Abstract
This book is a rich and detailed ethnography, conducted over a 6-year period, of how the most invisible and undervalued workers of the world, that is, domestic workers, succeed in passing a treaty for their rights at the International Labor Organization (ILO). The ILO is an intergovernmental body comprised of government, worker, and employer delegates of its 183 member states. Given the unequal power between these three parties, historically, for many analysts the ILO was at best a reform oriented organization and at worse one that reproduced the status quo. Hence, despite many conventions, which are treaties that are binding on governments who ratify them, the situation for most workers, particularly in the era of neoliberal globalization remains precarious and exploitative.
Given this reputation, how did the ILO pass the Domestic Workers Convention, commonly referred to as Convention 189? Jennifer Fish tells this fascinating story, which is a result of several stars aligning together. Chief among them, the decades long histories of domestic workers’ struggles and policy wins in several countries around the world and the formation of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN) in 2006 and the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) in 2010, the first women led union. Around the same time given the inequalities generated by neoliberal globalization, ILO had begun to focus on Fair Globalization. This together with allies within the ILO and various governments and IDWF’s strategic collaborations with two key players, the Women in Informal Economy: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers’ Association (IUF), along with serendipity were what led to the victory.
As Fish notes, looking at the ILO is instructive as “the ILO serves as microcosm of the larger global arena where employers defend capitalism, workers demand rights, and state governments vacillate between profit and people” (p. 8). In the case of Convention 189 member states, at least on paper, put domestic workers over profit. This was accomplished by a large, shifting, and coordinated cast. Chief among them, the global domestic workers’ movement which began in 2006 when the International Restructuring Education Network Europe, brought 60 leaders from national domestic workers’ movements to build a global movement. In 2008, ILO announced its intention to bring Decent Work for Domestic Workers on the agenda of its International Labor Conference. Only twice before in 1948 and 1965 had ILO even had this issue on the agenda. But following the increased pace of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s along with global women’s and human rights movements, in 1996, ILO also began to articulate work in the era of human rights, particularly in nonstandard work sites such as the household. ILO Convention 189 became the focus of the newly formed IDWF, which over 2 years attended meetings of the ILO in Geneva, Switzerland and with the help of WEIGO and IUF, government delegates, and other advocates achieved the passage of the convention in 2013.
But as decades of work on transnational movements around intergovernmental bodies, such as the United Nations and its agencies, have shown these are fraught sites. Tensions abound because only those with economic and linguistic resources have access to elite institutions like the ILO; and there are inevitable differences between local activists and the transnational, professional consultants and advocates who help them navigate these elite spaces. Thus, all public outreach and media relations were done by English speaking professionals who crafted domestic workers’ stories to fit the need of the media and the institution. Often domestic workers were exasperated at having to tell their stories numerous times; it was also difficult to speak in a universal global voice given the varying work situations and national contexts. For example, for domestic workers in Asia and North America migration and citizenship were key issues but not as much in African countries.
Yet, storytelling served as a key unifier among women activists across national contexts fostering a shared worker identity and building ties across national contexts for their rights as women, workers, and citizens. Their framing of domestic work was also instrumental in their success. First, they defined it as just like all other work, not a special category, and hence, in need of the same protections.
Furthermore, framing domestic work as a transnational care commodity and domestic workers as “conduits of globalization connecting families, nations, economies” resonated with ILO delegates many of whom relied on domestic workers in their own homes. Second, IDWF also foregrounded justice in all their appeals, “everyone should care for care work,” and connected their struggle to other struggles of rights, economic restructuring, and justice. “Domestic workers’ rights are human rights.”
Fish also highlights the ways in which domestic workers used their “activist edge” both playing by the rules and pushing the boundaries of rule bound arenas such as the ILO. Even though most of the time activists could only observe the proceedings, they made their presence felt through song, cheering, clapping, and just by being there. When they were reprimanded for disturbing the deliberations with their “bad behavior,” they made their presence known non-verbally through color coordinated clothing and buttons, using their bodies as “rhetorical tools.” Outside the ILO, they made their presence visible by giving press conferences and holding public demonstrations—in one instance, with an apron quilt with handprints of 3500 Asian domestic workers. Yet, the success of the IDWF also raises questions that have been raised about other global policy victories around deeply entrenched injustices. How does this victory translate on the ground for domestic workers, most of whom are not unionized? In normalizing and regulating domestic work, which is highly classed, gendered, and racialized, questions of socialized care, men’s responsibilities for care work, and the increased need for such work in a neoliberal and global economy recede into the background, perpetuating inequalities.
Finally, in a book otherwise full of detailed and complex analysis, there was very little discussion of what Fish calls her “research practice,” which she describes, thus, Activist, organizer, unionist, visionary leader, Witbooi speaks, no script, no notes. Advocate, writer, teacher, photographer, I scribble and snap photos. Her voice commands; I document the details. Together we conjure. We co-write policy talks this way, in hopes of gaining rights for domestic workers. (p. 13)
Often described as scholar activism, such a research practice also raises many thorny questions. If “our work is not our own but reflects the analyses of people engaged in building a global movement,” then what does it mean that our books only bear our names? Some reflections on these questions would have been a welcome contribution to this ongoing debate.