Becoming Working Class: Domestic Workers and the Claim to Localness in Mumbai

This chapter explores some of the challenges that organizers of domestic workers in Ecuador face. Its discussion of domestic worker organizing touches on the three major themes of this book: social reproduction, informal arrangements that render domestic work invisible, and class relations that degrade and dehumanize workers. Workers' engagement in long hours of paid and unpaid social reproduction makes them difficult to reach and organize. Informal arrangements, and lack of political will and political effectiveness to change these arrangements, combine to make the enforcement of existing laws difficult. Moreover, relationships with the left-leaning state, embedded in traditional assumptions about who constitutes the working class—assumptions that leave out women and informal workers—have been fraught. The chapter then shows how domestic workers and their advocates have been organizing, what strategies they have used to demand the rights of these workers, and what the implications of these strategies are for political action and change.

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Breaking the “Harness of Household Slavery”: Domestic Workers, the Women's Division of the St. Louis Urban League, and the Politics of Labor Reform during the Great Depression

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547915000186 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 88 ◽

pp. 49-66

Author(s):

Keona K. Ervin

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Working Class ◽

White Male ◽

Domestic Workers ◽

The Great Depression ◽

Local Chapter ◽

Household Workers ◽

Contractual Agreements ◽

Everyday Resistance ◽

Working Class Women

AbstractLargely denied membership in organized labor and access to basic labor protections, black domestic workers of St. Louis employed the local chapter of the Urban League's Women's Division to carve out a space for themselves in a growing, predominantly white, male labor movement and in the multiple coalitions that configured the New Deal. Domestics used household employment reform codes to lay the groundwork for dignity to manifest itself in their labor and contractual agreements. From the Household Workers Mass Meeting of 1933 to the close of the St. Louis Urban League's first phase in the late 1940s, black working-class women joined forces with progressive black women who led the Urban League's Women's Division to reform domestic employment through negotiation, enforcement, collective action, and everyday resistance. A border city with a large and settled black working class located within its core, St. Louis had acute class, gender, and racial divisions that shaped the terms of black women's economic activism. The Gateway City's mix of urban Midwestern-, northern-, and southern-style geopolitics propelled domestics’ mobilization, offering space for dissident women to call for changes to the social, political, and economic order.

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Life’s a Peach: The Convergence of Sexuality and Class in Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name

Digital Literature Review ◽

10.33043/dlr.8.1.83-91 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 83-91

Author(s):

Allen Warren

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Young Male ◽

Domestic Workers ◽

Class Structure ◽

Stepping Stones ◽

Food Items ◽

The Way

Call Me by Your Name (2017) became famous for its “peach scene,” though the orchard around the Perlmans’ villa where this fruit thrives could not have grown on its own. Distinctions of class and a parasitism by the most affluent of their workers cultivate the paradise where director Luca Guadagnino sets the blossoming romance between Elio and Oliver. Apricots are a clear metaphor for desire here, yet their prolificacy is only possible through the invisibility and silent intervention of other food items, from peas to latkes to frozen chicken. Critics have pointed out the beauty of the Italian setting and its use as a temporary escape from heteronormative surveillance, as well as the way domestic workers flow in and out of scenes almost wordlessly. What these critics have missed is the connection these occurrences have in explaining how the working class have built (but do not benefit from) this heaven on Earth, where the young male lovers may permit their bodies to act without restraint. While queer and class theories inform this discussion, my primary vehicle for interpretation will be food, both for its prominent place in the movie and for the ways it parallels the class structure at the villa. I find the film quietly reflects on the levels of economic privilege and exploitation needed to experience the paradise it depicts, with the usurpation of food in many scenes helping to remind the audience of the stepping-stones Guadagnino asserts are required to access this more subversive space.

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Proper Conjugation of Bodies

10.5117/9789462988668_ch06 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Michele Ruth Gamburd

Keyword(s):

Sri Lanka ◽

Working Class ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Extended Family ◽

Moral Panic ◽

National Level ◽

Domestic Workers ◽

Frail Elders ◽

Female Migration ◽

Ethnographic Analysis

Physical and symbolic aspects of bodies limit the migration trajectories of female domestic workers from a Buddhist community in coastal Sri Lanka. Government regulations and family decisions regarding women’s overseas labour draw upon and in turn influence discourses about gender, sexuality, age, health, and class. This ethnographic analysis illustrates that local norms task women with nurturing the brains of babies, preserving the chastity of teenage daughters, caring for frail elders, and preventing their working-class husbands from overindulging in liquor or having sex with other women. Successful social reproduction depends on the proper conjunctions of bodies in the extended family. Corporeal and symbolic dangers imagined to arise from women’s absence fuel a national-level moral panic about female migration.

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On Sentimental Orientalists, Christian Zionists, and Working Class Cosmopolitans: Filipina Domestic Workers’ Journeys to Israel and Beyond

Migrant Workers in Asia ◽

10.4324/9781315875132-6 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 25-38

Keyword(s):

Working Class ◽

Domestic Workers

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The Dual Discourse About Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race, and a Nationalist Project

Latin American Politics and Society ◽

10.1111/j.1548-2456.2006.tb00339.x ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 48 (1) ◽

pp. 87-116 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Silke Staab ◽

Kristen Hill Maher

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

Middle Class ◽

Working Class ◽

Field Study ◽

Working Conditions ◽

Domestic Workers ◽

Santiago De Chile ◽

Time Shape ◽

Migrant Domestic Workers

AbstractThis article examines the functions of the “dual discourse” about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle-class employers of Peruvian workers simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle-class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.

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