Transnational intersectionality and domestic work: The production of Ugandan intersectional racialized and gendered domestic worker regimes

Abstract

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Domestic work has evolved and adapted in the global South in distinctive racialized and gendered forms as a result of neoliberal economic restructuring. With the case of Uganda, this article applies a transnational intersectionality framework to neoliberal economic restructuring to identify how domestic worker regimes are produced. A transnational intersectionality approach spotlights the translocation of diverse Ugandan domestic workers embedded within the structural forces of economic organization, reproductive labor, state policies, and geography. Drawing from extensive fieldwork from three regions of Uganda, the study’s two main findings document: (1) the production of an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime as a consequence of the Ugandan aid state; and (2) the production of an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime supported by the weakening and underfunding of social development policies in the Ugandan national budget. These regimes show how race, gender, and regional demarcations of domestic work intersect in distinct forms connected to restructuring. A transnational intersectionality approach exposes the diversity of patterns in reproductive labor in Uganda.

Keywords

Domestic work gender race transnational intesectionality Uganda

Introduction

Research into domestic work is at the forefront of applying an intersectionality lens to the creation of global inequalities via the production of an international division of reproductive labor (Parreñas, 2001; Yeates, 2009; Zimmerman et al., 2006). The international division of reproductive labor was produced by global restructuring. Most research shows how racialized migrant women from the global South subsidize global North women’s workforce participation by providing gendered household care work (Hochschild, 2000; Misra et al., 2005). What is less studied is how the international division of reproductive labor unfolds in the global South, notably Africa, with restructuring. Domestic work has evolved and adapted in the global South due to economic, state, and geographic restructuring forces (Cheng, 2003). Restructuring, however, does not produce homogeneous domestic worker experiences. Rather, diverse, and overlapping intersectional domestic worker regimes emerge where race, gender, class, and region categories intersect with some categories rising in ‘degrees of importance’ (Anthias, 2012) within regimes.

A growing field in intersectionality scholarship has called for a stronger engagement with how global processes and transnational spaces shape marginalized identities, forms of inequality, and resistance (Hancock, 2016; Patil, 2013; Purkayastha, 2010). Feminist globalization studies highlight the gendered processes and effects of neoliberal economic restructuring on global South geographies (Chow, 2003: Mohanty, 2013; Naples and Desai, 2002). More scholarship is needed, however, in what Marchand and Runyan (2011: xxi), building on Sassen (2007), label ‘intersectional advances in feminist theorizing on globalization.’ Overlapping structural forces of domination are found at scales from the local to global but produce divergent outcomes across and within borders depending on certain markers of difference (Acker, 2004; Naples, 2002). A transnational intersectional lens applied to global restructuring and domestic work is a way to ‘deepen’ and ‘extend’ (Purkayastha, 2010) intersectionality scholarship to global South geographies by highlighting what Anthias (2012) labels the ‘translocations’ of different domestic workers.

Taking the case of Uganda, this article applies an intersectional approach to neoliberal economic restructuring to identify specific practices that produce intersectional racialized and gendered domestic worker regimes. We define domestic workers as any worker who is employed within a private household in such positions as housekeeping, childcare, cooking, gardening, driving, and security (ILO, 2017). Intersectionality in this context is understood ‘structurally’ (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1991), embedded in global-national economic processes (Marchand and Runyan, 2011) that shape the ‘transnational nature of the state’ (Lind, 2005) and geographies. Domestic workers stratified by race, gender, and regional demarcations have different ‘translocations’ (Anthias, 2012) which shape their working experiences connected to restructuring differently.

Drawing on a structural fieldwork methodological design (Gellert and Shefner, 2009) encompassing three regions of Uganda, our two main findings document: (1) the production of an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime as a consequence of the Ugandan aid state; and (2) the production of an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime supported by the weakening and underfunding of the ‘Social Development’ policies part of the national budget. These findings show how markers of difference (race, gender, and region) intertwine but also rise in ‘degrees of importance’ in impacting the material embodiment of domestic work. Accordingly, by applying a transnational intersectional frame to Ugandan domestic work, this article contributes to domestic work and transnational feminism studies by showcasing how within a single country in the global South there are divisions among domestic workers marked by race, gender, and regional social locations producing multiple and layered domestic worker regimes. Our different data findings between the two domestic worker regimes demonstrate how race takes an overt, salient force shaping aid state reproductive labor dynamics in Kampala; while gender and regional inequalities between domestic workers take form via a weak ‘Social Development’ state apparatus that is indirectly influenced by racial dynamics embedded in global restructuring. Therefore, in one geography we find overlapping regimes spotlighting the role of different intersectional institutional forces that create diverse domestic worker outcomes due to divergent domestic worker translocations.

Domestic work, globalization, and intersectionality

Scholarship on domestic work is at the foreground of intersectional and transnational processes, showing how the globalization of care via neoliberal economic restructuring creates new international divisions of reproductive labor (Chin, 1998; Hochschild, 2000; Misra et al., 2005; Parreñas, 2001; Yeates, 2009). Much of this literature provides a global panorama to the unequal organization of care by focusing on the experiences of female migrant care providers (Cheng, 2003; Lindio-McGovern, 2003; Parreñas, 2001). The processes of globalization and the global logic and practice of neoliberalism created a worldwide crisis of care. The crisis of care, however, looks different depending on where women fall within the global hierarchy. In the global North, changes to welfare policies, lack of family supportive work, and white women entering high-skill service professions left families with limited care options (Misra et al., 2005). In the global South, nations forced into the neoliberal development policies of export promotion, foreign direct investment, and labor deregulation pushed many women to be either ‘sex workers, maids, workers in export production, or microfinance recipients’ to gain an income (Pyle and Ward, 2003: 470).

Domestic work and globalization scholarship has greatly expanded our knowledge of how gender, race, and nation divisions affect domestic workers, families, and employers’ incorporation into the global care chain, but gaps in the research remain. First, scholarship linking global processes and domestic work in the global South is lacking, even though the majority, over 15 million, of domestic workers are based there (ILO, 2017). When we do not highlight global South geographies we fail to link the growth and evolution of domestic work in those regions with the ways economic restructuring has changed the national development landscape for racialized and gendered workers. Gendered norms, patriarchal structures, and racialized assumptions affect which types of jobs become available, for whom and why when an economy restructures. Yet, these processes appear different in diverse geographies. There is a particular need for scholarship to highlight restructuring and domestic work in a postcolonial African development context where we see both men and women performing domestic work. African domestic work, similarly to the United States (Duffy, 2007), is rooted in a history of racial oppression (Ally, 2009) but exhibits new intersectional entanglements (Grosfoguel, 2016) by showcasing male and female workers, regional ethnic divisions, and new postcolonial white employers.

Intersectional and transnational feminist scholars have recently called for a stronger engagement with the global contours of intersectionality and the complexity and diversity of experiences of women of color across geographies (Collins and Bilge, 2016; Falcón and Nash, 2015; Patil, 2013; Purkayastha, 2012). Applying an intersectional lens to transnational processes is useful because intersectionality’s foundation as an interrogation of interlocking systems of domination (Collins, 2015) extends from the local level to transnational forms (Grosfoguel, 2016). The ‘scattered hegemonies’ (Grewal and Kaplan, 1994) of racism, ethnicity, patriarchy, and nation collide and are constituted through global forms but manifest and take different shape depending on the region, country, and local geography they take hold in (Hancock, 2016; Mohanty, 2003; Purkayastha, 2010). Thus, this intersectional perspective is a return to an analysis of power relations inherent in ‘structural intersectionality,’ as advocated by Cho et al. (2013; see also Andersen, 2005), but ‘deepens’ and ‘extends’ the intersectional frame by linking it to ‘existing global hierarchies’ (Purkayastha, 2010) produced by the interaction between global and local axes of domination. What can be further strengthened in transnational intersectionality literature is a more direct focus on what Anthias (2012) labels a ‘translocational lens.’ A translocational lens highlights how social structures and processes produce intersectional outcomes based on individual social location.

Transnational intersectionality and Ugandan domestic work

To apply a transnational intersectional approach to how Ugandan domestic work outcomes formed under global restructuring we apply Anthias’s (2012) ‘translocational lens’ to the facilitation of domestic worker ‘regimes’ (Connell, 2014). This makes visible the ‘racialized, gendered, and classed persons embedded in domestic and transnational politics’ that Hancock (2016: 47) notes but roots it in the processes of economic restructuring. More specifically, with this approach we identify two divergent but overlapping intersectional domestic worker regimes: one racialized, the other gendered. Race, gender, and other social categories intersect in both regimes but race and gender rise in distinct ways shaping domestic workers’ lived material realities; thus, the regimes are both intersectional and a single category takes a more dominant influence. Domestic worker regimes are the patterned domestic worker outcomes that are configured from specific gendered and raced institutions found in neoliberal economic restructuring (Connell, 2014). The ‘neoliberal makeover’ (Connell, 2014: 9) has shifted how institutional structures at multiple scales – local, national, global – produce patterns of complex intersectional inequalities (Acker, 2006: 442) exhibiting ‘variation and commonalities’ (Bose, 2015) between different domestic workers.

Domestic worker regimes in Uganda emerge by applying a transnational intersectional lens to analyzing: economic organization and reproductive labor; the state; and geography. Gendered, raced, classed institutions populate every segment but specific institutions materialize to more powerfully produce domestic worker regimes. First, an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime formed, with male and female domestic workers stratified in a division of labor, as a byproduct of restructuring in support of the Ugandan aid state. When global South geographies open their economies through neoliberal reform, new industries develop and pull in gendered and racialized workers (Chow, 2003; Pyle and Ward, 2003). Neoliberal economic restructuring in Uganda began in 1987 when structural adjustment was introduced with the Economic Recovery Program. Into the next decade, Uganda liberalized coffee marketing, legalized foreign exchange markets, merged the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development (Whitworth and Williamson, 2010); and notably, deregulated labor. A lack of export-oriented production and low levels of industrialization pulled most Ugandans into weak agriculture subsistence and informal work (Byekwaso, 2010).

Against this backdrop, most relevant to the production of a racialized domestic worker regime were the global North ‘development managers’ (Pierre, 2012) that moved to Uganda to help manage the country’s transition to global market participation and to distribute global aid. Uganda functions via overseas development assistance (ODA). From 1991 to 2006, gross receipts of donor aid grants, in addition to loan disbursements to the central government budget via budget support, averaged 52% of total government expenditure and net lending (Brownbridge, 2010). Between 1998 and 2014, government debt to GDP averaged 43.13%. The global development managers of multilateral organizations, embassies, and NGOs collectively took form as a raced and gendered aid state institutional apparatus that re-imagined postcolonial reproductive labor. Reproductive labor now includes ‘white’ development care for the country subsidized by ‘black’ household care. Therefore, development managers represent figurative and literal racial subjectivities by embodying and performing whiteness as representative of modernity, development, and capitalism (Goldberg, 2009) while using the labor of black Africans to support their transnational, development-aid lifestyles. This re-informs essential ideas of blackness and Africans in servitude but re-frames the historical colonial settler now as a ‘nurturant’ country care provider (Duffy, 2007) in the postcolonial African development landscape.

Second, an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime formed and intersected with regional divisions in Uganda, notably the underdeveloped North, as a consequence of a restructured Ugandan state that did little to protect workers. State policies are highly impacted by neoliberal economic restructuring via global influences on policy, budgets, and cultural forms (Lind, 2005). States now react to domestic concerns through the constraints and opportunities set by global forces (Lind, 2005) and from their structural position in the global hierarchy of nations. In 1997, economic restructuring morphed into foreign aid supporting ‘inclusive’ neoliberalism via central-government-developed Poverty Eradication Action Plans (PEAP). PEAP focused on donor-friendly programs of health and education and ignored employment protection support previously found in the social development programs of the Ugandan national budget. The weak employment landscape in Uganda caused by restructuring crossed with Ugandan patriarchal forms (Tuhaise, 1999: 141) placing different women on a hierarchy of work from unpaid agricultural producers, informal economy workers (shop and market merchants), state bureaucrats, to, lastly, fillers of the reproductive labor left in households (PLA, 2007). Middle-class Ugandans were able to have access to domestic help but domestic workers were left unprotected and vulnerable to abuse and harassment brought on by a lack of worker protection in a weakened national budget. Female domestic workers experienced heightened gendered harassment at the hands of both male and female bosses, but women (and children) from Northern Uganda were more vulnerable.

Therefore, lastly, geography matters. The processes ‘through which places, economies, and societies become neoliberalized’ (Perrault and Martin, 2005: 193) are complex and diverse. Geographies are embedded in specific gender, race, ethnic, class, and regional social relations and hierarchies that shape domestic worker outcomes to restructuring. The geographic division that emerged strongest in our study was between North and South. Uganda was colonized under British indirect rule. The British racialized ethnic categories. The Baganda in the South gained power and privileges. Northerners, mainly Acholi, became a migrant reserve labor pool in the South or joined security forces. After the British left, continual North/South political power struggles prevented meaningful development in the North (Golooba-Mutebi and Hickey, 2010). When President Museveni (1986–present) gained power, a 15-year civil war with Northern ‘rebels’ began. These North/South racialized ethnic categories play out in restructuring through aid management and employment options (Branch, 2014). Northern Ugandan domestic workers experience the harmful conditions of domestic work at the intersection of regional, gender, class, and age categories.

Thus, the transnational intersectionality that has produced intersectional domestic worker regimes in Uganda needs to be understood at the nexus between global structural forces and national, local state institutions that are raced, gendered, and classed and specific to and embedded in Uganda. These layered and interacting institutional arrangements highlight how diverse domestic work regimes form from specific institutional gendered/racial practices in distinct institutions that create different material existences for domestic workers. Highlighting differences in domestic worker experiences connected to different structural processes spotlights what Anthias (2012) labels ‘translocational positionality.’ With a translocational lens to domestic work we are able to analyze ‘positions and outcomes produced through the intersections of different social structures and processes, including transnational ones, giving importance to the broader social context’ (Anthias, 2012: 130) of Uganda. Anthias (2012) argues that we should not just analyze ‘a group,’ such as, ‘domestic workers.’ Rather, we should focus on how domestic workers have different social locations marked by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region that are variously hierarchically stratified in connection to different structural institutional arrangements. Furthermore, with a translocational focus, the saliency of different categories can rise above others, such as race or gender, because different forces of structural power produce decidedly apparent category patterning. Thus, the complex hierarchies of domestic work difference are ultimately accentuated with a translocation approach.

Methods

The article is based on multiple structural fieldwork techniques applied over a period of one year in 2014. We gathered comprehensive qualitative data through a combination of focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and domestic worker questionnaires in three regions of the country – Kampala, Mbale, and Gulu. The questionnaires were a tool to gather descriptive statistics on wages, hours, monthly expenses, and other benefits. We also collected secondary data from multiple government reports, particularly the Ugandan National Budget Framework Paper FY 2014/15–2018/19. Our broad data sources with regional geographic scope, including 162 questionnaires (92 women/70 men), 10 focus groups (54 women/38 men), and 23 interviews (8 women/15 men), allowed us to capture the diversity of domestic work and the structural forces that shape intersectional dynamics. All of our focus group and domestic worker interview participants completed a questionnaire. Access to domestic workers was obtained following an outreach campaign to find and identify domestic workers by the Uganda Hotels, Food, Tourism, Supermarkets & Allied Workers’ Union (HTS-Union).

For our study, using the ILO (2017) definition as a guide, we define domestic workers as individuals who work for private households in a range of tasks – cleaning, cooking, childcare, gardening, security, and drivers. Uganda was an ideal geography for the study because of the country’s long engagement with restructuring and its relationship to the global aid community; its specific colonial, gender, and regionally divided history; and its location in Africa, a region understudied with respect to domestic work (PLA, 2007; Wiegratz, 2010). Notably, including male domestic workers in the analysis adds theoretical depth and nuance. There is limited research on regional divisions of domestic work within a single country in Africa, therefore the three regional cities (Kampala, the central urban capital city; Gulu, a Northern urban hub; and Mbale, located in the East) typify how diverse areas of Uganda experience the effects of transnational intersectionality connected to domestic work in both distinct and similar forms. Regional distinctions also follow ethnic divisions between domestic workers. In our sample, the most pronounced division is between the diverse ethnic backgrounds in Kampala and a predominantly Acholi ethnic background in Gulu.

Focus groups and interviews with domestic workers centered on (1) conditions at work, i.e., pay, hours, duties, etc.; (2) broad treatment from employers; and (3) experiences of gender and racial harassment. Interviews with government officials, union representatives, employment agencies, and NGOs addressed the macro political economic environment in which domestic work is embedded. The interviews were conducted by us, and depending on need, with an interpreter. English and Luganda were the main languages spoken but we also gathered data in Acholi, Kiswahili, and Lumasaba. Ugandan and Kenyan transcription services transcribed and converted all data to English. We use pseudonyms to protect the identity of participants. Statistics on data sources are presented in Table 1.

Table 1.

Uganda field data statistics.

Data sources	Regional total	Differentiated total^b	TOTAL
Questionnaires			162
Kampala questionnaires	89
Mbale questionnaires	21
Gulu questionnaires	52
Domestic worker focus groups			10
Kampala focus groups	5
Focus group participants		32
Mbale focus groups	2
Focus group participants		13
Gulu focus groups	3
Focus group participants		47
Domestic worker focus group participants			92
Interviews			23
Domestic workers^a		4
Employment agencies^a		3
Labor officers		6
Kampala labor officers	4
Gulu labor officers	2
Police officers		4
Kampala police officers	3
Gulu police officers	1
NGOs		3
Kampala NGOs	2
Gulu NGOs	1
HTS-Union^a		3

All interviews conducted in Kampala. ^b Individual number of participants.

The criteria for choosing different categories of research participants are informed by structural fieldwork design. With structural fieldwork participants represent different structural institutional positions¹ as they relate to domestic work, e.g., workers, advocates, and government regulators, in different geographies across the country. These actors and disparate geographies provide insight into how local political economic dynamics and working condition outcomes related to domestic work are connected to the broader global structural forces embodied in a transnational intersectional lens (Gellert and Shefner, 2009). The boundaries between the global and local are interrogated as ‘global economic and political change … manifest in the daily lives and struggles of women’ and men across the globe (Acker, 2004; Naples and Desai, 2002: xii) who experience the consequences of global processes in their daily lives.

Interview and focus group analysis involved open and focused coding techniques that were categorized into integrative memo themes (Emerson et al., 2011) on the conditions of domestic work; foreign-race relations; gender divisions; state social support; and Northern regional development. Focused coding included relational coding of how specific analytical categories, e.g., female domestic workers, male domestic workers, domestic workers in foreign households, child domestic workers, domestic workers in different regions, were compared and constructed in relation to each other and structural constraints in ways that produced material outcomes. The coding strategy privileged focusing on the ‘translocational positionality’ of workers as raced and gendered bodies that are produced through the global, national, and local practices of transnational intersectionality (Anthias, 2012).

Intersectional racialized domestic worker regime

A transnational intersectionality lens on Ugandan restructuring exposes racialized domestic workers’ incorporation as household care providers in support of the Ugandan aid state. The aid state, centered in and around Kampala, required a global governance apparatus of international financial institutions (World Bank, IMF), global multilateral bodies (United Nations departments), national government offices (embassies, USAID, UK Department for International Development [DFID]), global NGOs (World Vision, Save the Children), and contract organizations to support it (Hilgers, 2012). These organizations were tasked to ensure that Uganda followed the restructuring prescriptions for public and private aid disbursement, which was $1633 million in 2014. The day-to-day household functioning of the global aid state needed racialized domestic work. An intersectional racialized domestic worker regime supported the relatively luxurious lifestyles of expatriate aid workers and in the process re-formulated historical colonial racial divisions of household labor but with new contemporary meanings. Expatriate aid workers now represent what Pierre (2012) terms ‘development whites,’ who not only manage neoliberalism as a ‘technology of governance’ (Hilgers, 2012), ensuring the maintenance of global racial power relations, but also discursively represent and reproduce a new form of racialized care labor. Development whites embody modernity, rationality, competence, and technological superiority (Pierre, 2012: 58); a new type of global development ‘nurturant care’ (Duffy, 2007) that de-racializes old colonial tropes of European and American superiority under a guise of support for African poverty eradication and uplifting (Karides, 2005). Development whites also do not have to be ‘white.’ They represent how whiteness practices and meanings are now found in postcolonial spaces through the continuation of whiteness’s structural global dominance and how it is performed and sustained by ‘non-white’ bodies (Arat-Koç, 2010). As development managers provide public care for the country, male and female Ugandan domestic workers provide private care in their households. In the process, the contradictions, and racialized practices, embedded in development whites’ presence in Uganda to purportedly ‘develop’ Uganda, are exposed.

Because the institutional apparatus of the aid state is centered in Kampala, Kampala was the region in our sample with the highest amount of foreign employers. In Table 2 we show questionnaire data from 27 domestic workers, male and female, working in foreign households in the greater Kampala region. The largest subset worked in the residencies of high-ranking embassy employees who helped to manage their country’s bilateral aid commitments, development programs, and interests in the region. Many of these workers also participated in focus groups in Kampala. We also gathered data on different domestic work grievance cases against embassies from district Labor Offices and a domestic work advocacy organization. The workers in these grievance cases are not part of our questionnaire data. The average monthly wage for embassy workers in our sample was $222 for men and $154 for women. They were the highest paid workers of any category, but as informal workers, none had formal contracts, only verbal agreements. All domestic workers in foreign households lacked contracts, which left them vulnerable to long hours, no proper channels if accused of an offense, and subject to the whims of their ‘bosses’ and their extended families. They also did not typically receive ‘allowances’ (additional monies given to subsidize day-to-day expenses such as transport, food, and medical costs).

Table 2.

Domestic workers in foreign households.

Employer category	Employer details	# DWs	Men	Women	Monthly^a wages	US$	Monthly^a wages men	US$	Monthly^a wages women	US$
Embassies	North African, British, Spanish, Russian, French,	10	6	4	USh511,742	$195	USh582,913	$222	USh404,985	$154
Multilateral development organizations	European Union, USAID, UNICEF, World Bank	4	1	3	USh437,500	$166	USh500,000	$190	USh416,666	$158
Development support industries	Sobetra, ABC Bank	10	8	2	USh317,829	$121	USh334,786	$127	USh250,000	$95
NGOs/Foundations	Aga Khan, Belgium Education	3	2	1	USh233,333	$89	USh295,000	$112	USh80,000	$30
TOTAL		27	17	10	USh396,878	$151	USh403,654	$153	USh344,994	$131

Average; conversions to US$ based on Bank of Uganda Exchange Rates, 11 August 2014.

All DWs based in Kampala except one in Mbale.

The material conditions of domestic workers in foreign households are understood through an implicit racialized paternalistic perception by foreign employers that Ugandans should be grateful for the jobs they receive and that foreigners were in Uganda to ‘help’ Uganda. This ignores the fact that the lack of Ugandan economic opportunities is connected to neoliberal restructuring. Senior foreign service officers from the US make between $123,175 and $185,100 annually while in the UK the pay range is £85,000 to £139,000. Many expatriates live extravagant lifestyles not available in their home countries and commonly receive ‘hardship’ pay and other perks for simply living in Uganda. In a satirical editorial titled, ‘How Bazungu eradicate their poverty in Uganda,’ a former British expatriate aid worker wrote, ‘I can confirm that my poverty was nicely alleviated and eradicated; I had been empowered’ (O’Connor, 2008: 50). Domestic workers were aware of this inequity and were incredulous that their bosses did not pay allowances for basic food and medical necessities while they lived in lavish compounds, bought imported goods, and sent their children to private international schools. ‘Bazungu,’ an East African term entangled in multiple overlapping meanings of foreignness, whiteness, and power, is the realization of a global racial hierarchical order but materially seen and discursively understood within a local Ugandan geography.

Blackness in relation to whiteness in the intimate households of the aid state was always present for domestic workers. Blackness also unified Ugandan domestic workers of different ethnic backgrounds who work in foreign households. During a focus group in Kololo, Kampala, many workers expressed their awareness that in their perspective their work conditions were justified due to their blackness. One male domestic worker got into a verbal disagreement with a female European ambassador who was his boss. The ambassador called him a ‘Black savage, poor African.’ He responded to her by stating, ‘My friend you are working in Black people’s land . . . I am Black but you are getting money from my soil here; you aren’t in your white place here’ (3 August 2014). ‘Getting money from my soil’ represents the economic control that foreign interests embodied in restructuring and the racialized reproductive labor that Ugandans produce to support it, but their labor is poorly treated and compensated. One male domestic worker stated:

We are facing so many things really, how can you give one ten thousand (Uganda shillings) that is the money for the food for the week, while you are white and you are eating from Shoprite. I am a human being like you the only difference is color, that is otherwise insulting. (3 August 2014)

Ten thousand Uganda shillings is roughly $3. This is the amount that the worker was expected to use as a food allowance for a week while his foreign boss bought imported foods from Shoprite, a South African grocery chain. Kampala is a very expensive city to live in. Workers’ wages must meet housing, transportation, medical, food, school fees, and the needs of family members in the village. For the worker, it is racism that explains domestic workers’ condition in development whites’ households, a racism that reproduces itself under a veneer of perceived compassion for Uganda’s future, while Ugandan household workers are expected to survive under conditions of work expatriates would never accept.

The aid state structural arrangement reproduces and evolves old colonial racial relationships. Black reproductive labor was a way of attaining ‘prestige’ during British colonialism with Europeans representing an ideal civilized advancement for Africans to look up to (Kennedy, 1987). Prestige, according to Kennedy (1987: 153), ‘was a rather bald expression of status maintenance.’ Now, prestige has shifted and gone colorblind through restructuring. Aid workers exhibit prestige as capitalist development and humanitarian experts; a representation that is presumably not about race but skill and resources. This perception renders invisible the exploitative history of racial capitalism and colonial arrangements. The contemporary use of racialized household workers to support the aid state exposes the façade surrounding the new perception of prestige as colorblind. Development whites construct new racialized boundaries and meanings between themselves and their household workers that solidify their benevolence while essentializing black labor and their supposedly limited livelihood needs.

Race and gender intersect for domestic workers in foreign households even when race forms a salient boundary. More specifically, racialized gendered constructions of domestic work (1) shape domestic work position and compensation; and (2) interactions with male and female bosses. First, men made more money in all foreign household categories (see Table 2) and perform different tasks: mostly security, cooking, and gardening, although the divisions were often blurred. Women workers were also sometimes perceived and treated differently as workers. Women workers from a North African embassy complained that they could not speak to each other or drink water until the afternoon, and were told they had ‘smelly’ hands. The embassy also strictly monitored their bathroom breaks, causing one female worker to ‘carry extra knickers’ in her purse in case she had an accident. Lastly, they were accused of being ‘witches’ and practicing witchcraft. One female housekeeper stated:

The woman [ambassador’s wife] says we bewitch her, accusing us of bring[ing] charms into the house to make her sick of pressure disease or that we bring charms that make them quarrel [the ambassador and his wife]. The previous ambassador’s wife could accuse us of looking at her in a bad way. When they go to a dinner she came back with stomach ache, she will accuse us [of practicing] witchcraft [on] her stomach.

The relationship between women workers and their foreign women bosses represents an important reproductive labor shift because Ugandan women historically were not in white households during colonialism due to gendered norms and a fear of miscegenation (Kennedy, 1987). Thus, with restructuring new racialized gendered boundary constructions between workers and foreign bosses are needed to show both prestige and to maintain racial boundaries. A discourse of African witches conspiring against their boss re-fashions the historical male gendered ‘black peril’ threat as now a fear of black women who have ‘power’ via access to the intimate lives of their female bosses. This example also highlights how whiteness in a postcolonial context through restructuring with ‘development whites’ is not solely produced by ‘white bodies’ (Lopez, 2005). North Africans are not constructed as ‘black’ and fall closer to whiteness, ‘social whites,’ in the global hierarchy of nations in relation to East Africa. They are an example of how whiteness is materially and symbolically deployed through the maintenance of anti-blackness imbued within global white supremacy.

Elizabeth, a former cook-housekeeper in the home of a multilateral organization officer, displays the insidiousness and largess of the aid state through a transnational intersectionality lens. During an interview, Elizabeth told us she was fired after a white American female nanny told lies about her to her boss.² Although only a household of three (the official, her unemployed husband, and two-year-old baby), the boss employed seven domestic workers: a cleaner, shamba man (gardener), a driver, two security guards, Elizabeth, and an American nanny. A clear racial and nationality hierarchy of domestic work in the household existed where the white American nanny’s contributions and perspective on the other domestic workers was valued and believed over the Ugandan domestic workers. When Elizabeth fought back against her mistreatment and subsequent dismissal by filing a grievance with HTS-Union she was admonished for challenging her treatment and the racial status quo. Before a scheduled arbitration meeting at the union headquarters several Ugandan male lawyers for her former boss harassed her in the hallway exclaiming: ‘Who do you think you are?’; ‘Your boss can chase you if they like,’ and that she should be ‘happy’ with her work (14 August 2014).

Elizabeth’s experience unmasks the extreme racial power inequities between Ugandan domestic workers and their foreign bosses but also how whiteness may be deployed and wielded to counter the whiteness being used within the aid state. The researchers were at the union headquarters the day the arbitration meeting took place. One researcher is a white American woman. This researcher was called in during the middle of the meeting between the union and the lawyers to seemingly demonstrate that she was on ‘their’ side. Thus, using whiteness through proximity to its resources and representations, in this case a white researcher studying domestic workers, can also be harnessed to mitigate the whiteness represented in production of the aid state. Furthermore, proximity to whiteness/foreignness also might embolden domestic workers in foreign households to file official grievances. In addition to Elizabeth’s union case, most grievance cases we uncovered (although difficult to find and mostly limited) from government Labor Offices and an advocacy group were filed by domestic workers in foreign households. The Labor Office from the Lubaga Division in Kampala mediated a case between a 30-year-old female housekeeper and the ambassador from an East Asian country. The ambassador had withheld wages and refused to meet with the worker because she bought the wrong color of cabbage. The Ministry of Gender, Labor, and Social Development handled two cases involving three men who accused a Middle Eastern and a European embassy of unfair termination. A local legal advocacy organization described two court cases between two male domestic workers that worked for different embassies regarding withheld wages. By filing grievances and exposing the hypocrisy of the white aid state, black domestic workers, in a small way, gain access to material compensation and disrupt the racial status quo.

Intersectional gendered domestic worker regime

Alternatively, an intersectional gendered domestic worker regime formed with class, region, and age divisions through the structural forces of transnational intersectionality found in how economic restructuring proliferated domestic work for men and women and weakened the Ugandan state in its ability to protect domestic workers. The regime is connected to transnational processes because the Ugandan state, as addressed with restructuring, operates under constraint from and obligation to powerful global actors who dictate finances, policy preferences, and economic goals in the country (Lind, 2005). It is also intersectional because the Ugandan state is a gendered and regionalized institution whose practices create intersectional domestic worker inequalities (between men, women, and regional translocations), but many of those practices grow out of global pressures (Connell, 2014). By highlighting this regime, in addition to the regime highlighted above that was centered on race, we are exposing how there are multiple, overlapping regimes within a single national geography. It is not that race is no longer present per se. Rather, race is exhibited indirectly through how the power of whiteness is imbued through the neoliberal structural forces of global actors that shape the institutional practices of the Ugandan state. In Uganda, the gender, class, and regional domestic worker outcomes and dynamics of state practices are more prominently revealed.

Economic restructuring in Uganda pulled female and male workers in search of employment into the cities from the villages. Depending on class status, Ugandan city inhabitants were pulled into bureaucratic jobs, merchant entrepreneurism, and informal work. An oversupply of poor village workers made it possible for even relatively middle-class urban Ugandan families to hire domestic workers. Thus, the intersectional gendered domestic worker regime that emerged is representative of middle-class Ugandan employers, who hire both male and female poor Ugandan domestic workers, but those workers are stratified in how their jobs are compensated and how they experience workplace harassment by gender and region. More specifically, the regime is a byproduct of how a neoliberalized economy generated an abundance of low-skill workers who could not find formal employment and a neoliberal state that was under-resourced, staffed, and funded through its ‘Social Development’ labor protection ministry, the Ministry of Gender, Labor, and Social Development (MGLSD). Thus, class dynamics, accentuated by neoliberalism, shape the relationship between Ugandan employers and their Ugandan domestic workers; but female domestic workers experience further material inequality in comparison to male workers, and women and child domestic workers based in Gulu are even more vulnerable because of the long-standing regional/ethnic inequalities between the North and South.

MGLSD was the state ministry hit hardest by restructuring. Much of its mandate is to protect workers and support vulnerable populations, community mobilization, and mainstream gender rights; but the Ministry of Finance evaluates the ‘financial implications’ for any labor law. Moreover, in 2014, out of the 17 budget Sector Allocations in the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) from the Ugandan National Budget Framework, ‘Social Development,’ which funds MGLSD, came second to last in government budget support, at 0.3%, and of that amount donor support was only 3.8%. Top government priorities by percentage were Works and Transport (19.2%), Energy and Mineral Development (12.8%), and Education (13.5%). MTEF and top donor-supported projects go together, as MTEF is the donor communities’ preferred aid modality. For donors, priorities were Works and Transport ($252.38m) followed by Health ($186.99m), Energy and Minerals ($146.81m), and Public Sector Management ($88.02m).

Indicatively, the intersectional gendered domestic worker regime that materialized in the wake of restructuring is characterized by (1) a gendered division of reproductive labor; (2) gender-based harassment; and (3) regional inequalities. These aspects are a product of and supported by restructuring’s prioritizing neoliberal growth at the expense of decent work and labor protection practices in the MGLSD. The power of whiteness shaped global restructuring mandates and its influence on the Uganda state but the direct domestic work outcomes and dynamics formed around gender and regional markers. First, the gendered division of domestic work is seen in our sample in how women were mostly housekeepers, cooks, and childcare providers while men were mostly security guards and gardeners. In reality, most of these jobs were blurred, as men and women perform multiple tasks; but women domestic workers were paid less and their work was constructed as natural female household care (Tuhaise, 1999). Table 3 shows the average wages of our domestic work sample by region and gender. The average monthly wage for women in our sample was $58, while for men it was $92. Moreover, regional social locations intersected with gender, as women in Gulu, Northern Uganda, made $30 a month while men made $68. In Mbale, Eastern Uganda, men earned $34 a month while women earned $29. Hence, as women entered Ugandan households as domestic workers following restructuring men still maintained advantages as domestic workers. These material privileges, however, are divided by where men and women live. Thus, the necessity of analyzing domestic work through the translocations of workers is clear.

Table 3.

Domestic worker descriptive statistics (N = 162).

Region	Total	Age^a	Min.–max. wages	Monthly wages^b	US$
Kampala	89	33	USh15,000–1.5m	USh264,667	$100
Male	52	35	USh50,000–1.5m	USh279,111	$106
Female	37	31	USh15,000–650,000	USh263,051	$100
Gulu	52	27	USh30,000–300,000	USh99,038	$37
Male	10	34	USh150,000–300,000	USh178,500	$68
Female	42	26	USh30,000–250,000	USh80,119	$30
Mbale	21	30	USh30,000–150,000	USh82,857	$31
Male	8	26	USh40,000–150,000	USh90,000	$34
Female	13	29	USh30,000–150,000	USh78,461	$29
TOTAL MEN	70	34	USh40,000–300,000	USh243,125	$92
TOTAL WOMEN	92	29	USh30,000–250,000	USh153,455	$58
TOTAL DWS	162	31	USh15,000–1.5m	USh192,201	$73

Note: Data from background questionnaires.

Average age. ^b Conversions to US$ based on Bank of Uganda Exchange Rates, 11 August 2014.

Domestic work particularly represents a gender ‘duality’ (Salzinger, 2003) exhibiting both rigidity and fluidity with regard to how feminization and masculinization are performed and produced through domestic work. For example, Abia, a Ugandan domestic worker advocate, stated (6 August 2014): ‘Of course, the “shamba” boy, who we call “shamba boy,” in most cases they are men, really. And we call them “shamba boys.” ’ By calling some male domestic workers ‘boys’ due to the household nature of their work we find that contemporary male domestic workers are both feminized and infantilized as precarious household workers in relation to other male employment. Nonetheless, their position and working conditions are compensated and constructed differently vis-a-vis women domestic workers according to hegemonic patriarchal logics. Furthermore, their male gender position protected male domestic workers from the rampant abuse female domestic workers experienced from male and female bosses.

Discussions of sexual harassment and intimidation were ubiquitous in all of our focus group discussions with female domestic workers. None had filed complaints. One female worker (2 August 2014) stated, ‘there are cases where some men aren’t satisfied by their women and they turn to you. Any objections mean salary [decrease] and promises to dismiss you from your job; yes, it happened to me one time but I left that job for fear of my life.’ Another woman accused of stealing was forced to ‘open her private parts to check whether she had hidden the dollar’ in front of the entire household, according to her male co-worker (3 August 2014). Subtle forms of sexual intimidation such as being forced to wash the intimate garments of female bosses, a sign of disrespect within the cultural practices in Uganda, and being verbally abused by female bosses were also reported to us. One female domestic worker (3 August 2014) stated:

When I begun the work fine, my boss, okay, we have the washing machine, it does all the washing but her bra with the underpant[s] she does the washing herself. But now in our days she has changed her mind. She could just collect them there in her room but then after supper she tell me, ‘Could you please go and help me to do that thing.’ So those are the things we are facing in the workplace but you cannot refuse because you want to protect your job so you have to do it.

Abuse of female domestic workers by male and female Ugandan employers amounts to a complex intersectional gendered domestic worker regime. Male bosses exert sexual control over female employees, while female bosses seek to intimidate and humiliate them because of their perceived status as a ‘threat’ to the female employer’s position in the household. These practices should be analyzed within a context of global patriarchal hegemonic gender norms that intersect with local norms to produce Ugandan women of different classes who are socialized into specific behavior patterns and expectations and reproduce them.

In addition, for domestic workers based in Gulu, abuse is accentuated by regional and age inequalities. In Gulu, a neoliberal humanitarian economy took hold in the aftermath of the civil war (Golooba-Mutebi and Hickey, 2010). PLA (2007) documented from their study of 636 Ugandan adult domestic workers, that those based in the North reported insecurity as a key reason why they went into domestic work. Moreover, the lack of jobs and education steered Northern children toward domestic work, with one government worker estimating to us that children make up 60% of the domestic workers in the region. From the Gulu police department we documented 14 child-domestic worker abuse cases over a seven-month period in 2014. Most were female child domestic workers (10) who experienced assault or verbal abuse, and who attempted suicide. One of the abuse cases documented by the police entailed an HIV-positive 14-year-old-girl threatening violence to her employers by saying, ‘one day I will die with you’ because they had stigmatized her for her status. A case reported to us by the police, but not formally documented, included a young girl domestic worker who injected a child in her care with her HIV-infected blood. Absolute desperation and hopelessness fueled violent reprisal. In domestic worker focus groups in Gulu, two young women told us about being sexually approached by HIV-infected men when they were children and the limited power they had to protect themselves. We were told child female domestic workers also referred to bosses as ‘daddy.’ Using titles (familial and professional) instead of given names is a sign of respect in Uganda but when domestic workers use a familial title, it replaces a worker relationship with a familial.

In many ways, female child domestic workers in Gulu carry the most trauma from the intersectional gendered domestic worker regime that formed and solidified under neoliberal economic restructuring. Their translocation as children coming from a region of undeveloped ‘rebel’ ‘Northerners’ intersected with the depleted labor protection in ‘Social Development’ funding to accentuate the extremely negative conditions of their domestic work employment. As attested, the greatest byproduct of a decimated MGLSD is the extreme vulnerability it placed domestic workers in; but as Collins and Bilge address (2016: 96), vulnerability is not an ‘absolute category’ and ‘some women were more vulnerable than others’ after we factor in other markers of translocation. Regardless of labor legislation, a Ugandan advocacy organization’s domestic work study found that domestic workers were not benefitting from government legal provisions and suffer under extremely weak labor protection enforcement (PLA, 2007). Our findings corroborate this study. From our fieldwork we uncovered that labor inspection is not only underfunded but also inspectors are poorly equipped to deal with the growth of domestic work. There were only 38 labor officers who were able to complete just 64 formal workplace inspections in 2014 for the entire country. Domestic worker government grievance reports were extremely difficult to unearth, as the national Acting Director of Labor told us they ‘do not inspect homes,’ but our field data contradict this statement. Labor officers told us they were mediating domestic work disputes but haphazardly documenting them (3 cases reported nationally to the Labor Commissioner, 6 in Gulu, 2 in Lubaga, 5 in Kampala city since 2009), and with limited means and training on what are best practices. One labor inspector (8 August 2014) stated regarding investigating domestic worker complaints, ‘There is no manpower . . . there is no transport to get to the field. . . . I have to pull [on] my money to put on my motorbike to go and see what has happened.’ The best result inspectors hope for is mediation and a possible small compensation for the worker. The grievance most likely will never be documented by the inspector. Ultimately, the intersectional gendered domestic worker regime exposes the interaction between transnational neoliberal processes and state practices in facilitating domestic work inequalities marked by the translocations of domestic workers divided by gender, region, and age.

Conclusion

The Uganda domestic worker case exposes the entangled power arrangements (Grosfoguel, 2016) embedded within neoliberal economic restructuring that places countries, regions, and marked bodies along a hierarchical global racial and gender continuum of care within a single country in the global South. A transnational intersectionality perspective highlights the ‘translocations’ (Anthias, 2012) of domestic worker social categories embedded in the structural dynamics of economic organization and reproductive labor, state policies, and geographic divisions. With this approach we must take seriously the geography of Uganda, divided by the social location of variously raced, gendered, and regionalized domestic workers who experience differently the stratified outcomes of domestic work. Therefore, transnational intersectionality pushes domestic work and intersectionality scholarship forward by representing an important heuristic framework that focuses attention on how domestic work social categories relationally solidified through difference are constituted and arranged through complex global processes but materially are felt diversely. In any country, domestic workers do not experience the same working conditions from the growth of domestic work. The implications from our two regimes reveal how there can be multiple, overlapping domestic worker regimes constituted by different intersectional institutions that also interact and proceed to produce a translocational hierarchy of lived domestic work experiences.

In Uganda, as an outcome of the aid state, domestic workers serving in the households of foreign development managers were subject to racialized assumptions of care and material need, creating an intersectional racialized domestic worker regime. Gender intersected with race shaping female workers’ experiences in foreign households, but race rose in degree of importance as men and women performed racialized reproductive labor for male and female foreign employers. An intersectional gendered domestic worker regime formed when domestic workers were pulled into the households of middle-class Ugandans due to an abundant informal labor market but were left unprotected by the depletion of ‘Social Development’ resources caused by restructuring. Female and male domestic workers were divided, compensated, and subject to various forms of abuse according to their gender, regional and age status. Thus, the transnational intersectionality of Ugandan domestic work unmasks the layered and intertwined ways race, gender, and region inequalities form.

As well as highlighting the importance of a transnational intersectionality framework, this study accentuates the particular position and framing of ‘Africa’ within the global imaginary and economy. As Ferguson (2006: 2) notes, Africa is in the shadows, but serves as a multi-meaning metaphor ‘against which the lightness and whiteness of western civilization can be pictured.’ The deep racial consequences of neoliberal economic restructuring are imbued throughout all structures of economic, political, and social life in Africa, even without the ubiquity of white bodies. We found through an examination of Ugandan domestic work that ‘whiteness has retained its undisputed if contested power position’ (Pierre, 2012: 72) through both overt and subtle forms of signification. This demands continued attention to how a global racial hierarchy intersects with gender with evolving constructions of reproductive labor. Particularly, our study exposes how male African domestic workers are racially marginalized but gender privileged. This may lead to new opportunities and challenges for building worker solidarity among domestic workers (Sarti and Scrinzi, 2010).

We also need to interrogate more the role of whiteness in the research process (Faria and Mollett, 2016). How whiteness not only can be used as a tool for racial justice but also embodies the wider global racial order. The whiteness of one of the researchers opened doors with government and advocate participants and demonstrated a perception of ‘authority’ with domestic workers. By collaborating as researchers we seek to mitigate global racial inequality and redistribute the privileges of whiteness while acknowledging how it is reflected and reinforced in our own structural positions. Ultimately, more research is needed to fully explore transnational intersectionality and domestic work in other global South geographies to document the varied gendered and racialized processes that produce domestic worker regimes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for comments and guidance on the article from Joya Misra, Krista M Brumley, and Louise Seamster. We are especially indebted to the domestic workers in Uganda who participated in this study and are organizing for better working conditions and livelihoods for themselves and their families.

Funding

This research was funded by the Department of Sociology, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Notes

Author biographies

Michelle Christian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Her researcher connects intersectionality, structural racism, global political economy, and precarious labor scholarship.

Assumpta Namaganda is the Assistant General Secretary for Domestic Workers with the Uganda Hotels, Food, Tourism, Supermarkets & Allied Workers’ (HTS-Union), affiliated to the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF).

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