Dust and Dignity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erynn Masi de Casanova ◽  
Maximina Salazar
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
National Level ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Informal Work ◽  
Work Arrangements ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Common ◽  
Work Histories

What makes domestic work a bad job, even after efforts to formalize and improve working conditions? This book examines three reasons for persistent exploitation. First, the tasks of social reproduction are devalued. Second, informal work arrangements escape regulation. And third, unequal class relations are built into this type of employment. The book provides both theoretical discussions about domestic work and concrete ideas for improving women's lives. Drawing on workers' stories of lucha, trabajo, and sacrificio—struggle, work, and sacrifice—the book offers a new take on an old occupation. From the intimate experience of being a body out of place in an employer's home, to the common work histories of Ecuadorian women in different cities, to the possibilities for radical collective action at the national level, the book shows how and why women do this stigmatized and precarious work and how they resist exploitation in the search for dignified employment. From these searing stories of workers' lives, the book identifies patterns in domestic workers' experiences that will be helpful in understanding the situation of workers elsewhere and offers possible solutions for promoting and ensuring workers' rights that have relevance far beyond Ecuador.

Like Any Other Job?

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Erynn Masi de Casanova
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Political Effectiveness

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.

Proper Conjugation of Bodies

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.

In Search of the Ideal Worker

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Erynn Masi de Casanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
High Status ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Work Arrangements ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
Ideal Worker ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter discusses the image of the ideal domestic worker, looking at the point of view of potential employers and domestic employment agencies acting as intermediaries. The ideal worker and the ideal domestic employment arrangement, as communicated by the “help wanted” ads, illustrate all three of this book's main themes: social reproduction, informality, and class relations. Paid domestic work, like other forms of social reproduction, invokes stereotypes about gender roles and involves tasks and qualities that connote femininity. Gendered assumptions about social reproduction are thus embedded in the ads, which nearly always label the desired domestic worker as a woman. Work arrangements are usually informal and escape regulation by labor law. The class relations of contemporary domestic employment are also sometimes visible in the text of the help wanted ads. Some ads refer explicitly to the high status of the employers' family and some indicate status indirectly, for example, mentioning where the family resides—almost always in upper-class or middle-class neighborhoods of Guayaquil, including exclusive gated communities. The class relations of domestic employment, rooted in precapitalist and colonial socioeconomic structures, also appear in references to trato (treatment) of the worker by employers. When employers emphasize trato, personal treatment, rather than pay and benefits, they hearken back to patronage relationships based on personal connections rather than labor laws. Even today, emotion, care, respect, and honor loom large in domestic employment.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Erynn Masi de Casanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Modern World ◽  
International Labor Organization ◽  
Home Based ◽  
International Labor ◽  
The Family ◽  
Private Homes

This introductory chapter provides an overview of domestic work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines domestic work to include housework; caring for children, ill, disabled, or elderly people in private homes; and tasks such as “driving the family car, taking care of the garden, and guarding private houses.” Paid domestic work is an ancient occupation, rooted in feudal economic systems, but it is part of the modern world under capitalism. Historically, domestic workers cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, as they do today. However, this work has shifted from in-kind payment (room and board) to wages, and from most domestic workers living with employers to most living separately. Also, middle- and upper-class women have entered the workforce, relying on domestic workers to take up the slack at home. Based on research conducted between 2010 and 2018, this book explains why domestic work remains an occupation of last resort in Ecuador (and elsewhere) and discusses how these working conditions might be improved. In exploring the experiences of paid domestic workers in Ecuador, it shows how concepts of social reproduction, urban informal employment, and class boundaries can help illuminate the particular forms of exploitation in this work and explain why domestic work continues to be a bad job.

Women, Children, and the Social Organization of Domestic Labor in Chile

2011 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nara Milanich
Keyword(s):  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Work Arrangements ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Individual Household ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of

Abstract This article explores the relationship of domestic labor and social reproduction in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chile, paying particular attention to the roles of children. Children figured as products of women’s reproductive labors, but they were also themselves crucial members of a domestic labor force structured by age as well as gender. Drawing on classified employment ads, judicial cases, and the records of Santiago’s main orphanage, the analysis highlights how the labor of childrearing and the labor of children existed within the same social field. Women’s and children’s domestic work, while increasingly distinct, mutually shaped each other. Children influenced employment opportunities and work arrangements for women, both mothers and childless women, and placed in vivid relief the tensions that pervaded women’s remunerated and unremunerated labors. Women’s work in turn shaped the fate of children. Ultimately, the analysis suggests that domestic and reproductive labor was a resource allocated not just at the level of the individual household but on a societal scale across social groups. Circulating through households of different class statuses and across rural and urban spaces, the labor of childrearing (including wet nursing and fosterage) and the labor of children (as servants and criados) was mobilized across dense social networks. Even as the circulation of this labor linked disparate social groups, it simultaneously differentiated them, materially and symbolically, thereby reproducing the multigenerational patterns of patronage and hierarchy that were constitutive of Chilean society. Finally, while domestic work is often associated with private spaces, the analysis finds that public beneficence institutions played an active role in training, subsidizing, and distributing it.

“We cannot discriminate against someone without an eye or a leg … But I do look at obesity”: Statistical discrimination and employers’ recruitment strategies at housecleaning service companies in Johannesburg

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
David Du Toit
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Recruitment Strategies ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Demographic Profile ◽  
Job Seeking ◽  
Service Companies ◽  
Personal Skills

The landscape of paid domestic work has changed considerably in recent years with the growth in the number of housecleaning service companies in South Africa and elsewhere. Housecleaning service companies transform domestic work into a service economy where trained domestic workers render a professional cleaning service to clients. In South Africa, little is known about the factors that employers at housecleaning service companies take into consideration during the selection and recruitment process. A key feature of paid domestic work is the gender, class and race constructions of domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are women, usually women of colour, from low socio-economic backgrounds. Whether we are seeing a change in the demographic profile of domestic workers with the growth of housecleaning service companies remains unclear. This paper therefore focuses on the recruitment strategies of employers at selected housecleaning service companies in Johannesburg in an attempt to shed light on the challenges that jobseeking domestic workers may face. Open-ended interviews with managers revealed that gender, race, age, long-term unemployment, and technical and personal skills of job-seeking domestic workers have a strong impact on the recruitment process, while immigration status plays a somewhat reduced role. This paper concludes that housecleaning service companies have not changed the demographic profile of domestic workers in South Africa yet, and that paid domestic work is still predominantly a black woman’s job.

Impact of Covid-19 on Informal Sector: A Study of Women Domestic Workers in India

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946622110238
Author(s):  
B. S. Sumalatha ◽  
Lekha D. Bhat ◽  
K. P. Chitra
Keyword(s):  
Informal Sector ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
National Level ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
State Support ◽  
Household Dynamics ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
Jel Code ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
At Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has left severe impact on livelihood, security and health of informal sector workers, especially domestic workers, majority of whom are women. Being least organised and lacking institutional support, domestic workers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and human rights violations, and the pandemic has aggravated the situation. Telephonic interviews were conducted with 260 domestic workers from three cities, namely Delhi, Mumbai and Kochi with focus on working conditions, livelihood and household dynamics, health scenario and state support during the pandemic. The data was substantiated with qualitative inputs from in-depth interviews conducted with 12 domestic workers across the cities. In the results, widespread job loss is reported among domestic workers during March–June 2020 along with drastically reduced income and increased workload. About 57% domestic workers reported stigma and discrimination at workplace, and 40% worked without any safety measures. Incidence of domestic violence at home, increased work burden at home, issues in access to health care, etc., were reported. The study findings point out the urgent need to have a national-level policy and state support specifically targeting women domestic workers, without which the situation of poverty, health hazards and social exclusion will continue to exist. JEL Code: J4, J46

scholarly journals PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM PEKERJA MIGRAN PENATA LAKSANA RUMAH TANGGA (PLRT) DI LUAR NEGERI OLEH NEGARA DITINJAU DARI KONSEP TANGGUNG JAWAB NEGARA

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Koesrianti
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
State Responsibility ◽  
Vulnerable Group ◽  
Unfair Treatment ◽  
National Jurisdiction ◽  
The Government ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

<p align="center"><strong><em>Abstract</em></strong></p><p><em>This research discusses the legal protection of migrant workers, especially, women migrant domestic workers. Due to the nature and characteristic of domestic work, the migrant domestic workers are subject to violence, abuses, discrimination and unfair treatment when they are in destination countries. The most vulnerable group among migrant workers is women migrant domestic workers because they are women. Accordingly, the government and the stakeholders should give protection to the women migrant domestic workers regardless their status (legal or illegal) as they are stay beyond national jurisdiction of sending state.</em></p><p><strong><em>Keywords: </em></strong><em>legal protection, Migrant workers, domestic, state responsibility.</em></p><p align="center"><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p>Penelitian ini mengkaji bentuk-bentuk perlindungan hukum yang diberikan kepada pekerja migran PLRT di luar negeri. Pekerja migran PLRT karena karakteristiknya merupakan kelompok yang sangat rentan terhadap perlakuan <em>abuse</em>, diskriminatif, dan ketidak-adilan ketika bekerja di luar negeri. Kelompok paling rentan diantara pekerja migrant adalah TKW PLRT karena keperempuannya. Konsep tanggung jawab Negara mengharuskan pemerintah memberikan perlindungan kepada TKI terlepas dari status mereka, baik legal atau illegal karena mereka berada diluar yurisdiksi Negara pengirim</p><p><strong>Kata Kunci: </strong>Perlindungan hukum, TKI, PLRT, Tanggung Jawab Negara.</p>

Arbeid-en-zorgbeleid in de participatiesamenleving

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara A. Yerkes ◽  
Laura den Dulk
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Organizational Context ◽  
National Level ◽  
Care Policy ◽  
Big Society ◽  
Work Arrangements ◽  
Collective Agreements ◽  
Care Policies ◽  
The One ◽  
Childcare Policy

Work and care policy in the ‘big’ society: an expansion of capabilities? Work and care policy in the ‘big’ society: an expansion of capabilities? In this article, we assess the extent to which national-level work-care policies in the Netherlands enable various groups in society (men and women, lower and higher educated and employees versus self-employed) to reconcile work and care. We answer this question by conducting a policy analysis using Sen’s (1992) capability approach. Applying this perspective, we evaluate the availability, accessibility and design of work-care policies in the Netherlands. In addition, we consider the importance of collective agreements and the organizational context. Our assessment shows that work-care policies and collective agreements offer greater capabilities to certain groups to reconcile work and care than to others. Childcare policy offers decreased accessibility for the self-employed and flexible work arrangements enable women more than men to take on care tasks and work part-time. In addition, higher educated workers appear to have greater access to flexible arrangements than lower educated workers, but often use this flexibility to work more rather than reconcile work with care. Moreover, current care leave policies enforce rather than challenge existing socio-cultural norms, and alternatives to the one-and-a-half earner model remain limited.

Policy-Making in the European Union

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
National Level ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Eu Policy ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Common ◽  
Key Events ◽  
The Eu

Policy-Making in the European Union explores the link between the modes and mechanisms of EU policy-making and its implementation at the national level. From defining the processes, institutions and modes through which policy-making operates, the text moves on to situate individual policies within these modes, detail their content, and analyse how they are implemented, navigating policy in all its complexities. The first part of the text examines processes, institutions, and the theoretical and analytical underpinnings of policy-making, while the second part considers a wide range of policy areas, from economics to the environment, and security to the single market. Throughout the text, theoretical approaches sit side by side with the reality of key events in the EU, including enlargement, the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon, and the financial crisis and resulting Eurozone crisis, focusing on what determines how policies are made and implemented. This includes major developments such as the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, the reform of the common agricultural policy, and new initiatives to promote EU energy security. In the final part, the chapters consider trends in EU policy-making and the challenges facing the EU.

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