Abstract
On June 16, 2011, the adoption of the ILO Convention 189 Decent Work for Domestic Workers and Recommendation 201 marked a historical milestone for an often overlooked worker category. Although domestic workers had not been excluded from previous labor standards, the adoption of a convention specific to these workers represented an important turn in international labor law. These two legal instruments crystallize a complex process in which the international movement of domestic workers, in cooperation with other national and international actors, allows for the emergence of a transgressive transnational legal order.
The book tells the backstory of this historic moment in a first-person account by Adelle Blackett, who was both an actor and a witness to this process. Everyday Transgressions is not about her experience, however; instead it is about how a variety of actors (domestic worker organizations, states, union and employer representatives, the International Labour Organization [ILO], and other international players) contribute at different moments (before, during, and after the approval of the convention) to establishing a legal framework able to transgress the law of the household workplace.
This key concept is, in fact, one of the book’s main contributions to the study of regulating paid domestic work. The literature on the field shows that the challenges states face in their attempt to regulate this sector are related to the workplace—the employer’s house—and the emotional labor involved in this relationship because of the intimacy of the tasks performed—care work, in particular. Though Blackett does not reject this interpretation, she does propose a different take on the domestic work relationship. Following labor law scholarship regarding the pluralist law of the shop (based on diverse sources of law), she highlights the importance of decoding the normative logic that structures relational practices within paid domestic work (Chapters 2 and 3). “The pluralist law beyond the state in the domestic work relationship is powerful enough to have a tight grip on that relationship even in the presence of state law, national or international” (p. 49).
The methodological questions, then, are as follows: How can a work that remains invisible because it is naturalized be rendered visible? How can that which remains opaque for the actors involved be captured empirically? How can the process that made this governing principle invisible be historicized? And how can this be done on a global scale, leaving behind the particularities of each historical and geographically situated case in order to understand the universal features of the domestic work relationship? There is no straight answer to these questions, which is why Blackett develops a very innovative methodological strategy. On the one hand, she analyzes seven ethnographies (completed by people other than herself) that cover different regions of the world and that were carried out between the 1980s and 2005. These ethnographies display the experiences of Chicanas in Denver; Indonesian and Filipina women in Kuala Lumpur; domestic workers from Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia in Rome and Rotterdam; Latinas in Los Angeles; West Indian and Filipina workers in Toronto; and African and colored women in Johannesburg. The governing principle of domestic work in these ethnographic accounts emerges through social asymmetries within geopolitical hierarchies. Gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and migrant status play a crucial role in the way subordination and exploitation within domestic work relationships are built and function (Chapter 3).
On the other hand, to understand the historical roots of the law of the household workplace, Blackett uses a kind of hidden archive in which it is possible to find traces of domestic servant practices and expectations. She analyzes cookbooks, which traditionally served as guides on the rights and duties of servants, from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Furthermore, she explores the ways in which the master–servant law and the colonial order laid the foundations for the principle governing domestic work in the present (Chapter 4). As the author argues, looking at various sources of the law, an alternative legal history of the domestic work relationship is possible. Without drawing a direct line between the historical and ethnographic material and the present day, this methodological strategy helps to understand the domestic work relationship as an embodiment of the unequal law of the household workplace.
This concept—the law of the household workplace—thus becomes indispensable for understanding not only the process of drafting ILO Convention 189 and Recommendation 201 but also the process of ratification and the regulatory reforms that it follows at the national level. The emergence of an alternative transnational legal order can be explained only by analyzing the interactions between the law of the household workplace and national and international labor law (p. 115). In a wide space of interlegality, these normative principles are constantly in tension, superposing or contradicting themselves in endless dynamics over time.
To reconstruct one particular moment in time in which international law unsettled the law of the household workplace, Blackett chooses a multiple scale and multiple situate approach. Right from the beginning of the book, she takes us to the International Labor Conference, introduces its participants, and lets us overhear their discussions. We are able to see the law of the household workplace interfering at every step of the standard-setting process. Blackett’s ethnographic account of the 2010 and 2011 International Labor Conferences shows us the precariousness as well as the coherence of many of these consensual agreements, including the definition of domestic work, between the three parties represented. She analyzes the discussions in regard to standards of wages and working conditions as well as to the role of migration and employment agencies (Chapter 5).
From this micro-level of analysis, Blackett scales up to national and international levels through case studies on regulating domestic work: three countries from the South and two from the North, three of which have ratified Convention 189 (South Africa, Switzerland, and the Philippines) and two that have not (Côte d’Ivoire and France). Using this macro-level of analysis, it is possible to see the transnational labor law in action through the multidirectional (and counterintuitive) diffusion of decent work for domestic workers. This alternative legal order travels from South to North, before returning to the South (Chapter 6).
While the literature amply covers the articulation between national and international labor laws, Everyday Transgressions reveals what happens when the pluralist law of the household workplace intervenes, yielding questions such as: Are national and international labor laws powerful enough to counteract the inertial power of the law of the household workplace? Would formalized laws be able to change informal laws? Is it possible to transform the normalized patterns of inequality that are the underpinnings of the law of the household workplace—and if so, how? There seems to be no established answers to such questions. The law of the household workplace persists under the shadows of state law, Blackett tells us, because the latter does not hold a monopoly in the governance of the domestic work relationship. However, the standard-setting process shows that within the constant struggle between different normative orders, international labor law is able to transgress the unjust law of the household workplace.
Everyday Transgressions is a magnificent piece of research. The book sparks numerous questions and provides innovative heuristic tools for answering them. For specialists in this field (legal scholars and social scientists) but also for domestic workers and activists, it can be read as an invitation to explore the international and local dynamics in which state law confronts and defeats (albeit partially and momentarily) the persistent law of the household workplace.