Abstract
People. It is people who anchor and power Jennifer Fish’s extensive and meaningful text about the road to the passage of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) Convention 189, the convention concerning decent work for domestic workers. Of all the multiple actors who Fish populates her text with who play a pivotal role in bringing Convention 189 to fruition, it is women domestic workers from the Global South—their voices, songs, bodies, and stories—who are the lifeblood to what Fish argues is the most invigorated women’s transnational justice movement of the twenty-first century. Domestic worker organizers and leaders such as Hester Stephens and Myrtle Witbooi from South Africa, Aida Moreno from Chile, and Shirley Pryce from Jamaica began organizing domestic workers in their respective countries decades prior. They brought the fight from backrooms and backyards, at considerable risk, to national arenas, regional networks, and, finally, all the way to Geneva. Distinctly, Fish’s book of “transnational organizing” in the shadows of the global economy, where women quietly work day and night in private households providing the reproductive labor that subsidizes the machinery of global capitalism and state social responsibility; is one of hope, tensions, and the transformative possibilities of a poor, women of color–led global movement in pursuit of global social justice and collective liberation.
Rather than rely upon any specific theoretical position to guide analysis, Fish subtly incorporates theoretical insights from the vast literature on domestic work and organizing as a way to contextualize how Convention 189 rapidly materialized via spotlighting how decisions were made, challenges emerged, and opportunity structures arose. Her embedded ethnography approach documented the movement as it unfolded from the back roads of South Africa, across five continents, ultimately reaching the ILO. Much of the book is focused on what happened behind the scenes, at meetings, and in public forums about domestic work at the ILO. In the backdrop of the procedural-heavy, male-dominated territory of the ILO, domestic workers and their allies organized, navigated, and strategically positioned narratives about the value of domestic work that was worthy of a “legitimate worker” designation, and thus, entitled to the same worker rights and benefits found in more traditional employment relations. Fish explores how the tripartite system between business, labor, and government dictates all rules of order and complex nuanced proceedings that govern how a labor convention is established. A recurring theme was how the imposing, bureaucratic, and distant ILO was transformed by the presence and actions of domestic workers. During, after, and outside of proceedings domestic workers shouted, sang, told stories of abuse and triumph, and demanded delegates to confront their own privilege.
The immense contributions of the book really emerge when Fish disentangles the inherent tensions and contradictions that form in the movement as it pursues the Convention, most notably around gender framing and ally standpoints. A strategy the movement employed was “crafting vulnerability” (p. 152) and suffering around a gendered performance of victimhood. The positioning of domestic workers as childlike and marginalized, who suffer along the edges of patriarchy and devalued work, belies the picture of passionate, capable women workers who juggle multiple household care responsibilities, hold court with national legislative bodies, and organize their sisters in pursuit of labor rights. Fish never fully resolves the consequences to reifying gendered suffering and Global North benevolence but hints that there is agency involved in domestic workers’ performance. Similarly, the “tapestry of alliances,” (p. 186) their role, support and organizational agendas collide in the fight for Convention 189 positioning how the movement needed and relied upon “professional advocates” who also reflected existing global racial power inequalities.
The issue of “race” was one area Fish could have developed further beyond noting that domestic work emerges from “race hierarchies and deep-seated class/caste systems” (p. 6). New forms of racialized domestic work are produced nationally and in transnational spaces that require new modes of analysis and insight, particularly as it shapes implementation and enforcement of the Convention, but this line of inquiry went beyond the scope of the text. Importantly, the book’s core achievement is in providing a spotlight to a little known and under-appreciated global intersectional movement that took the ILO by storm and changed the face to what a “standard” worker is. The future of and leader of “workers” are reflected in the faces of women of color from the Global South notably epitomized in the post-Convention established International Domestic Worker Federation. Fish’s reflexive scholar-activism as a documentarian, advocate, and participant in the movement also provides a blueprint for how to achieve purposeful cross-border feminist engagement and accountability. According to South African union activist, Eunice Dhladhla, “everything is alive because of the domestic worker” (p. 137). Domestic workers may also be the necessary “oxygen” needed to sustain and build the transnational labor justice movement into the twenty-first century.