Maids in Brazil: Domestic and Platform Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Correa, Luisángela; Fontes, Paulo Vitorino

doi:10.1515/9783110718249-008

Cited by 1 publication

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“…As a case in point, the first person to die from Covid-19 in the state of Rio de Janeiro was a 63-year-old female domestic worker who caught the virus from her employer, an upper-class White female judge who had returned from vacation in Italy to her home in the wealthy neighborhood of Leblon ( Corrêa and Fontes, 2020 ; G1, 2020 ). Although the exact identity of the domestic worker was never revealed by authorities, to protect her family from discrimination, most domestic workers in Brazil are women of color, and this domestic worker turned to the country’s public health system for treatment in the early days of the pandemic when testing was still very rare.…”

Section: Exposure In the Private And Public Spheresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The intersectionality of health (in)security: Healthcare, disposable workers, and exposure within Brazil’s pandemic politics

Pérez

Mendes

2023

Security Dialogue

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Brazil has suffered severe consequences from the Covid-19 pandemic, currently ranking second globally in terms of total fatalities, with more than 682,000 lives lost. This article critically outlines how a ‘health security’ framework overlooks processes of intersectionality and the varying impacts of the virus on different segments of society, or what we term health insecurity. We organize our analysis around three aspects of the pandemic that have become salient in Brazilian society, namely access to healthcare, disposable workers, and exposure to the virus, and delineate the intersectional impact of gendered inequality, neoliberal ideologies, and racial hierarchies within these three themes. Our methodology employs media and scholarly interpretations of Covid-19, and other secondary empirical and statistical data, to outline the virus’s impacts on differently positioned bodies throughout Brazilian society. Our main findings reveal that during the pandemic, women’s labor and health concerns have been undervalued, exploitative working conditions have been exacerbated, and Afro-Brazilians have been put in situations of higher exposure to the virus in both public and private spaces. This article underscores the need to better examine how public health, systems of oppression and exclusion, and (in)security overlap with each other.

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Section: Exposure In the Private And Public Spheresmentioning

confidence: 99%