Collective Complaint: Immigrant Women Caregivers’ Community, Performance, and the Limits of Labor Law in New York City

Abstract

In 2010 New York passed the first legal protections for in‐home care workers in the United States. Amid these legal changes, care workers deploy collective complaint as a community‐building strategy, allowing immigrant women who are domestic workers—often isolated in private homes—to commiserate with one another through shared criticisms of their, mostly women, employers. Based on fieldwork among activist nannies in New York between 2010 and 2012, I argue that collective complaint is a critical source of solidarity and community for childcare providers while caregivers’ rhetorical and affective strategies offer insight about the potential limitations of rights‐based legislation in this and other informal sectors.

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

“…Even though the union is not able to further any collective demands on behalf of all workers (and from all employers), it does facilitate a worker's ability to negotiate one-to-one with an employer and to gain some degree of job security and insurance-like support. As other scholars have also observed, workers use the collective spaces and platforms of unions to practice and "perform" their expectations from and demands on employers (Glaser 2020). These negotiations are not in the shape of written contractual documents but, rather, are verbal agreements that are honored from time-to-time and that follow a script of formality for the workers.…”

“…In South Africa, though domestic workers have been legally recognized as workers, their everyday reality continues to be shaped by apartheid logics that categorize Black women as servants (Ally 2009). In an immigrant workers' community in New York, despite recent recognition of domestic workers, it is the workers' collective and affective sharing of strategies of employer engagement that are more useful in navigating job insecurity or sudden dismissal (Glaser 2020). While highlighting the limitations of state categories, these studies stop short of offering an alternate conceptualization of the categories themselves.…”

Disappointment

“…Such is the case, Strassler (2020) argues, in newly democratic Indonesia, where the photograph, once a fetish of transparency, became an exemplar of manipulation, invested with both disappointment and ludic experimentation. This sort of play within and across poetic forms throws into relief the contours of power regimes and the limits of imaginable horizons, giving rise equally-and sometimes simultaneously-to humor and to distress, to cynicism and to engagement, to critique and to complicity, to complaint and to chagrin (e.g., Boyer & Yurchak 2010, Glaser 2020, Molé 2013, Yeh 2017. In short, far from producing uniformity, the poetics of disappointment give rise to a highly varied affective, political, and social Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org.…”

What a difference political economy makes: QUESTION: How can economic anthropology promote the construction of just and anti‐racist economic forms?

“…Almita Miranda (2017) has worked with undocumented Mexican families in Chicago, organizing against racist immigration legislation and policy via a progressive church. Alana Glaser (2020) worked with and alongside multiracial and multinational female care workers in New York City, organizing for respect and improved working conditions. And Elisa Lanari (2022) documents Latina Georgian mothers’ schooling activism on behalf of their children as the gendered labor of care.…”