptions, which often lead policymakers to treat the skills involved in domestic work as inherent and unskilled rather than learned or valued.
In Domestic Workers of the World Unite!, Jennifer Fish suggests this attitude may finally have begun to change. Particularly over the past decade, feminist activists, unionists, and international institutions have begun to acknowledge that domestic workers are workers, and that as workers, their labor rights must be protected—even in private homes, and perhaps especially because of their precarious status. In her celebratory account, Fish describes how a burgeoning social movement around domestic workers’ rights culminated in an international agreement on a new model convention, which spells out domestic workers’ rights and appropriate protections. Enriching her account with the personal stories of individual activists—many of whom are themselves former domestic workers, or the sons and brothers of domestic workers—Fish argues that the drafting of ILO Convention 189 begins a process of “dismantling the neocolonial underpinnings of global domestic labor [and] penetrating the previously inviolable domain of household labor” (p. 123).
Fish observed national domestic workers’ meetings around the world, as well as the Geneva-based discussions where Convention 189 was drafted, and her detailed ethnography offers rare insight into the complexity of crafting global regulatory conventions. As she notes, the convention also stems from the growing interest in strategies to protect “precarious” workers across many different sectors, and in finding regulatory frameworks that could protect workers who have not historically been protected by labor law or strong contractual rights. But as Fish’s careful ethnographic descriptions show, these discussions are never easy, especially for the tripartite International Labour Organization (ILO). In the case of domestic work, the struggle to find common ground between representatives of employers, governments, and organized labor was especially complicated, with colonial legacies and gendered assumptions about households often coming up in heated debates over how to balance protections of workers’ dignity and safety, against employers’ concerns of privacy and flexibility, or government worries about maintaining employment levels.
Many of these debates were further complicated by gendered tensions, as domestic worker leaders and “femocrats” who stressed the importance of respecting workers’ dignity and reproductive rights often ran up against gendered biases from the very organizations they rely on for assistance. In national union federations and even in the ILO, Fish notes, gendered understandings of who workers are, and of the private nature of reproductive work, often prevented major labor federations and international policy discussions from taking domestic workers’ needs seriously. But as Fish acknowledges, transnational networks have begun to reshape some of those assumptions; she notes the contributions of some key male allies, mainly labor leaders and bureaucrats, along with support from philanthropic foundations and key transnational NGOs, as critical to the convention’s ratification.
At times, Fish is also surprisingly open about tensions between grassroots activists, especially between those who sought to emphasize domestic workers’ dignity and their rights to fair wages and living conditions, and those who saw emphasizing vulnerabilities as a strategy to attract public sympathy and resources. Her account gives us unusual insight into internal dynamics of transnational social movements; the dilemmas around framing issues and mobilizing resources are rarely presented so clearly by insider ethnographers.
Other details of the process will be especially interesting to those concerned about how “precarious” workers can be protected. As well as trying to design global standards to regulate relationships that take place within disparate types of private space, across a range of national contexts, the convention’s framers also struggled to address vulnerabilities linked to the growing importance of global migrant labor. Global migration has expanded, and women now make up about 50% of migrants worldwide; most women migrants are likely to end up working in service work, many of them in private homes, where they find it difficult to access legal protection from either their own government or from the host countries where they work. Fish writes, “No longer can national laws assure fair labor standards when so many migrants work in countries where they have no citizenship rights” (p. 127), and where employers’ governments often display little interest in acknowledging, much less protecting, the dignity or labor rights of foreign workers.
That unresolved dilemma echoes another, even deeper, challenge. Although Convention 189 has been ratified by most of the world’s countries, ratification alone provides no guarantee that the new law will actually be implemented anywhere. The ILO can propose model laws, and nations can ratify them, but the ILO cannot enforce the laws. With its powers basically limited to publishing occasional reports on specific countries, the ILO can sometimes shame governments into taking action, but under our current system of global institutions, only national governments have the power to ensure that those laws mean more than the paper on which they are written.
In the short run, Fish’s celebratory tone is understandable: The domestic workers’ movement has been surprisingly successful in pushing global policymakers to acknowledge a kind of work that has long been left in the shadows, with workers left unprotected. But the story is not yet complete. Of course activists can hope that, simply with the passage of the convention, some employers around the world will begin to treat their domestic workers better, and some governments will begin to adopt the convention’s regulations. But in much of the world, history tells us that other employers will ignore the new code, and many governments will fail to take steps to implement the code. At the end of Domestic Workers of the World Unite!, a lingering question remains: What pressure can activists bring to ensure that the promises of dignity and recognition embodied in Convention 189 translate into meaningful protections for domestic workers? Over the next few years, if those steps are unsuccessful, the volume’s celebratory tone may begin to ring painfully hollow.