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Nel contesto italiano del lavoro di riproduzione, quali sono state le definizioni e le rappresentazioni del lavoro e delle lavoratrici domestiche dal secondo dopoguerra a oggi? Ma soprattutto, quali sono state le cause o le contingenze delle mancate o solo potenziali alleanze tra organizzazioni delle lavoratrici domestiche e movimenti femministi? Il volume approfondisce questi interrogativi attraverso un focus sugli anni Sessanta e Settanta: la stagione che in Italia ha rappresentato sia l’apice del percorso di riconoscimento del lavoro domestico e di cura come “vero” lavoro, rimasto tuttora incompleto, sia un laboratorio particolarmente vivace per le analisi femministe sull’occultamento della centralità della riproduzione nell’economia capitalistica. Si tratta quindi di un volume sul lavoro domestico e di cura, ma anche sulle prospettive del movimento femminista italiano generalmente trascurate nella storiografia (come il femminismo sindacale, la campagna internazionale per il salario contro il lavoro domestico o il ruolo delle donne nelle associazioni cattoliche) e sui fenomeni sociali trascurati dallo stesso movimento femminista italiano (come la femminilizzazione delle migrazioni internazionali). Ragionare sulle mancate alleanze del passato, le criticità e i punti di forza sia delle forme di organizzazione delle lavoratrici domestiche salariate sia dei discorsi e delle pratiche femministe sul rapporto tra produzione e riproduzione, può aiutarci a comprendere come riconnettere nel presente la questione politica del lavoro domestico e di cura non retribuito a quella delle condizioni delle donne native e migranti nel mercato del lavoro.

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The chapter looks at domestic workers’ movements as a telling case of collective action developed by multiply marginalized social groups, in particular migrant, low-class, racialized, and rural women employed in the sector. The present study focuses on Ecuador and Colombia, exploring the ways in which organisations in both contexts used intersectionality differently, in various aspects of their mobilization process, in the period between 2010-2018. Interestingly activists in Ecuador appear to develop a complex discourse that articulates the role that gender and class, in addition to race, play in the inequalities that weight on domestic workers, and yet when they lobby their government to ratify the ILO “Convention No. 189 on decent work for domestic workers”, they privilege alliances based on class and the promotion of labor rights. On the contrary, in Colombia, activists are able to use their intersectional identities, as afro-colombian women domestic workers, to promote a discourse in the public sphere in which gender, race and class are always present, and they do so by originally articulating a new frame rooted in a feminist analysis of the “care economy”.

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Feminist scholarship and movements worldwide have extensively engaged in theorising reproductive labour as an undervalued element of local and global political economies and have been pushing for its recognition «as work». At the same time, since the late 2000s the conditions of paid domestic workers have become an object of a new wave of mobilisation. Demands for equal labour rights and decent work for this category of workers have been put forward at the national and international level, while new international legislation has been adopted, such as ILO Convention 189. Despite these potentially convergent elements, it is not clear to what extent feminist theories on the valorisation of care and reproductive labour can be extended to, or can include, the case of paid domestic workers. In order to address this issue, in this article we present a comparative analysis of the relationships between feminist actors and domestic workers’ groups in Ecuador and Colombia from the late 2000s to 2018.

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In response to the promulgation of International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention n.189 on domestic workers in 2011, scholars have turned their attention to this workforce, documenting how the Convention acted as a catalyst for the proliferation of campaigns at national, regional and international levels. The ILO Convention is an attempt to address domestic workers' labor rights as "global rights" and as a global common goal due to their implications at the level of human and social rights for a wide range of vulnerable subjects in many countries. However, little is known about the ways in which the Convention has been incorporated - or resisted - with respect to "local struggles" and in different local contexts. Our study contributes to filling this gap by offering a comparative analysis of four countries - Colombia, Italy, the Philippines and Taiwan - between 2011 and 2018. Considering Convention n. 189 as an exogenous factor, we explore the configurations of the strategic action field (Fligstein and McAdam 2012) of domestic workers' rights in these countries - including the actors involved, the focus of their action, the alliances they establish, and the frames they activate. Our analysis shows that Convention n. 189 seems to have fostered transformations in terms of mobilization and the enlargement of rights in contexts where it has promoted synergy between state and civil society actors, has been embedded in pre-existing local struggles and in larger progressive political projects, and has been framed in ways that touch on issues of national identity

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Il lavoro domestico è un lavoro: il progetto europeo DomEqual. Eloisa Betti intervista Sabrina Marchetti, coordinatrice del progetto europeo DomEqual (Inchiesta, n. 198, 2017, pp. 31-35).

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Mistress, owner, guardian, and consumer – these are some of the labels that have obscured the identity of those who benefit from the household labour of others. Despite decades of research and activism, traditional representations of workers as being ‘one of the family’, and their employers as a substitute mother – or in some cases a capricious taskmaster – persist. The resilience of these tropes is mirrored by the limited changes in the actual labour conditions of domestic workers, even if many policies now set standards for wages, contracts, working hours, temporary employment, safety, and the protection of migrants.

While large areas of the world still exclude domestic workers from the law, small shifts in law and social policy have contributed to the recognition of domestic workers as workers. It is in this context that the possibility of employee-employer relations within the private household emerges. The question then becomes: can employers act as allies in the struggle of domestic workers for dignity, recognition, and living wages?

To put this question differently: can employers afford not to partner with domestic workers, given that their labour takes place in arenas of the familial, personal and intimate? As the Tanzanian trade unionist Vicky Kanyoka once explained, “It is our work in households that enables others to go out and be economically active . . . it is us who take care of your precious children and your sick and elderly; we cook your food to keep you healthy and we look after your property when you are away”. Domestic workers have become ‘the oil in the wheels’ of the global economy, and essential to the functioning of households of all types.

The condition of domestic workers has gained significant traction in light of the growth of this sector globally. In 2015, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there were 67.1 million domestic workers at the global level, and more than double the amount of employers, since a number of domestic employees work for multiple households. The demand for domestic workers is expected to grow in the face of an aging population, decreased social services, and women’s rising labour market participation.

Housework and carework have remained women’s work, even if adult men devote somewhat more time to unpaid labour in the home than they did a half century ago. The perception that domestic work is women’s work feeds into the way domestic labour is undervalued, similarly to how various forms of “dirty work” have been relegated to those at the bottom of perceived racial, ethnic, class, and caste hierarchies. Despite the necessity of domestic labour, conditions are deteriorating with over 40% of all workers uncovered by minimum wage regulations and over half outside of work hour limits.

Nonetheless domestic workers have won major victories during a period of union defeat. In 2011, they gained inclusion in global labour standards when employers and their representatives joined worker and government delegates to pass the International Domestic Workers Convention 189 (C189), the first global policy instrument recognising domestic work as part of the larger “decent work” agenda to bring the informal and migrant economy under the umbrella of human rights standards.

In record time for such conventions, 24 nations have ratified C189 to date. Workers have also formed the International Domestic Worker Federation (IDWF), the first woman-led international labour federation, building upon and feeding into the work of existing national and regional unions and worker associations. Organisation by employer counterparts, however, has lagged, despite notable exceptions, such as Hand in Hand in the United States or Uruguay’s Housewives’ Association, the latter of which engages in tripartite bargaining over the terms of a national contract for domestic workers. The lack of organising at the employer level has meant that worker groups have had to step up and educate households on their responsibilities as employers.

The policy advances that have anchored domestic workers’ organising victories hinge upon employers’ capacity and willingness to actualise these protections beyond paper. Rather than the moral consciousness that may have guided some ‘benevolent employers’ to provide selective protections in their individual homes – much like the ‘good employers’ who ‘cared’ for their servants during the colonial era – recently established policies provide a potential avenue for much needed structural shifts. Yet, the success of such policies still depends on the ability and desire of ‘good employers’ to enact newly established mandates, and agree on contracts that include a fair salary, days off, sick leave, parental leave, and so on.

The various victories resulting from domestic workers’ national and global organising have generated new possibilities through which employers can actively participate in the movement for rights and justice in the home. This series draws together contributions on the role of employers in the fight for domestic workers’ rights from a range of perspectives. As leaders in the realms of employer activism, academia, policy, and labour organising, the experts we have convened in this policy debate have analysed the potential role of employers in terms of ensuring the rights of domestic workers, participating in activist movements, and transforming household practices. In doing so, these experts shed light on the structural and political constraints as well as the range of individual experiences that pervade various forms of intimate labour.

As the leaders of the international movement of domestic worker repeatedly proclaimed, “women won’t be free until domestic workers are free!” The pieces within this dialogue invite a wider consideration of a collective investment in domestic worker rights, where the entrenched divides between “maids and madams” may gradually shift toward a co-investment in the the protection of the rights of those “who make all other work possible,” as the National Domestic Workers Alliance popularised.

Bridget Anderson from the University of Bristol (UK) offers a nuanced view on the limits and the paradoxes of such possible alliances, while Lucero Herrera and Saba Waheed (UCLA, USA) refer to a survey from Californian households to offer the case for an alliance driven by common interests in everyday life and shared political demands. Rosa Navarro and Mechtild Hart, from the Latino Union of Chicago (USA), emphasise how such alliances should be based on employers’ awareness, however difficult to achieve, of the structural exploitation of workers happening in this field, which goes beyond individual moral obligation. The practical challenge this poses is well illustrated by the Andrea Londoño (Fundacion Bien Humano) contribution on the Colombian case: the powerful movement that has been rising in recent years from the workers’ side does not find correspondence on the side of employers, putting under threat the results achieved so far. A contrasting example is offered by the US-based organisation Hand in Hand, which has been campaigning, side by side with workers and other stakeholders, for better working conditions, with the goal of improving the experience of care and personal services for all subjects involved. That struggle involves moving into related campaigns, like affordable health care and immigrant rights.

The outcome of these tensions at the global level is a complex scenario, with strong differences across countries in the profile and the history of employers’ organisations. This is discussed in depth in the contributions by Elizabeth Tang and Marie-José Tayah (IDWF) and Claire Hobden and Moriah Shumpert (ILO). By describing the actors and the policy measures that have been taken at national and international level, both pieces underscore the importance of empowering employers’ organisations in order to improve workers’ rights. Among others, we include the case of a particularly significant country to this debate, by looking at what happened in the Philippines since the ratification of C189, through the eyes of a workers’ union, with an article by Julius Cainglet from the Federation of Free Workers (FFW) and Ronahlee Asuncion, from the University of the Philippines.

Indeed, the organising of employers generally appears to have been a positive step towards the expansion of rights for paid domestic workers, the recognition of domestic workers as workers, and the formalisation of the care sector. Precisely because the work occurs in private spaces, employers’ individualism still tends to shape workers’ treatment, which then becomes just a moral or affective concession. A social and collective solution comes up against engrained individualism, one of the main reasons why, in many circumstances, interlocking obstacles persist in the way employers serve as allies. Yet in individual households, domestic worker policy victories – even in their infancy – map the potential for employer alllyship and the gradual transformation of an industry through collective action.

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This article looks at the gradual development of a ‘global governance of paid domestic work’ by assessing the impact of the ILO Convention n. 189 on campaigns for domestic workers’ rights in different countries. Here I compare the case of Ecuador and India as two contrasting examples of the ways in which state and non-state organizations have positioned themselves around the issue, revealing how the context-dependent character of domestic workers’ rights can ultimately condition the mobilisation of different actors in each context. On the basis of the theory of ‘strategic fields of action’, I also define the promulgation of C189 as an ‘exogenous change’ that has differing impacts on the relevant social actors in two countries. As I will show, these national differences give shape to a very different modality in campaigns for domestic workers’ rights, resulting in different roles, purposes and scope of action for key social actors.

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There are more than 67 million domestic workers across the world, according to estimates from the International Labour Organisation. In the last decade, awareness has greatly increased about their living and working conditions. We now know that abuse and exploitation, child labour, discrimination, starvation, violence, debt bondage, invisibility, and the many crimes held under the umbrella of ‘trafficking’ are disproportionately represented within this traditionally unorganised and invisible sector. Many domestic workers – especially migrant domestic workers – are denied access to labour and human rights. Even in the countries where rights exist on paper, they are extremely difficult to implement, and ‘the mentality of servitude’ still prevails in different forms.

What is less known is that this increase in our awareness corresponds to the slow and steady expansion over the last 20 years, and despite considerable odds, of a grassroots mobilisation of workers who resist their exploitation and stigmatisation. They fight back as domestic workers, but also as migrant women, ethicised women, and women of the lower classes and caste. The widespread belief that domestic workers are ‘impossible to organise’ has been proven false by the enduring commitment of activists and unionists around the world.

The movement for domestic workers’ rights spearheaded the push for ILO Convention 189 – the Domestic Workers Convention – which came into force in 2011. This convention arguably represents one of the most hopeful moments in the fight against exploitation and trafficking globally, despite the refusal of many countries – included in the US and the UK – to ratify it.

It is a movement that still struggles to gain visibility, political support, and financial support. Not surprisingly, domestic workers’ organising is not an issue that easily fits within the humanitarian and international donor frames – as Marie-Jose L. Tayah points out in her piece about organising in the Middle East. Indeed, when we read about the experiences of organising domestic workers, we hear about slow processes of raising collective consciousness and of reaching out to women who live and work isolated from each other, frequently in the same houses as their employers, with no money, time, or even documents.

Domestic workers speak

In order to get a better understanding of some of these issues that often remain hidden, we asked domestic workers’ rights activists themselves to tell us directly about their movement – their struggles, their experiences as domestic workers, the reasons for their ongoing exploitation, and the strategies to fight it. We are both researchers and activists based at the University of Venice, Italy. We coordinate the project DomEQUAL, and are members of the Research Network for Domestic Workers’ Rights.

From our university offices we reached out to our connections via email to organisations all around the world that are led by domestic workers themselves. The response has been great. In spite of tight schedules, difficulties accessing the internet, or problems with language and translation, we received contributions from organisations based in 20 different countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, in addition to Europe and the US.

For most of the organisations, their members come from other, many more numerous, countries. Authors have written individually, collectively, or with allies. Some have preferred to give interviews, some have shared parts of their collective creations. For most of them, their analysis is rooted in their organising experience as well as in their personal experience of paid domestic and care work – a journey often beginning in adolescence as an alternative to school, or as a way to finance it. For some contributors, it is important to be named and recognised as domestic workers. For others it is crucial to belong to larger forms of activism, and to protect their personal identities, because they work in contexts where organising may result in lost jobs, repression, and even prison.

Among the authors are also some of the protagonists of the last decade who have witnessed or brought about great changes in this field, and their organisations have directly contributed to the creation of the ILO convention on domestic worker rights. Some have been, or currently are, representatives of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF), which was created in 2012 and currently has 62 affiliates in 50 countries, for a total of more than 500,000 workers worldwide. IDWF is a membership-based organisation which includes trade unions, trade union federations, as well as workers’ cooperatives and associations.

This variety, which readers will also find in this collection, reflects the variety of the movement and of the different contexts in which it has been growing. It also accounts for the slow process of inclusion of domestic workers into trade unions – which only began in this century – and more generally for the ongoing process of transition from informal self help groups to more structured organisations.

Across such a large variety of contexts, readers will learn about organisers taking employers to court, lobbying for policy change, and taking to the streets. They will also read about more creative forms of organising, new and old, such as language courses, participant workers’ research, WhatsApp chats, financial literacy training, conflict solving forums for workers and their employers, as well as more hidden forms of communication across the balconies of employers houses, or informal gatherings in parks and churches.

What is work?

All the pieces of this collection speak about the difficulty of becoming part of a political conversation and of a labour movement that is still dominated by people – predominantly men – who do not think of domestic work as real work. Indeed, many of these people are themselves employers of domestic workers. Workers’ experiences and analyses force us to interrogate the fundamental concepts that frame our lives: what is work and what isn’t? What is the limit between love and work? They also compel us to face and address concrete everyday issues, such as how to care for our kids, our elderly, our homes when we have no time and energy to do so under a capitalistic system.

Indeed, unlike other ‘culprits’ of exploitation, the employers of domestic workers cannot be represented as others from us, such as ‘egoistic’ profit making business people, or ‘deviant’ men who pay for sex. Domestic workers are employed by all kinds of families. They typically work for other women, including, as Marcelina Bautista from the National Domestic Workers Union in Mexico stresses in her piece, “lawyers, legislators, teachers, feminists and public workers”.

Wherever we live, it is difficult to isolate domestic work and get rid of its social and political content, as something different and far away from us. Therefore, if we are able to listen to the analyses provided by domestic workers, we may learn a lot about the material constitution of class, gender, race, and our own complicity in their reproduction. Many readers may find in these contributions indications of how they can responsibly employ domestic workers, or of how to recognise the hypocrisy of a system that demands reproductive labour but doesn’t value or recognise it.

In that sense it may not be surprising that activists stress the need to work on the cultural, the symbolic, the interiorised, and the intimate effects of subordination and power. Many speak about the impact of language and words – servant, the girl, etc. – and the importance of using new terms: ‘domestic worker’ in English, ‘family collaborator’ (colf) in Italian, ‘house manager’ in Korean. The piece by Ok-Seop Shim from the Incheon Branch of the National House Managers Cooperative in South Korea speaks about the shame in her children’s gaze when she decided to start working in domestic work. The piece by the Domestic Workers Rights Union in India echoes this, emphasising that many workers hide their occupation from their own families. Many more articles speak about the stigma of the dirty work, the sense of being unworthy and undeserving, to the point of feeling ‘grateful’ that employers do you the ‘favour’ of paying you.

In the case of migrant undocumented workers, this interiorised dimension may extend to the sense of being a criminal, because as well shown by Migrant Domestic Workers/FNV in the Netherlands, one lives in constant fear of any contact with authorities. These are all issues that call for a kind of resistance that is necessarily a collective path, a change that is not linear, that some may even call “spiritual”, as the Acli Colf from Italy would put it.

These issues make domestic work quite special compared to other forms of work, and domestic workers’ organising even more difficult and unique. But is it really so incomparable to other forms of labour? Interestingly, some of the authors, such as Vicky Kanyoka of the IDWF regional office in Africa suggest quite the opposite: that the domestic workers’ movement may indeed be exemplary for sectors looking to find their way in the new economy.

Indeed, as “the original gig economy workers”, as Ai-Jen Poo of the US-based the National Domestic Workers Alliance put it, this movement may represent a model of how to bring together individuals working in isolation from one another and faced with precarious working conditions, restrictions of movement, and exclusion from formal rights. These are conditions not only experienced by domestic workers, but by an increasing number of people in today’s world, and especially by those who cross national borders.

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Giulia Garofalo Geymonat e Sabrina Marchetti (a cura di), Domestic Workers Speak: A Global Fight for Rights and Recognition , 2017, London, Open Democracy[PDF]

In the last decade, awareness has greatly increased about the living and working conditions of the world’s 67 million domestic workers. We now know that abuse and exploitation, child labour, discrimination, starvation, violence, debt bondage, invisibility, and the many crimes held under the umbrella of ‘trafficking’ are disproportionately represented within this traditionally unorganised and invisible sector. Many domestic workers – especially migrant domestic workers – are denied access to labour and human rights. Even in the countries where rights exist on paper, they are extremely difficult to implement, and ‘the mentality of servitude’ still prevails in different forms.

What is less known is that this increase in our awareness corresponds to the slow and steady expansion over the last 20 years, and despite considerable odds, of a grassroots mobilisation of workers who resist their exploitation and stigmatisation. They fight back as domestic workers, but also as migrant women, ethicised women, and women of the lower classes and caste. The widespread belief that domestic workers are ‘impossible to organise’ has been proven false by the enduring commitment of activists and unionists around the world.

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