Abstract
In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse. In From Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other. Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor. From Servants to Workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.
... Framing itself as "non-political," DWEP aimed to foster "good relationships" between employers and workers and to improve DWs' lives through education on employment principles and personal initiative. However, the organization's charity-oriented approach positioned white employers as benevolent patrons, with leadership roles reserved for non-DWs (Ally 2009). ...
... DWEP initially helped politicize DWs, but many found its response to their grievances inadequate (Ally 2009). By the early 1980s, this dissatisfaction, alongside rising resistance to apartheid, led to the formation of new, worker-led organizations in cities like Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. ...
... By the early 1980s, this dissatisfaction, alongside rising resistance to apartheid, led to the formation of new, worker-led organizations in cities like Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg. Despite ongoing restrictions on organizing, DWs began forming unions (Ally 2009;Gaitskell et al. 1983). The shift from gathering discreetly under employer oversight to openly organizing for labor rights was a significant one, paralleling the broader Black labor and popular resistance to apartheid, which peaked in the 1980s (Webster 1988). ...
In this article, I highlight the issue of organizational forms within the informal-sector workers’ movement by examining the experiences of domestic workers in India and South Africa. I am motivated by the growing body of literature that explores the tension between NGOs and trade unions as opposing organizational forms in the context of emancipatory struggles under neoliberalism. My argument is that trade unions and NGOs are not mutually exclusive within the domestic workers’ movement; they work with similar communities and address similar issues. Grassroots organizations mobilizing domestic workers in India and South Africa exhibit characteristics of both NGOs and trade unions, even if they self-identify as belonging strictly to one category. Within these movements, ideological tensions between NGOs and trade unions become pronounced, particularly as they compete for control over constituencies and funding sources. In India the domestic workers’ organizations tend to adopt a hybrid form that leans toward the NGO model, while in South Africa they align more closely with the trade union model. By comparing the historical context of domestic workers’ movements in these two countries, I demonstrate that state recognition of domestic workers’ rights and the influence of the mainstream labor movement play significant roles in determining the direction of this hybridization.
... Yet, the private domain of the household becomes an intimate (public) workplace for both the employer and domestic worker, giving rise to tensions associated with the public-private boundary-making process typical of the employment relationship. Since domestic work remains undervalued, mostly informal, and poorly paid, it is often relegated to black women, highlighting the longstanding power dynamic associated with the raced, classed, and gendered nature of paid reproductive work entrenched in South African society (Ally, 2010;Du Toit, 2013a). While great strides have been made to improve the rights of domestic workers in South Africa, through an array of labour legislation, the sector remains afflicted by poor regulation and non-compliant employers (Mullagee, 2021;Patel, Mthembu and Graham, 2020). ...
... The article begins by providing an overview of South Africa's domestic work sector that continues to position domestic workers as precarious and disposable, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, the theme of 'lockdown work,' which we propose to describe working conditions during the lockdown period, is framed within the context of an intimate workplace, highlighting the interplay of 'boundary work' (Lan, 2003) and 'practices of power' (Ally, 2010) that domestic workers experienced. This is followed by an overview of the methodology of the study. ...
... For employers, the aim of boundary work is to exercise control over poor performance or maintain a stable relationship. Domestic work scholarship is replete with descriptions of employers' practices of power as a managerial or boundary work strategy in employment relationships (Ally, 2010;Lan, 2003;Villiers and Taylor, 2019). Typical examples of inclusion-based boundary work include maternalism or strategic personalism. ...
This article explores domestic workers’ experiences of ‘lockdown work’, which refers to working conditions during the level 5 to level 3 lockdown period in South Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews with female black African South African and African migrant domestic workers from Zimbabwe and Malawi, the article provides crucial insights into how the pandemic altered existing working conditions and employment relationships. We use the sociological concept ‘boundary work’ to illustrate the relational dynamic and consequence of social and physical distancing during the pandemic. We argue that social and physical distancing deepened the public-private divide in employers’ private households and domestic workers’ intimate workplaces. The findings show that domestic workers experienced limited or no control over decisions regarding Covid-19-related protocols in their workplace, intensified workloads without additional remuneration, and felt voiceless regarding working conditions because they feared losing their jobs. The experience of lockdown work highlighted domestic workers’ vulnerability because of the asymmetrical and intimate nature of domestic work under new management imperatives that positioned most domestic workers as a high-risk group or perceived carriers of Covid-19. We conclude that the experience of personalism/maternalism and distant hierarchy as forms of boundary work undermined domestic workers’ sense of dignity and employment rights.
... There is a plethora of research on domestic work that considers the lived experiences of Black African women in the domestic sector. Research on domestic work in South Africa has explored the working conditions, employment relations between employers and domestic workers, and the legislation's effect on the paid domestic work sector (see, for example, Ally, 2010;Cock, 2011;Gaitskell et al., 2010). These studies have demonstrated how domestic work remains a vulnerable occupation for women, despite interventions from the state. ...
... Another major theme prominent in the literature around domestic work is the issue of labour relations and exploitation in the post-apartheid era (Ally, 2010;King, 2007). For example, Shireen Ally's (2010) book From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State provides a good overview of paid domestic work and its political implications in post-apartheid South Africa. ...
... Another major theme prominent in the literature around domestic work is the issue of labour relations and exploitation in the post-apartheid era (Ally, 2010;King, 2007). For example, Shireen Ally's (2010) book From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State provides a good overview of paid domestic work and its political implications in post-apartheid South Africa. Ally (2010) demonstrates how the shift from informal to formal labour relations in the post-apartheid period has both positive and negative consequences for domestic workers. ...
Domestic work is a major source of income for many Black African women in South Africa. The experience of domestic workers is mainly shaped along racial and class lines – this is a result of the remnants of the legacy of apartheid, where many Coloured and African women were dependent on employment in the domestic work sphere. This article considers the experiences of a group of Coloured female domestic workers in a coastal town in South Africa. Drawing on ten qualitative interviews, I show how their experiences are framed around issues of mobility – this includes moving to work and moving at work and the consequences of immobility in the world of work. Most research that deals with issues of mobility in domestic work focuses on migration patterns. This novel approach to understanding the notion of mobility for domestic workers contributes to the existing literature on domestic work in South Africa but extends the conceptualisation of movement beyond migration patterns. The article also makes a much-needed contribution to understanding the experience of domestic work in rural settings in South Africa. This is done by exploring the coping strategies that the participants employ to support themselves and their families. Networks and family ties form an essential component of the financial and emotional survival of this group of women. The role of social capital is also investigated as it plays an important role in forging trust and reciprocity among participants of this study.
... In the home services market, the former is true: digital platforms that are being provided and run by platform companies are transforming already existing informal independent domestic work (or 'char') into a new commercialised and platformised form of domestic work. Platform domestic work, therefore, represents the platformisation of domestic work and it is the latest employment trend in paid domestic work that is building upon decades-long structural shifts from fulltime employment to part-time work, self-employment, and employment through private agencies (see Salzinger, 1997;Ehrenreich, 2003;Rio, 2005;Neetha, 2008;Ally, 2009;Anderson and Hughes, 2010). ...
... Paid domestic work is an old occupation that traces its roots to practices of slavery, indentured servitude, and colonialism (ILO, 2010;Ally, 2009;Cock, 1980). It is an occupation that is described as 'pre-modern' in many ways because it is still a highly exploitative occupation, predominantly done by marginalised groups, mainly lower-class women, in informal and unprotected employment (ILO, 2010;Coser, 1973). ...
... Modernisation through commercialisation has also been a policy adopted by some governments, most notably in Europe, to 'industrialise' domestic work and provide employment using a variety of policy interventions that are meant to subsidise the financial and administrative costs of employing domestic workers (Devetter and Rousseau, 2009;Pérez and Stallhaert, 2016). In South Africa, policy interventions have sought to modernise domestic work mainly through the extension of employment and social rights to domestic workers (Ally, 2009;Fish, 2006). As a result, there has not been a direct or explicit policy initiative aimed at modernisation through the marketisation of care. ...
Digital platform technologies have brought about a new labour form in the occupation of domestic work, in which domestic cleaningwork is now being managed and organised virtually through an online platform, or ‘app’, operated by private technology companies and provided to householders on a convenient and on-demand basis. This paper analyses the emerging impact of this new form of ‘platform domestic work’ in South Africa’s domestic sector using an interpretivist case study done in Cape Town on ten platform domestic workers and their platform companies. Using evidence obtained through in-depth interviews and analysis of publishedcompany discourse material, this paper argues that far from formalising and modernising domestic work through the twin forces of commercialisation and digital platform technology, the phenomenon of platform domestic work is deepening informalisation in paid domestic work as a form of insecure ‘gig work’, and also through the widespread practice of platform leakage by domestic workers on the platform.
... In South Africa, the majority of the approximately 800,000 domestic workers in the country are black African women from marginalised backgrounds who perform domestic and care work duties on a live-in or live-out, full-time, part-time, or temporary basis (Du Toit & Heinecken, 2021). Despite the feminisation of paid domestic work, historical studies show that in the Natal region during colonialism, domestic servants were predominantly black African males, referred to as 'houseboys', who cooked, cleaned, and cared for white families (Ally, 2010;Van Onselen, 1982). This supply of male domestic servants later spread to Johannesburg by the late 19 th century, as the labour bureaus controlled the influx of black men and women from rural to urban areas and pushed them into domestic services. ...
... I am not like I am a worker or whatever.' Whereas numerous studies have shown that 'being part of the family' masks exploitation and abuse (Ally, 2010;Cock, 1980), in this study, it appears that participants are treated well, given that all of them receive wages that are higher than the minimum wages stipulations and, in some cases, even double, compared to what female full-time domestic workers normally receive. ...
... Dennis also mentioned that when it is his birthday, his employer gives him either cash or gifts. Scholars doing research on the paid domestic work sector are often critical of giftgiving and link it to the maternalistic behaviour of the employer to evoke harder work and loyalty from domestic workers (Ally, 2010;King, 2007;Cock, 1980). ...
Despite the large body of scholarly research that has addressed the various challenges encountered by female domestic workers,there exists a notable gap in understanding the experiences of male domestic workers in South Africa. The present study seeks to bridge this gap by exploring the experiences of ten black African migrant male domestic workers in Johannesburg. Drawing upon Katz’s framework of disaggregated agency, encompassing resilience, reworking, and resistance strategies, the study demonstrates that in the absence of collective resistance through unionisation, male domestic workers employ resilience and reworking strategies to improve their material well-being. Decision-making processes regarding migration to South Africa, engaging in job-hopping, and engaging in multiple piece jobs are examples of the resilience and reworking strategies used by male domestic workers to improve their living conditions. This study shows that paid domestic work in South Africa, whether performed by men or women, is not withoutchallenges, but that male domestic workers exhibit agency by utilising various strategies to navigate and mitigate some of these challenges.
... Domestic work is rooted in the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, whereby women worked for non-related and non-black employers as servants (Ally, 2009;Cock, 1989). Nonetheless, the end of the apartheid system in South Africa facilitated the rise of domestic work in black families. ...
... Similarly, the literature on domestic work suggests that domestic workers are exposed to exploitation and risks such as verbal, sexual abuse and job uncertainty (Magwaza, 2008;Tolla, 2013;Zungu, 2009). Ally (2009) and Grossman (2004) further argue that poor working conditions such as low wages and long hours of work are common in the domestic work sector. This has been normalised in the sector, because domestic work is considered informal (Tolla, 2013) and, therefore, not regulated (Cock, 1989). ...
... Since the seminal work of Cock (1989), domestic work has gained scholarly attention in South Africa, with most studies helping to give insight into the evolution of the domestic work sector, transitions into a sector dominated by black women, and the challenges experienced (Ally, 2009;Cock, 1989;Fish, 2006;Ginsburg, 2000;Grant, 1997;King, 2007). The domestic work sector in South Africa is traced back to colonialism and remnants of the practices of apartheid, in that was dominated by non-related black women working as domestic workers. ...
Domestic work constitutes a large sector, with more than a million women working as domestic workers. In South Africa, it is a norm that whites employ black women as domestic servants, but with the demise of apartheid, there has been an increase in the employment of domestic workers in black families. However, hiring family members as domestic workers in black families is an under-researched area. Drawing from the authors dissertation, this article examines family domestic work – whereby family members hire their relatives as domestic workers – in rural Limpopo. The study mobilises a qualitative approach to comprehend the experiences of hiring kin as domestic workers. Findings illustrate that family domestic work is an act of reciprocal care amongst family members. Relatives hire their kin to help with domestic duties and enabling family members to provide for their families. The relationship between ‘sister-maids’ and ‘sister-madams’ is intertwined, which leads to the difficulty of balancing formal employment and family relations. Thus, family domestic work symbolises a capitalised reciprocal caring within black families in post- apartheid South Africa, as helping involves paying each other. The article does not generalise on family domestic work, but contributes to the body of knowledge about domestic work within black families.
... In her book, Cock (1989) explains that during apartheid, domestic workers worked under exploitative conditions, including as long hours, low wages and verbal abuse, because the sector was not regulated by labour laws. However, the dismantling of apartheid resulted in formalization of the domestic work sector and regulation of domestic workers' conditions of work (Ally, 2009). ...
... In post-apartheid South Africa, domestic work is considered as formal employment. Ally (2009) highlights the changes within the domestic work sector post-apartheid that turned servants into formal workers. The Department of Labour implemented and adopted the Labour Relations Act of 1995 to ensure that domestic workers have access to organizations such as the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). ...
... The Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) 75 of 1997 protects domestic workers' rights as employees. Meanwhile, Sectoral Determination 7 of 2002 strengthens the BCEA through regulating domestic workers' working conditions, wages, and the contractual employment relationship between domestic workers and their employers (Mbatha, 2003: Ally, 2009). Therefore, domestic workers have access to collective bargaining and unions, such as South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU), which assists with protecting and negotiating fair working conditions such as hours of work and wages (Mbatha, 2003). ...
Domestic work-one of the largest sources of employment in South Africa-is rooted in the colonial and apartheid era, during which black women worked as domestic servants for white families. In contemporary South Africa, however, domestic work is prevalent in black families, and there is a growing trend towards family domestic work: family members or close friends working as domestic workers for kin. Typical challenges in the domestic work sector include the navigation of employer-employee relationships, which shape the negotiation of other working conditions. In family domestic work, the setting is worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic and implementation of working from home. This paper draws from 15 semi-structured interviews conducted with black women working as family domestic workers. The findings suggest that family domestic work is centred in reciprocal caring-sister-maids are financially enabled to support families and sister-madams are assisted with domestic duties. Covid-19 has had an impact on family domestic work and family-work relationships, whereby sister-maids had difficulties working in the presence of sister-madams and their children. Hence, silence is adopted by sister-maids challenged by working during Covid-19. However, the pandemic also enabled some sister-maids and sister-madams to grow closer to each other, which strengthened family-work relationships.
... In South Africa, approximately 800,000 people, predominantly black African women from poor socioeconomic and migrant backgrounds, are employed as domestic workers who clean, cook, and care for their mostly middle-class employers (StatsSA 2022). Traditionally, domestic workers are either employed on a live-in basis, where they live on the premises of the employer, or on a live-out basis, where they work for a family full-or part-time; which comes with different demands, employment conditions, and duties (Ally 2010;Du Preez et al. 2010;Du Toit and Heinecken 2021). However, in the last decade, with developments in technologies, a new type of domestic service has emerged through digital domestic work platforms where domestic work has become more fragmented and task-and-time bound (Ahmed et al. 2021;Hunt and Samman 2020;Ticona and Mateescu 2018). ...
... The private nature of domestic work means that domestic workers are subjected to a variety of forms of discrimination in the workplace such as racism, abuse, and harassment (Ally 2010;McCain 2022). This indicator assesses occupational discrimination in its various manifestations as experienced by domestic workers (Ghai 2003). ...
... Social dialogue and representation focus on the collective action and bargaining power domestic workers have. Historically, domestic workers struggle to bargain collectively through unions due to the private nature of domestic work (Ally 2010). In South Africa, the South African Domestic and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) has managed to organise domestic workers successfully, but the low membership remains a challenge. ...
Digital domestic work platforms have grown in the past few years, enabling employers to source paid domestic work via an app. Few studies have looked at the impact that digital domestic work platforms have on the working conditions and well-being of domestic workers. This study draws on the International Labour Organization’s Decent Work framework to explore the extent to which the domestic work platform SweepSouth offers opportunities for decent work. Findings are based on in-depth qualitative interviews with domestic workers employed by SweepSouth. The research revealed that working hours and autonomy were experienced as positive by domestic workers. However, wages remain insufficient to sustain a quality life. Furthermore, the lack of control over work time, an absence of union representation and collective bargaining power, and no social benefits have a negative impact on domestic workers’ working conditions. Algorithmic ratings from clients also put extra pressure on domestic workers to render quality cleaning services. Finally, this study shows that domestic work remains unstable and insecure and that digital domestic work platforms do little to improve the lives of domestic workers.
... I also build upon existing anthropological understandings of the role of religion in domestic work by highlighting how domestic workers negotiate Islamic respectability and cultivate spiritual kinship connections in a women's madrasa as well as their transformation of work into worship through ibada. For example, scholars have described how domestic and home care workers rely on religiosity and religious spaces to cultivate social relationships with their peers and spiritual meaning in their lives and to counteract, in limited ways, the vicissitudes of domestic work (Ahmed, 2010;Ally, 2009;Gill, 1994;Liebelt, 2010;Parreñas, 2015;Stacey, 2011). This literature mostly looks at domestic workers' participation in working-class religious spaces that lack the class diversity of Rehema's madrasa, and I am only aware of one article that explores the role of Islam (Ahmed, 2010). ...
... This is especially notable since mainlanders in Zanzibar are often prejudicially represented as sources of moral decay and as inauthentically Islamic. Her madrasa differs from other scholars' depictions of domestic workers' participation in more socially homogenous religious spaces (Ahmed, 2010;Ally, 2009;Gill, 1994;Liebelt, 2010;Parreñas, 2015) in its diverse membership. This means that domestic worker participants are negotiating dignity and receiving communal affirmation of their moral personhood in a social space that simultaneously reflects and transcends broader social inequities on the isles. ...
Few domestic workers on the semiautonomous Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar are registered union members, and most domestic workers neither receive nor demand their legal right to a formal contract. Relying on my yearlong engagement between 2017 and 2018 with a women's Islamic studies group and a life history interview with a domestic worker, this essay explores domestic workers' reliance on alternative protective mechanisms from unionization and formalization. The domestic workers I engaged with cultivated relationships with God, negotiated dignity, received affirmation of their spiritual equality, and developed spiritual kinship connections in faith‐based spaces. They also sought to ensure their physical and social well‐being through kin‐based connections and recruitment mechanisms. Kin‐based connections that were spiritual or that connected domestic workers to employers were more protective than kinship relations cultivated in the context of work. Furthermore, domestic workers transformed routine work tasks into opportunities to practice devotion, which reflects Swahili/Islamic understandings of personhood as going beyond the category of worker. Religious spaces and spiritual kinship offer protection to domestic workers through the forms of reciprocity they enable and are thus often a more viable framework than unionization and formalization for overcoming the compounding effects of economic crisis and social inequality on domestic workers' lives.
... Interestingly, in specific contexts, the formalisation of hired care work might produce recalcitrant realities and contradictory consequences, and even reinforce structures of classed, raced and gendered inequality. This is the case of post-apartheid South Africa (see Ally 2010), which witnessed one of the most remarkable efforts to recognise paid domestic work as a form of employment. A new labor legislation was established that included domestic workers and gave them a national minimum wage, formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, a pension fund, and other rights. ...
... In 2013, South Africa ratified the ILO C189. Yet Shireen Adam Ally (2010) argues that in South Africa -like in postcolonial Zambia (Hansen 1990), Tanzania (Bujra 2000), and Zimbabwe (Pape 1993), among others -democratic values have coexisted with continued servitude relations within paid domestic work. In her study, domestic workers were refusing to sign contracts and instead chose to informally negotiate the conditions of their work. ...
Drawing from the lived experiences of female domestic workers in Ethiopia and Tanzania, this article illustrates different ways in which domestic work can be practiced and defined in both countries. It analyses women’s narratives in the present and past tense to explore different situations before and after they come into contact with an NGO that advocates for domestic workers’ rights. Since their childhood, the women interviewed have worked in various kin and non-kin households, and performed different types of domestic work (formal and informal, paid and unpaid, live-in and live-out). The asymmetrical and hierarchical relationships between employees and employers are ambiguous and often confused with kinship or distant kinship. These ambiguities come to the fore precisely when projects fostered by labour activists aim at the formalization of hired care work, that is, skilled employment made up of clearly defined tasks, regulated by written contracts, rights and responsibilities. In contexts where labor protections are poorly enforced, proposals to formalize domestic work can provide an essential reference point for the collective mobilization of women workers. At the same time, proposed solutions favoring the formalization of hired work might clash with local realities and not necessarily be perceived as appropriate by domestic workers.
... These conceptions were highly consistent with the post-Apartheid justifications of welfare provision by the state (Ally, 2009;Seekings, 2009). They revealed more broadly why the state appeared to fail to protect the migrants, despite providing six months of assistance and promoted reintegration (at least in Cape Town). ...
... What was at stake was the reach of the state: it preferred to empower local actors to reduce their own vulnerabilities rather than require government actors to take responsibility for fighting social inequalities. The state would nonetheless provide assistance, but only to the most vulnerable and deserving-the elderly, the sick, and children (Seekings, 2009), and in exchange for the wielding of control over individuals (Ally, 2009). Consequently, responding to xenophobia as a disaster may never bring the state to tackle the root causes of the problem, only its visible surface. ...
In 2008, South Africa witnessed a bout of xenophobic violence, requiring the state to declare a disaster to manage a massive displacement of migrants and foreigners. How did the South African state come to care for these populations, whereas it was widely seen as responsible for fostering xenophobia, if not violence? Widespread violence and displacement rendered migrant vulnerabilities visible in the urban space and forced the state to temporarily recognise and protect those who became seen as ‘victims.’ The kind of protection displayed by disaster management was restricted to the ‘most vulnerable’ because of organisational complexity, political unwillingness to own the problem, and a focus on emergency management at the detriment of an intervention on root causes, revealing the broader limits of disaster management.
... These services include cleaning, washing and ironing clothes, cooking, child-minding, and sometimes taking care of the elderly. These f ive components are common across the literature (Cock, 1981;Zungu, 2009;Ally, 2010), yet as domestic work occurs in private households, there may be other services such as gardening or taking care of pets that are expected of a domestic worker. As Statistics SA (2023) notes, around 863,000 domestic workers, who are predominantly low or semi-skilled black women (Business Tech, 2023), f ind their workplace in the private homes of employers every day. ...
... Thus, the critical, seminal work of Cock (1980Cock ( , 1981Cock ( , 2011 remains relevant to contemporary discussions on 'maids' and 'madams'. In line with Ally's (2010) work, From Servants to Workers, the development of domestic work in South Africa and the government's attempts to regulate this area of the service industry post the advent of democracy, have been highlighted. This includes protective laws such as the Labour Relations Act (LRA) in 1995, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) in 2002, the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) in 2003, and various increments in the minimum wage since. ...
... Although the colonial state and the Church subsequently deployed domesticity as a mechanism of labour controlreframing African women as Christianly wives, mothers, and servantsthe material conditions of colonialism ultimately undermined the consolidation of a patriarchal nuclear family (Baderoon, 2014). Importantly, Ally (2009) points out that the notion of devout domesticity was leveraged by African women to reclaim their right to wifehood and motherhood under colonialism. The Manyano movement in South Africa, for instance, was a key source of resistance to the expropriation of property and fragmentation of the family, even as it emphasized collective prayer over action. ...
... Far from passive, the performance of patience requires high levels of self-discipline. Recognizing these historically cultivated practices of power in the affective world of paid domestic work is key to ensuring that attempts at formalization empower, rather than disempower, domestic workers (Ally, 2009). Although paid domestic work can entrench patriarchal control within the householdresolving cooperative intrahousehold conflicts by outsourcing care responsibilities to working-class womenattempts to improve the conditions of domestic workers must seek to overthrow this "cult of feminity" to borrow from Gqola (2007). ...
... Even where their work may be recognized as legitimate or formal work, it translates into few actual protections against unlawful firing. In South Africa, though domestic workers have been legally recognized as workers, their everyday reality continues to be shaped by apartheid logics that categorize Black women as servants (Ally 2009). In an immigrant workers' community in New York, despite recent recognition of domestic workers, it is the workers' collective and affective sharing of strategies of employer engagement that are more useful in navigating job insecurity or sudden dismissal (Glaser 2020). ...
... This essay started with Anita urging workers to collectively oppose employers in one residential apartment block who were opting to hire new domestic workers. Other scholars have also noted that more than wages or social security, it is security against losing one's long-standing job that most domestic workers aspire for (Ally 2009). Even when Anita was in the hospital, she told her employers that she feared that they would replace her and that she would lose her source of income, making her predicament even worse. ...
In India, many women from former untouchable caste groups (Dalits) are domestic workers. Despite attempts at seeking formal, legal recognition, they continue to be seen by the state as part of a broad, ambiguous category of “informal workers” whose work is stigmatized and not legislated for. In this essay, I suggest that the discourses and practices of a neighborhood‐level Dalit domestic workers’ union in Mumbai reconceptualize domestic work as “formal” work. The workers assert themselves as formal workers (kamgaar) owing to their long histories of work in specific neighborhoods, relationships of trust with employers, and their ability to negotiate long‐standing employment with them. Though domestic work does not align with the state’s definition of formal work (for example, through the presence of written contracts), for the workers, it was their own qualities, origins, social positions, and relationships that defined the formality of work rather than the other way around. Centering respect and dignity in their own work, their union also facilitated the articulation of the caste and gender‐based prejudices that have not only kept domestic workers outside the ambit of formal recognition but also have brought about routine encounters with violence and harassment for Dalit women in the local neighborhood.
... There has been a massive effort by the state to regulate paid domestic work and, since 2004, South Africa has had a progressive employment regulation, not least because of the well-organised domestic worker organisations. 'Servants' were transformed into 'workers' (Ally 2009). In Linbro Park today, working hours have become adapted to office hours. ...
... Workers work from around seven or eight o'clock in the morning till four or five in the afternoon. Saturdays and Sundays are usually off and they generally have holidays (see also Ally 2009). ...
... The injustices caused by the apartheid regime in South Africa did not only affect the sociological, physical, and mental lives of black people, but their means of making a living were relegated to labouring through hard work as uneducated people who at most became mineworkers, gardeners, domestic workers, and garbage collectors [1][2][3][4]. These types of jobs were justifiable, because the black labour force constituted intentionally uneducated people. ...
This study examines the challenges faced by marginalised populations in accessing and benefiting from higher education funding models in South Africa. It explores how student loan schemes and income-contingent loans, while intended to improve access, often reinforce post-apartheid inequalities by burdening graduates with debt and limiting employment opportunities. The study also evaluates the effectiveness of the South African government’s 2018 transition to a fully subsidised funding model in addressing these disparities. Despite increased financial support through initiatives such as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), barriers to employment and salary expectations remain significant socio-economic challenges. This research employs a qualitative approach, utilising secondary sources, including existing literature, government reports, and archival materials. The findings reveal that while funding programmes have improved access to higher education for marginalised communities, graduates continue to experience declining job absorption rates and persistent inequalities, particularly among women and African graduates. The study concludes that financial and socio-economic challenges perpetuate cycles of inequality, underscoring the need for comprehensive policies that extend beyond funding access to ensure equitable employment opportunities and long-term socio-economic transformation.
... A large body of research on the experiences of domestic workers in migration spaces also exists. Ally (2010) (Cock, 1990). The appeal of domestic work was moulded around particular ideologies of respectability that accompanied African women's entry into urban spaces in search of work. ...
This thesis is situated within debates about the intersection between identity, gender and transmigration that are on the rise in the South-South context. Using a feminist research approach nested within qualitative methodology, the thesis focuses on the experiences of Zimbabwean women who live in the City of Johannesburg with precarious immigration legal status. The thesis argues that the working-class, transmigrant women navigate Johannesburg in ways that reveal colonial, spatial injustices that Black South Africans are already experiencing. This includes grappling with the legacies of colonial, border regimes (concrete and metaphorical) and social exclusion in labour/work; accommodation; access to public health institutions; cost of living crisis; remittances; experiences with GBV, structural violence such xenophobia, being arrested, detained, and deported. However, because of their ‘irregular’ legal status, Zimbabwean transmigrant women narrated from semi-structured interviews that they negotiated everyday life in ‘gendered spaces’. As a result, the women face additional intersecting layers of social exclusion that are embedded in historical, social structures that prompt ‘feminisation of migration’. The impact of ‘irregular personhood’ that is inscribed in the identities of working-class, transmigrant women means that they experience violence at all stages of the migration value-chain. An illumination of South-South gendered migratory trajectories is timely and crucially arises out of practices by androcentric state definitions of belonging/unbelonging to the nation-state as a project that are fundamentally gender/race/class project through somatocentric policy and migration governance. A key finding in the thesis is that what prompts women to migrate from Zimbabwe especially from the Matabeleland provinces is largely economic but can also be linked to violent post-independent nation-building projects that led to Gukurahundi genocide. The thesis argues that this violence lingers socially with the phenomenon of ‘Missing/Absent Fathers’ that is being filled by the transmigrant women themselves when they play double-roles and by other actors known as oMalayitsha. The interactions and modalities of community that arise from these social relations indicate non-normative family arrangements and non-White sociality that showed how women empathise with transmigrant Zimbabwean men and their struggles in Johannesburg therefore humanising them and demonstrating the fluidity of the performativity of gender. This analysis moves beyond the narratives of Zimbabwean working-class women Johannesburg society that binarily characterize them as either ‘victims’ or ‘victors’ without adequate engagement of the importance of gender regimes in an African context as relational. This arises from the fact that dominant analyses in transmigrant research are rooted in economic, push-pull and top-down approaches which, in this thesis, are substituted with an eclectic theoretical approach anchored on intersectionality, decolonial feminism and the reflexive turn in migration research. The thesis concludes, in part, that transmigrant Zimbabwean women’s life experiences in South Africa create gender and discourses about power and space-making that needlessly create worry, violence, and anxiety for transmigrant working-class women in South Africa. South Africa has policy options that it can adopt to address these challenges and is tied to serious attempts at bilateral and regional levels to regularise the stay of marginal transmigrants and to protect them in terms of labour exploitation and other forms of violence.
... Women employment in domestic work is emerging theme indicating they feel empowered, as they are able to financially contribute to their home. The key themes identified through analysis for domestic workers is "economic vulnerability", women move into employment due to their low economicconditions (Ally, 2010;Jureidini&Moukarbel, 2004;Garabiles et al., 2019)."Migration" has been another source of income to domestic workers to improve their living conditions at home country, however their well-being is determined through creation of labour standards, regulation of migration and policies in the host country, on contrary absence of these could have adverse effects on domestic workers wellbeing as they leave their families and stay far away (Parrenas, 2005;Anderson, 2007;Yeoh & Huang, 2000)."Labour ...
Domestic workers face unique challenges due to their informal nature of the work that impact their socio-economic status, health and well-being. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of socio-economics status of global domestic workers research of 24 years of scholarly work (2000-2024) published in Scopus database consisting of 1304 publications. The study uses VOS viewer and Bibliometrix from R studio software to visualise and examine the research trends. The result of the research shows the publications trend has increased significantly post 2020 due to the informal nature of work, restricted mobility of labour during pandemic, migration, emerging technological advancement, increased awareness of their rights, global advocacy and policy movements through International Labour Organisations (ILO). The citation analysis highlights prominent studies conducted globally with influential authors, sources and high volumes of publications. It explored geographical spread of studies emphasising on countries and organisations contribution towards socio-economic status of domestic workers. Furthermore, keywords co-occurrence analysis highlights the key themes and basic concepts within the literature. Despite broad focus on various dimension of socio-economic dimensions, literature has lacuna in qualitative research, underexplored or unexplored areas like technology playing a crucial role, gender-specific challenges faced by domestic workers. The study encourages future research on interdisciplinary approach and emerging issues that is imperative for welfare of domestic workers. The findings provide crucial insights to governments, policy makers, advocacy groups and labour organisations to create global awareness and protect domestic workers rights and well-being.
... Policy attempts to equalize opportunities can have unexpected results. For example, Shireen Ally has shown how the South African constitution aimed to give Black South African women greater rights, including modernizing and recognizing domestic employment as work deserving of protection (Ally 2011). Yet, the labor policies aimed at ensuring reasonable wages, leave and unemployment insurance weakened labor unions and women's mobilization, and did not radically change domestic workers' circumstances. ...
... The 1994 democratisation shifted the policy goals and the nature of protection but furthered the development of disaster professionals and bureaucracy. This should not minimise, however, the importance of the reconfiguration of the state with the democratisation and the project to extend and transform the nature of protection provided to populations against a broader set of risks, more generally participating from a redefinition of welfare from the risk and vulnerability categories (Ally, 2009;Seekings, 2009;Seekings & Nattrass, 2005). ...
What does it mean to govern disasters? The history of disaster policy in South Africa showed how the emergence of collective forms of assistance, rescue, and over time, prevention and preparedness participated in the formation of the South African state by extending the scope of its interventions to new threats and new populations, and the extent of its protective politics. Disaster policies were always associated with decisions over who and what is deemed worth protecting in society, and therefore, what are the political foundations of a regime. Protective politics constitute an essential avenue for research in the era of climate change.
... As Ray and Qayum (2009) and Ally (2009) show, the rhetoric of love and the ideologies of family, loyalty, and mutual obligation and dependency enable employers to perpetuate exploitative working conditions. Simultaneously, these discourses sometimes enable household workers to make claims to customary rights, allowing them to gain some measure of equality in intrinsically unequal relationships. ...
In 2013, Argentina promulgated Law 26844, transforming household workers’ juridical status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights, to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. This article examines how household workers in Buenos Aires who share amicable or kin‐like relationships with their employers and the people they care for experience the transition from a discriminatory normative order of patronage and servanthood into an egalitarian normative order of full labor rights. The article shows, first, that rather than adopting a purely contractual rationality of labor rights and obligations, workers instead often make claims to labor rights in the registers of reciprocal obligation extant in their relationships with their employers and the people they care for. Second, the article shows that, as a type of social capital, the intimate capital that workers accrue in their relationships with their employers and the people they care for, in the form of relational ties with them, sometimes enables workers to access labor rights. Thus, the article demonstrates how household workers claim and access their legal equality against the backdrop of enduring intersectional inequalities between them and their employers in a context of widespread violation of household workers’ labor rights.
... This in turn resonates with the frameworks employed by movements of other informal workers with whom domestic workers have developed important links. Shereen Ally (2009) andJennifer Fish (2014) explain how, in the midst of the South African democratic transition, expanding domestic workers' rights in the country was successfully framed as integral to the wider process of 'defining features of the new nation' after the end of apartheid (Fish, 2014: 233). By contrast, in European public debates, especially since the 2000s, Bridget Anderson (2010) and Helen Schwenken (2003) have referred to two competing ways that domestic workers' struggles have been framed -namely, in terms of trafficking and in terms of rights. ...
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Drawing from the EU-funded DomEQUAL research project across 9 countries in Europe, South America and Asia, this comparative study explores the conditions of domestic workers around the world and the campaigns they are conducting to improve their labour rights.
The book showcases how domestic workers’ movements put ‘intersectionality in action’ in representing the interest of various marginalized social groups from migrants and low-income groups to racialized and rural girls and women.
Casting light on issues such as subjectification, and collective organizing on the part of a category of workers conventionally regarded as unorganizable, this ambitious volume will be invaluable for scholars, policy makers and activists alike.
This paper examines the demand for, creation and ultimate failure of a legislation aimed at formalizing domestic workers in Mumbai, India. The paper is based on an analysis of parliamentary discussions on the legislation process and ethnographic fieldwork with diverse groups of domestic workers undertaken between 2014 and 2021. I critique the claim that formalization policies are merely ill‐suited to the norms or complexities of domestic work. Instead, I argue that formalization fails because the state drafts laws that actively protect the interest of domestic workers' employers, rather than domestic workers. In drafting a piece of legislation that creates no obligations on employers and offers few immediate benefits to workers, I locate its failure in the context of widespread labor deregulation and a shrinking formal sector in India. Crafting such a law, the state plays a partisan role and stems the momentum of further domestic worker organizing in Mumbai.
In 2010, New York State passed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first‐ever US legislation protecting home‐based workers. Although the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights represented a significant change to US labor law and in the lives of workers and activists who made its passage possible, relatively few of New York's domestic workers were aware of the new regulations governing their work after its implementation. The domestic worker activists who fought for its passage, instead, describe the bill as recognizing the legitimacy and visibility of reproductive work, reversing what they understand as centuries of racist norms proscribing their labor. These activist nannies and caretakers of older adults draw on idioms of professionalism to validate claims for the dignity of domestic work even as they regard the protections afforded by the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights as an inadequate first step toward meaningfully improving their employment sector. In this article, I draw on Nancy Fraser's critical theory of recognition to grapple with the afterlife of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.
The present study has described and analyzed the experiences of women domestic workers living in multiple and different worlds. This study aimed to understand the lived experiences of these women as a silent and marginalized group due to the lack of an official position in the legal structure and the weakness of research. First of all, the questions of this study are based on the description of the salient points of domestic worker women's experience of the work and life situation in a context of different worlds. In what situations and with which mechanisms do these women experience difference and inequality? How does the perception resulting from such an experience manifest itself in people's consciousness? How can the more structural implications of such situational perception be explained? The approach and method are based on the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which is focused on the experience of the embodied subject in the world, whose perception is determined based on her situation concerning others and the world. The statistical population included female domestic workers aged 25 to 55 in Tehran, who were selected through snowball and criterion-related sampling. The results of the study show that the outstanding levels of perception among these women are the result of situations of powerlessness, ambiguity and not being at ease which is the result of the predominance of informal relations, away from legal supervision and intermingled with cultural practices that reproduce a structure of power hierarchies at the everyday level. Such a context makes the intention or motivation and daily practices of both sides subject to the possibility of multiple readings; This is largely due to cultural contexts and social beliefs regarding moral systems, dignified principles, and the reasons for placing people in hierarchical social stratifications. We are constantly acting based on perception and awareness affected by such entanglements, and we enable the reproduction of epistemic systems that We are not necessarily aware of their consequences. In the theme of instrumentalization, the participants found themselves in situations of excessive accessibility, worthlessness, and identification with the work they do. Ambiguity implied a perceptual background that was, at the first level, affected by borderline relations between the worker and the employer in an informal atmosphere and based on non-standard conditions or lack of supervision and rules, mixed with empathic, authoritarian, pitiful, and exploitative behaviors that Their interference in people's experience, in addition to the fact that it had led to indirect indications of such relationships; A form of sensory confusion followed. In the third theme, continuous exposure to the symbols of inequality, the difference in social status, and levels of Prosperity under contradictory situations could be recognized in the entire narrative of the participants, which shows the state of not being at ease. The meaning of such a space of plurality and multiple/contradictory possibilities of action/reaction can be understood in the shadow of Merleau-Ponty's belief that perception is inevitably accompanied by action; Perception, which is an inevitable aspect of our existence in the world, and always affects us through direct or indirect contact with others, their beliefs, their history, and their stories. A common focus of the literature on paid domestic work in the world is that the gender and social class of domestic workers are central to explaining the structural oppression of domestic work. Such an approach is confirmed in the present study. They show that the inequalities reproduced in domestic service flows are largely maintained through emotional ambiguities amid such intersections. At the macro
The article presents a general, though not exhaustive, overview of the notion of care and its presence and relevance in gender historiography, examining how historical research can inform and shape new discussions. A bibliographic and narrative review methodology is used, comparing selected studies based on their contributions and scope. Given that care is a transdisciplinary issue with significant heuristic potential, both historical topics and those from other branches of the humanities and social sciences are considered. Care is understood here both as an affective and a labor disposition, and it is from these dimensions that the main debates and problems are presented, focusing specifically on those that have had the greatest presence in gender and history studies: domestic work, feminized professions that care for others, affective communities, and maternal love. In the context of the current care crisis, it is concluded that the topic needs to be viewed broadly and its contributions revalued from a critical gender theory perspective, also considering a historiographic perspective sensitive to contexts and capable of interpretive flexibility. The article focuses on the main academic discussions held in North America and European countries, aiming to contribute to understanding the theoretical and applied scope of care and acknowledging that there is still much ground to cover. The conclusions offer an overview of the thematic lines and theoretical assumptions that could enrich future historiographical research agendas on care.
This innovative study is the first to explore the evolution of domestic service in the Soviet Union, set against the background of changing discourses on women, labour, and socialist living. Even though domestic service conflicted with the Bolsheviks' egalitarian message, the regime embraced paid domestic labor as a temporary solution to the problem of housework. Analyzing sources ranging from court cases to oral interviews, Alissa Klots demonstrates how the regime both facilitated and thwarted domestic workers' efforts to reinvent themselves as equal members of Soviet society. Here, a desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism clashed with a gendered ideology where housework was women's work. This book serves not only as a window into class and gender inequality under socialism, but as a vantage point to examine the power of state initiatives to improve the lives of household workers in the modern world.
With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labour organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF)—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI).
For both cases, I draw on five sources: secondary literature; archival material from the two federations; seven semi-structured interviews with experts on and members of these federations, plus a meeting with a small group of BWI leaders; and observations of several IDWF and BWI events.
This comparison yields two striking findings. First, despite contrasting environments and historical legacies, the two federations show much convergence in strategy. Second, they clearly differ in their degree of adherence to the standard trade union model, as a result of differences in assets and challenges. The BWI is strongly wedded to the conventional model and struggles to reach informal workers, while enjoying a robust inflow of membership dues. The IDWF is committed to welcoming a variety of organizations and readily mobilizes informal workers, while suffering from an anemic inflow of membership dues. These challenges must be met not just for the survival of the BWI and the IDWF but also for the prospect of organizing globally to defend informal and precarious workers.
Abstract
With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labor organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International. The contrast reveals similarities, divergences and trade-offs, with important implications for the future potential for building global organizations of informal workers.
This chapter explores how the rise of neo-liberalism changed the rules of the game, undermining the gains made by workers in the 1980s and eroding the standard employment relationship through outsourcing. The chapter begins by reflecting on different cycles of municipal workers’ resistance in Johannesburg. Then it goes on to show how these municipal workers rediscover their power and attempt to resist casualisation and privatisation. The contention is that, by failing to extend its struggle to the community (utilising societal power), the SAMWU lost an opportunity to broaden its power resources. The chapter concludes by showing how, in the age of globalisation, neo-liberalism has captured the state, social democratic labour’s historical ally. This has drawn sections of the union leadership into corrupt practices. In terms of Jelle Vissers’ typology, SAMWU is an example of dualisation, where unions defend existing strongholds and focus on workers in stable jobs. This opens up a growing representational gap as more and more precarious workers are left without a voice.
This framing chapter situates the book’s case studies within their historical context. Over the last half-century, globalisation and digitalisation have dramatically changed the world of work, and the social weight of the international labour movement has declined. Understanding these changes has preoccupied labour scholars. The chapter explores how this literature has wrestled with Karl Polanyi’s notion of a counter-movement to find new hope for labour under neo-liberalism. But the conundrum that is the ‘future of labour’ ultimately takes us back to Marx, whose insights into the inherent logics of capital accumulation and the fundamental contradictions of wage labour provide the theoretical building blocks for understanding the changing politics of production today. The central argument is that capital employs numerous ‘labour-process fixes’ to overcome impediments to accumulation, undermine worker organisation and restructure the workforce. The case studies in the rest of the book then consider how labour process changes in different industries ‘unmake, remake and make’ sections of the workforce and the working class more broadly. Finally, the chapter introduces the idea that how workers build power is the guiding question when enquiring what future there is for labour.
After 1994, the democratisation of the South African state led to the introduction of a new disaster management paradigm aiming to protect vulnerable populations and sustainable development. Yet, the transformation of the law, the bureaucracy, and the profession was a slow, conflictual, and difficult process shaped by different groups, each with its visions and interests. What notions of risk and vulnerability meant for disaster policy and the re-engineering of the state resulted from those attempts by specific groups (politicians, professionals, scientists) to shape reforms, gain or retain control over their jurisdictions. Contradictions between bureaucratic, political, and professional developments limited state building and the extension of state protection against disasters.
In this article, I will use a textual analysis of Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (1998) as a framework through which to critique and expand upon the concerns reflected in current studies of whiteness. As I will observe, the field of Whiteness Studies offers an insightful lens through which to examine the constructions of whiteness, particularly with regards to how it capitalizes on Black identities and subjectivities. Yet, it does not address the different formations of white identity that may emerge when seeking out points of empathy and connection between Black and white individuals and communities. Through a specific focus on Magona's portrayal of the figures of the white "madam", the white liberal activist, and the white grieving mother in Mother to Mother, I will examine how the novel demonstrates the ways in which engaging with the humanity of whiteness can potentially illuminate these different formations of white identity. ARTICLE HISTORY
This book shows how South African writing can help us to understand change after apartheid. It aims to shift the attention of literary criticism away from a narrow set of highbrow South African authors and towards a wider range of texts, including popular fiction. The object of analysis, at its largest level, is the South African polity as it veered between the hopeful optimism of the 'Rainbow nation' under Nelson Mandela, the murderous muddling of Thabo Mbeki, and the 'captured state' under Jacob Zuma. Questions of a political, economic, and sociological cast are central, with changes in the workplace, land reform, indigenous knowledge, xenophobia, corruption, and crime providing specific points of focus. Writing, Politics and Change in South Africa after Apartheid shows how creative literature of the post-apartheid period has a unique and powerful capacity to illuminate these issues and to intervene in our understanding of them.
This chapter takes on Joan Tronto’s idea of privileged irresponsibility, which emanates from her work on caring responsibilities, and asks how it may be extended into other concerns such as coloniality and responsibility for the damaged planet. In particular, we examine Tronto’s understanding of how privileged irresponsibility allows privileged groups to excuse themselves from responsibility and Val Plumwood’s mechanisms of dualism which make it possible to maintain privileged irresponsibility. We then discuss how the notion of wilful ignorance plays a significant role in maintaining privileged irresponsibility. Understanding responsibility as relational and political, and hence privileged irresponsibility as also social and political, turns our attention to re-evaluating the ways we understand caring responsibilities for marginalised and disempowered groups of the society. Such a framework makes visible the way in which caring responsibilities—for humans and non-humans alike—are bound up with gender, race, class, ability, human-centredness and other forms of inequality and serve to reproduce privileged irresponsibility.KeywordsPrivileged irresponsibilityMechanisms of dualismWilful ignoranceInequalityHumansNon-humans
This article focuses on platform domestic workers’ (PDWs’) experiences and their decision to engage in platform leakage—taking platform domestic work offline. We argue that delving into the types of domestic work choices PDWs make reveals their agency with and through digital platforms in response to precarity on the platform and in the domestic sector. The article demonstrates, through an interpretivist case study that included semi-structured interviews with a sample of PDWs in Cape Town and analysis of documents related to their platform company, that platform leakage is an unavoidable and possibly inherent feature of the platform domestic work model. The findings show that PDWs’ experience of platform domestic work as a form of “gig work” is informed and mainly influenced by unemployment and underemployment in the domestic sector rather than its benefits of flexibility for work life balance and fulfilling unpaid reproductive labour needs. Further, the algorithmic management of the labour process shows that flexibility leaves PDWs in a precarious position but also, paradoxically, creates the need and opportunity to engage in platform leakage. As a result, algorithmic management as a form of control over PDWs’ work performance, and its contingence on personalism for reputational ratings, does not always imply the inescapable power of platform companies. We conclude that further research is needed to deepen our understanding of the employment relationship that emerges from platform leakage, particularly how PDWs experience it and the management of it.
At the onset of the apartheid era, Jewish women across South Africa began to publish community cookbooks to raise money for Jewish schools, synagogues, and other organizations. Through their combination of recipes, titles, advertisements, prefaces, and guidelines, community cookbooks narrated the economic, social, and cultural successes of the women who compiled them. In the postwar period, South African Jewish women sought a place for themselves in Jewish communal life, and in the white middle class of the country’s new apartheid order. By producing and consuming community cookbooks, these women armed themselves with the organizational platform and the cultural capital that would help them claim that place. In order to be able to step into the public sphere while meeting their domestic obligations, they came to rely on the invisibilized labor of the black women who worked in their homes and kitchens. The paper uses cookbooks to think critically about the position of South African Jews in the apartheid system, analyzing how Jewish women benefited from the privileges of whiteness in the intimate arena of their homes.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has made the lives of domestic workers, who are mostly women, more difficult. Building on the testimonies of domestic workers in South Africa collected between January and August 2021, this article examines the everyday violence they face during the pandemic. It argues that everyday violence is greatly amplified during the pandemic, because the virus not only affects domestic workers’ livelihoods, but generates new forms of discrimination at work. The article calls for expanded worker alliances to be built in the informal sector to push back against everyday violence and reduce workers’ vulnerabilities.
This paper examines the home as networked and relational. These arrangements of spaceand place were investigated through a digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis ofdomestically focused posts by 50 Facebook users. This data was supplemented by interviews,and in-situ observations drawn from the broader sample. Facebook has opened up the privatespace of the home, allowing domestic space, place, and practice to gain visibility, which, whenanalysed in conjunction with Actor-Network Theory (ANT), illustrates the networked and relationalquality of the home. The home, and the relationships between actants, reflects discoursesand hierarchy. Women remain tightly bound to the home, and to postfeminist discourses ofdomesticity and domestopia. This paper reveals that whiteness, and in particular madamhood,is blackboxed within middle-class homes. Domestic workers employed by these households,on the other hand, were largely absent from such narratives and conversations, and weremarginalised within networks.
State policies may strongly influence the employment of migrants for care and domestic work (Ruhs & Anderson, 2010). Both sending and receiving countries have adopted mechanisms to channel migrants (especially women) into this specific occupation. The care market-oriented scenario described in the previous pages creates a growing demand for a (female) migrant labour force employed to work for longer hours and at lower wages than local workers (Anderson & Shutes, 2014; Cangiano & Shutes, 2010). These migrant care workers are generally disadvantaged by policies privileging skilled over unskilled migration, as well as by legislation denying (long-term) residence permits to people employed in the care sector. Policies that make the regular employment of migrants very difficult contribute to the under-valuation of these jobs, which are generally assigned to the most vulnerable and stigmatized subjects in each national context (Lan, 2006). Women migrating to work in the domestic and private care sector face a complex landscape of migration and labour regulations that is extremely difficult to navigate. The situation is also problematic for households that cannot find appropriate or affordable care within declining welfare states and among fellow nationals reluctant to take these jobs, but are forbidden or discouraged from directly hiring a domestic worker who is a third-country national. As a consequence, irregular migration and informal work are expanding within the realm of private homes.
I hope that readers of this book will have found in it a complete and inspiring overview of the many issues at stake around the topic of domestic work, from a migratory perspective. Some of the issues discussed in this volume actually go beyond the experience of migrants, in as far as they may concern the non-migrants among domestic workers. But they also concern workers in the care sectors more generally, as well as the households, companies or institutions for which they work.
In parallel with the development of the scholarship on migrant domestic work, the feminist approach of intersectionality of differences has gained traction in the social sciences in recent decades. I do not have the space here to account for the different understandings of intersectionality and their methodological implications for research (see Collins & Bilge, 2020; Lutz et al., 2016; Romero, 2017). Certainly the fact that some of the sociologists occupied with domestic workers’ issues have also used intersectionality in their work (for instance Helma Lutz in Germany, and Mary Romero in the US) has had profound repercussions. An intersectional approach requires that we avoid homogenizing views on people’s experiences, and seek a deeper understanding of the real elements of commonality or difference between them. In other words, an intersectional perspective tells us that between people who apparently share the same experience, or the same social conditions, there may also be key differences. In the study of migrant domestic work this occurs at two different levels.
Transnational migration gives rise to multiple forms of potential exploitation of paid domestic work, being an occupation that is relegated to the informal labour market where migrant women often find themselves in powerless positions in relation to their employers and host society. This is especially so when they are undocumented migrants, as is the case for migrants who do not fulfil the requirements for labour or family migration. As a consequence, in many countries, migrants’ employment in private households is strongly deregulated and workers do not have access to social and labour protection (Triandafyllidou & Marchetti, 2017). In several countries, domestic work is not recognized as work, and is therefore excluded from labour protections. Domestic workers are often deprived of monetary payment and compensated with only food and shelter. Also, in countries where domestic work is regulated through labour laws, provisions differ significantly from those in place for other jobs, having lower remuneration and fewer social protections. This lack of a normative framework adds to the vulnerability that is typical of the sector due to the isolation that is characteristic of this kind of work (especially for live-in workers) and the social stigmatization that they face in different parts of the world.
The transnational migration of women (and some men) as domestic and care workers is based on the increasing expansion of a private market which is recruiting workers, mainly in the Global South, to perform tasks relating to reproductive labour in wealthier countries. To understand the experience of these workers, it is important to consider how this labour market differs from others. It cannot be reduced to payment for the performance of tasks. It is also undoubtedly affected by the private realm in which it takes place. Some scholars have argued that the uniqueness of this labour market lies in the intimacy that it is charged with, as a consequence of the physicality of care work, the privacy of the domestic setting in which it takes place, and the relevance of the interpersonal dimension it entails (Parreñas & Boris, 2010). Let us look more closely at these different elements.
Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service – childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes – was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imagery, domestic workers were almost always black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were 'like one of the family', just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses on Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.
Scholars looking at whiteness through a postcolonial lens have notably explored the lingering and multi-faceted nature of whiteness in the wake of empire. We apply Shome’s argument that whiteness is rendered visible through how it is ‘disembodied’ to explore how whiteness is signified and interpreted in a postcolonial Ugandan context and with the term Mzungu. Disembodied whiteness centres the discursive and material forms of whiteness. Interview and focus group data from domestic workers who work for foreigners in Uganda are analysed. We argue in Uganda whiteness is structurally present in the growth of the development aid state and discursively understood in contrast and relation to Africanness and Blackness. Whiteness, Mzungu, African, Black represents multiple understandings and a duality for the Ugandan domestic workers who work in the foreign households of the aid state. Ultimately, postcolonial whiteness in Uganda sustains white supremacy, but fissures, contestation, and disruption also follow its production.
In this chapter, we look at theStruggle for citizenship struggle for citizenshipCitizenshipamong domestic workersDomestic workersin IndonesiaIndonesia. Indonesia is an important node of labour migrationLabour migration, sending more than six million workersWorkers to other Asian countriesAsian countries (and beyond) to work, many of them as domestic workers.
