Over the past decade, social science researchers in the area of feminism, labor, immigration, and family have written extensively on the care work crisis and globalized care work. Depending on how broadly care work is conceived, these writings emphasize unique aspects of gender, race, class, and/or citizenship inequalities. Second wave of feminist perspectives, for instance, identify housework and most work culturally defined as “women’s work”—including all paid health occupations dominated by women, such as nurses, direct care workers, and hospital workers but also possibly even health, education, and social service occupations—as central to gender subordination. Another important research stream, focusing on domestic labor as women’s work, but recognizing its traditional outsourcing to slaves, servants, and later employees, highlights the complexities of the inequality generated, not only in terms of gender but race, class, and citizenship as well. Bringing these two bodies of literature together in conversation initially pointed to the inaccurate assumption that care work was valued when it became wage labor. The paid labor of domestics, nannies, and elderly care workers, however, remains deeply devalued, most often with those with limited options entering the profession. This article both assesses contradictions within dominant approaches to care work and highlights the cultural and political foundations of the very inequalities that domestic care workers experience.
The mobilization of domestic workers in the United States has strengthened and grown nationally in the last 15 years, and scholars have been paying particular attention to the ways their organizing has undertaken innovative strategies to address social, cultural, and legal exclusions specific to migrant domestic workers. Research has focused on historicizing the entrenched colonial legacy of servitude and domesticity, but more recently studies have concentrated on documenting the challenges and victories domestic workers have achieved as a result of their legislative state campaigns for a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. This article reviews recent research that analyzes the complex strategies employed in organizing, and the role that migrant domestic workers play in challenging the boundaries of citizenship and integrating a transnational dimension to domestic worker organizing. Although research shows that enforcement continues to be a central issue in states where a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights has been enacted, migrant domestic workers continue to strengthen the coalitional power that has shown to transform new directions in organizing that demand alternate ways of contemplating workers experiences as generating different principles of justice.
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