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This chapter focuses on local and migrant domestic workers' unions in Hong Kong, in the context of the international domestic workers' movement for the International Labor Organization Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Global norms are providing collective action frames that facilitate cohesive activism, as well as international opportunities, symbolic and material resources, and publicity to pressure governments and corporations. In Hong Kong, domestic workers' unions are an amalgamation of a women's movement and a trade union that goes beyond the organizing of women or workers, but incorporating the frames of democracy, human rights, and social justice locally and internationally. Transnational organizing, on the basis of common social location and interests as women and workers under global capitalism, allows local and migrant domestic workers to envision and enact solidarity. But it is also this interaction that hierarchies of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality become visible, illustrating that privilege and oppression are often not absolute categories but, rather, shift in relation to different axes of power.

This chapter traces women's labor trajectories, studying interviews with fifty-two women in four Ecuadorian cities about their work histories, which all include stints of paid domestic work, periods of unemployment, and usually other jobs. The women's accounts explode common assumptions. Domestic employment has not been a stepping stone to more desirable jobs, but neither has it been the only job that these women have done. Their employment in private homes has been disrupted, temporary, sporadic, and anything but stable. Rather than mobility, the chapter found circularity: women cycling in and out of the informal labor market over the course of their lives, making employment decisions that are shaped by economic, health, and family crises. Their engagement in unpaid social reproduction affected both their choice to do paid social reproduction in the first place, and the way they managed that reproductive labor over time.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of domestic work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines domestic work to include housework; caring for children, ill, disabled, or elderly people in private homes; and tasks such as “driving the family car, taking care of the garden, and guarding private houses.” Paid domestic work is an ancient occupation, rooted in feudal economic systems, but it is part of the modern world under capitalism. Historically, domestic workers cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, as they do today. However, this work has shifted from in-kind payment (room and board) to wages, and from most domestic workers living with employers to most living separately. Also, middle- and upper-class women have entered the workforce, relying on domestic workers to take up the slack at home. Based on research conducted between 2010 and 2018, this book explains why domestic work remains an occupation of last resort in Ecuador (and elsewhere) and discusses how these working conditions might be improved. In exploring the experiences of paid domestic workers in Ecuador, it shows how concepts of social reproduction, urban informal employment, and class boundaries can help illuminate the particular forms of exploitation in this work and explain why domestic work continues to be a bad job.

This chapter traces the patterns of social disadvantage of women from the industrial revolution to the present, focusing on the family and public sphere. It examines the nature of women's work and the status of women in the workforce, the family, and the state from the late 18th century to World War I and through to the present. The historical analysis of the sources of disadvantage reveals two persistent themes. The first is that women remain primarily responsible for childcare and domestic work, and the second is that such work is consistently ignored and undervalued.

This chapter lays the foundations of the book by first defining the work that the book intends to interrogate and unpacking the angst around it in some quarters of Western society, focusing on the feminist literature where such concerns are evident. Next, the chapter highlights theoretical contradictions and tensions in the literature and the assumptions underlying them, for instance, the work is a problem primarily between women. By drawing attention to some gaps and silences in the invaluable contribution made byprior research tounderstandings of the historically and socially constructed complexities of exploitation in paid domestic work, the chapterargues that the prevailing Western theories of this work are limited by their restricted focus on gender and race as the primary analytical categories.A more inclusive and globally relevant feminist approach would have an equivalent focus on class (and caste).

This chapter contains life histories of ten founding church elders, who are currently in their 80s and 90s. All of the narratives begin with a socio-historical snapshot of the elders' hometowns, followed by interviews covering their life experiences in both the North and the South. These experiences include employment patterns and salaries earned; “separate but equal” education during the Plessy v. Ferguson era; White on Black violence, such as false imprisonment and threats of and actual lynching; politics of sex between White men and Black women in the South; enculturation of White children in perpetrating racial violence and of Black children in surviving it; Black adult strategies for negotiating southern White terrorism and for migrating to and adjusting within urban life; economic survival strategies, such as sharecropping in the South and Black women's performing domestic “day labor” in the North; southern religious roots and new urban religious options; and colorism. The chapter concludes by exploring how these narratives inform Great Migration research.

This chapter examines interviews conducted with Muslim advocates whose work against domestic violence (DV) focuses on awareness and prevention. There is a shared story arch among many of the advocates that supports the primacy of an experienced and embodied ethic on non-abuse that is then translated into active work in the community and in a later step a search for religious discourse in order to further effective activism. Advocates often first recognized domestic abuse as wrong, then became critical of the ways in which Muslim communities address or do not address this issue, and responded by taking action and developing or finding religious arguments. It is in this last part of the story that religious authority, and with that status and authority in communities, became an existential issue for the effectiveness of anti-DV work. The chapter then reflects on the connection between feminist ideas about patriarchy and DV on the one hand and acceptance/rejection of such ideas in Muslim communities on the other.

This chapter examines the role of bodies and embodiment in domestic work. It argues that bodies matter for how domestic employees experience their work. Indeed, domestic workers' accounts emphasized physical labor and the embodied inequality between employer and employee. They described their work as exhausting, accelerating the deterioration of their bodies, and potentially dangerous. These accounts conceive of the body as a limited resource that women draw on to do their work, a resource that can be used up or damaged in the process. Bodies also matter because of the symbolic distinctions drawn between “good,” middle-class/elite bodies and “bad,” lower-class/deviant bodies—between employers' and workers' bodies. Workers face clear boundaries between themselves and employers in relation to health, food consumption, and appearance. Even employers who buck tradition by pursuing more egalitarian relations are aware of the differential values typically placed on differently classed bodies in Ecuador.

This chapter describes how Corrine Washington jumped at the chance when she was offered an opportunity to leave her job in a Richmond tobacco factory for domestic work in New York City in 1938. An agent promised her a live-in position at twenty dollars a month, much less than the ten dollars a week she earned in the factory, but assured her that she would earn more if her employer liked her work. Tobacco factory work was an onerous and dusty affair, requiring workers to spend hours on their feet doing repetitive tasks on the assembly line. African American women such as Washington usually performed the dirtiest and most back-breaking chores in tobacco factories, and Washington could not have been sorry to leave the work behind. An added benefit was escaping the racial restrictions of the Jim Crow South and joining New York City's famously vibrant black community. Washington's decision was made.

This chapter examines how African American women who moved to northern cities from the South during the Second Great Migration circa 1940–1970 made the transition in and out of domestic work. It looks at the process by which domestic workers met potential employers while on other jobs, their relationships with their employers, and what they thought of their employers. The chapter shows that many women migrants used domestic work to fill in between other, more sought-after employment opportunities and considers the skills they brought to their work. It also discusses the special bond that could form between domestic workers and the children of their employers, and how the workers valued their personal dignity in the face of challenges.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of American Muslim organizations working against domestic violence in Muslim communities. The central goal of these organizations is simple: the eradication of domestic violence, a scourge that affects too many individuals, families, and communities in the United States and all over the world. Their work, however, is complicated, ongoing, and challenging. This book is about the people who carry out anti-domestic violence work in Muslim communities in the United States. It chronicles their efforts, their motivations, and their engagement with gender dynamics, textual interpretation, and religious authority. The chapter then lays out the framework for the following chapters, including the sources and methods employed in the study and the complex landscape of secondary literature on domestic violence.

The Introduction contextualizes the study in various strands of literature relating to the informal sector, work, and domesticity. It traverses the literature on women and work with a special focus on gender–class dimensions. It also outlines the importance of the space of the mistress and maid for an understanding of the relationship between gender and class. It looks at agency and representation to locate the different ways in which the ‘domestic servant’ has been represented in both in fiction and the academia. It discusses the history and emergence of paid domestic work in Europe as well as India. It looks at contemporary debates around care work and whether and how part-time paid domestic work can be understood in that context. It also situates paid domestic work in informal sector literature, indicating estimations of size and introducing public policy efforts.

This chapter analyzes Latina transnational mothers who are currently employed in Los Angeles in paid domestic work, which is one of the most gendered and racialized occupations. It also studies how their definitions of motherhood change in relation to the structures of late 20th-century global capitalism. The chapter refers to literature on immigration and transnational frameworks, and looks at gendering transnational perspectives. The discussion introduces the concept of the “cult of domesticity.”

This chapter explores three ways in which the familiar boundaries of labour law may be reimagined to extend its animating idea beyond the industrialized market economy. It looks ‘before’ industrialization at one of the most abject historical examples of human commoditization, the triangular slave trade; it finds continuity rather than radical disjuncture between slavery and ‘free’ labour. It looks ‘beyond’ the traditional market economy, to recognize the market-enabling character of care labour within the home, emphasizing paid domestic work. And it looks ‘after’ the domestic market, to consider the implications of recognizing labour to be a factor of production in intensified global trade. It emphasizes labour law’s pluralism, rooted in workers’ resistance to the commoditization of their labour power. The chapter only hints at distributive justice consequences, but acknowledges that to emphasize emancipation in the idea of labour law is to espouse a transformative vision of the field.

This chapter sets the stage for the global domestic workers’ movement that is at the center of this book. It examines the landscape of household labor and highlights the key concepts necessary for an understanding of domestic work in the global economy, highlighting the traditional power imbalances that exist between “maids and madams.” The chapter introduces key players in the struggle for domestic worker rights, and the challenges they faced in addressing widespread injustice. An overview of the scholar-activist framework, embedded ethnographic approach, and the author’s particular research journey is also included.

This chapter examines the International Labour Organization’s Convention No 189 concerning decent work for domestic workers (2011). It notes how the position of domestic workers within the employing family defies the public–private divide, upon which labour law is traditionally premised, noting the particular difficulties faced by live-in domestic workers. Domestic work poses acute dilemmas for feminists. The chapter critically assesses the provisions of the ILO Convention, comparing it with other sources of regulation of domestic work, particularly those in South Africa and Brazil. It notes the important role in South Africa of the Domestic Workers and Allied Trade Union and the necessity of a campaigning political role, given union membership is extremely low.