Abstract
Domestic workers experience high levels of exploitation, discrimination and exclusion from labour rights and legal protections. They are undervalued and low paid. What they do is often perceived as low skilled, demeaning and not ‘proper’ work. Discourses about the home as a place where activities are provided out of ‘care’ still prevail, and domestic workers are still overwhelmingly women. They are disadvantaged on multiple fronts besides their gender: their migration status, their racialized identity, their class or caste. But domestic work is also a site of resistance, struggles and negotiation over rights and repositioning in society, and Global Domestic Workers illustrates this clearly and coherently.
The book places domestic work at the juncture of complex interrelating forces: globalisation, structural changes and the growth in urbanization in the Global South, migration patterns, the crisis of welfare and of care provision and immigration policies in the Global North. It considers how processes of mobilisation have led to domestic work becoming an object of governance and assesses the impact of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No.189 concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which set international standards for paid care and domestic work. It focuses on nine countries, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, the Philippines, Spain, Italy and Germany, over the period 2008-18. The authors conclude that the impact of the Convention seems to have been greater where improving the conditions of domestic workers is seen as emblematic of wider social justice issues and is tied to combating structural inequalities. Inclusive forms of organizing combine human rights with cultural politics, broadening their focus to include issues like migration, anti-racism, political participation, economic autonomy, access to education or health.
The book has four chapters (besides the introduction and conclusion). It covers the main features of the domestic work sector and its legal provisions, as well as the strategies used by domestic workers' organisations to improve rights. It pays particular attention to how domestic work activism has engaged with and reinterpreted classic feminist approaches to reproductive labour and the commodification of care. Domestic workers’ struggles are presented as good examples of how ‘global rights’ are imported into local contexts, producing outcomes that are dependent upon socio-economic, cultural, historic and legal specificities. The authors argue that such struggles illustrate how intersectional politics can be practised and used to interrogate the role of feminist and workers’ movements in supporting the rights of multiply marginalised women.
The book’s intersectional lens will be appreciated by Critical Social Policy readers. As domestic workers experience the convergence and interrelation of ‘multiple structures of oppression’ (McCall, 2005), activists engage with intersectionality to shape their collective identity and political strategies. The authors explore how activists highlight the different forms of exploitation experienced by domestic workers and seek to change such interlocking systems of inequality. One way they do this is by building stronger alliances with other movements. The authors acknowledge the complex and sometimes fraught relationships between domestic workers’ groups and feminist and workers’ movements, and the secondary discrimination and marginalisation that domestic workers can suffer within single axis movements. They argue that an intersectional approach can help broach the distance between them.
Even when alliances are fractured or non-existent, feminist discourse is present in domestic workers activists’ narratives. The authors argue that these activists expand on classic feminist arguments about the value of reproductive work, focusing on the experiences of discrimination and exploitation in both paid and unpaid, formal and informal housekeeping and caregiving. The valorisation of reproductive labour goes hand in hand in their narratives with a critique of the commodification of care and a recognition of the racialized, gender aspects that interact with class, immigration status etc., thereby expanding the reach of feminist discourse and blurring the boundaries between domestic work activism and other rights based movements.
This is a slim book that covers a lot of ground. Inevitably, it can only give a sketchy outline of the issues and is often thin on analysis and contextual detail. The reader is left with many unanswered questions about the social, political, economic and ideological background of the countries under consideration. For example, we are told that India is ‘still far from ratifying C189’ (p.33), or that the requests of Ecuadorian ‘domestic workers to make formal rights a reality were not taken up by the state’ (p.41), but the authors provide no information as to why.
For a book which is about domestic workers, their voices seem strangely absent; they are heard only via their representatives, but not directly. The book focuses on the responses to Convention 189 of institutions and organisations (governments, trade unions, NGOs). Of the 200 ‘key informants, such as activists, organisers, policy makers, legal professionals and experts’ who were interviewed during the research project on which the book is based, only a minority (22 out of 200) had had experience of working as domestic workers (p.16). This may be due to the remit of the research but is jarring, especially considering the stress placed in the book on self-organization and empowerment. Giving preferential voice to organisers, academics and other ‘experts’ seems to be reinforcing the top down channels of knowledge formation that underpin constituted power relations.
Nevertheless, the book is valuable in providing a bird’s eye view of the organised struggles of domestic workers globally. In doing so, it helps highlight the problems faced by multiply marginalised groups. Domestic workers’ experiences of different fronts of oppression as women, carers, marginalised workers, migrants, racialized minorities, and their demands for economic, legal, social and cultural recognition may help, the authors suggest, create a ‘space of convergence’ for movements that have traditionally been seen as separate. By challenging the boundaries between feminist struggles, labour movements and identity based activism, this book reminds us of the importance of building and deepening alliances that can better push for societal changes and equitable social policies.