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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 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.”

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.

The final chapterreflects on the situatedness of the knowledge presented in this book and its relevance to the existing literature and the angst around outsourced cleaning. The implications of the book’s argument for an inclusive, cross-cultural feminist theory of paid domestic work are summed up. The chapter then concludes that the unease around paid domestic work and the gaps in the research prevent recognition of the fact that the exploitation in this work is not fixed and stable, but contingent on certain societal assumptions of ourselves, others and work. The issue of concern for a scholar of gender and sociology is not just that some women are doing the demeaning work of/for other women but is also the classed and casteised evolution of the very meanings of work across cultural contexts.

This chapter first elaborates on the research project informing this book. Next, based on descriptive analyses, the chapter situates the research samples in the broader social worlds from which they were drawn. The analyses provide early evidence in this book for the mediating effect of socioeconomic class on role of other axes of inequality in paid domestic work.