Paid domestic work and the struggles of care workers in Latin America

Abstract

About 30% of households are intimately involved in paid domestic work in Latin America, either as employers or as workers. Paid domestic workers overwhelmingly are female, from racial and ethnic minorities, and earn low wages. Labour codes have historically accorded them fewer rights and protections. Domestic workers have organized to demand equal rights, and recently, this organizing has begun to pay off. This article discusses the dynamics of paid domestic work through the themes of commodification and changes in government policies. Through a comparison of post-millennium Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Peru, the article compares the working conditions and struggles of domestic workers and highlights the factors that explain different outcomes in terms of labour rights and protections across these countries. It is argued that stronger rights and protections were made possible by the interactive effects of domestic workers organizing, more sympathetic left-wing governments, and the watershed ILO 2011 Convention on Domestic Workers.

Spinners or sitters? Regimes of social reproduction and urban Chinese workers’ employment choices

“…Finally, as other scholars suggest, our contemporary era is unprecedented because the sphere of social reproduction is not only deeply commodified but also increasingly politicized (Bhattacharya, 2017; Lee, 2019). In many places around the world, we see growing labor organizing and unrest at the point of social reproduction, for example, the unionization of domestic workers and protests against welfare cutbacks (Blofield and Jokela, 2018; Schmalz et al, 2017; Solari, 2018). In China, with a severe shortage of caring labor and thus a tight market, domestic workers’ structural bargaining power arguably increases.…”

How Decriminalisation Reduces Harm Within and Beyond Sex Work: Sex Work Abolitionism as the “Cult of Female Modesty” in Feminist Form

“…Premilla Nadasen (2015) presents the story of household workers of the world uniting. In Brazil, domestic workers formed a union, secured legal reforms and successfully lobbied for an ILO Convention on Domestic Workers (Blofield and Jokela, 2018). The gendered and highly damaging societal expectation that women are care givers is certainly not being tackled by a policy package of abolishing paid care workers (by criminalising those who employ carers or cleaners), or by aiming for a world in which all care and domestic labour is conducted for free.…”

Promise of Decent Care and the Problem of Poor Working Conditions. Double Movements Around Live-In Care In Austria

“…In particular in the Global South, such disputes have become more visible over the last decades, reached the International Labour Organization in 2010 and, in 2011, succeeded in achieving the adoption of the Domestic Workers Convention. This Convention 189 includes equal rights, regulation of employers' responsibilities, limitation of working hours, regulation of working conditions, and the right to form trade unions (Blofield/Jokela 2018). It defines minimum standards of decent work but, as of June 2019, has been ratified by only 29 countries, 6 Austria not being one of them.…”

“…The developments in Austria are similar to a pattern that is known from other countries in the field of caring and care work as well as in other fields where social protest is motivated by "shared repertoires" in the face of "market-fundamentalism" (Burawoy 2015: 15): an individual protagonist initiates debates, disputes, and protests, and social movements emerge in the respective field. In some countries, including Austria, this led stakeholders in the field of caring, like trade unions, to actually recognize the problems (Blofield/Jokela 2018;Schilliger 2014;Schwenken 2006).…”