Anthropology of Work Review最新文献

In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted a new Domestic Workers Convention, a change that generated struggles internationally around recognizing domestic labor as a form of work. Recognition as a worker is meant to redress the particularities that render the exploitation of domestic workers so intimate, painful, and naturalized. A decade after the Convention's passage is a reasonable period in which to assess its impact, as the papers in the special issue do in a variety of sites. The introduction discusses the limitations of the regulation of work in changing domestic workers' conditions. First, labor studies scholars have shown how contracts can cement inequalities. Second, attempts to standardize domestic labor through work contracts and the law rely on liberalism's supposedly unparalleled capacity to correct historical harms and perfect human relations. Moreover, studies in legal pluralism highlight the ways that informal work is organized according to social conventions. Forms of resistance by domestic workers indicate that they use a sense of rights based both on their status as workers and from other social domains to negotiate employment conditions. This leads us to the conclusion that all forms of energy expended, both paid and unpaid, should be considered forms of work.

In 2013, Argentina passed Law 26844, transforming domestic workers' status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. Since then, domestic workers' legal equality has stood against the intersectional inequalities they still endure vis-à-vis their employers and that challenge advancement to their labor rights. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Buenos Aires between 2016 and 2018 with domestic workers' rights advocates, this article investigates how they contend with these challenges. It examines the interpretive labor they engage in as they encourage workers to undertake situated strategies to advance their labor rights. These strategies consist of increasing workers' knowledge of their rights while, simultaneously, encouraging them to execute dissembling practices to claim and access them. These dissembling practices allow workers to perform the appropriate behaviors according to intersecting master categories of social differentiation in a context of systemic intersectional inequality. Concurrently, they enable workers to avoid direct confrontation with their employers, thus helping them to enforce their rights without jeopardizing their means of subsistence. Through these pedagogies of awareness and subterfuge, advocates create a space in which the law can be effected, promoting workers' agency without compromising their livelihoods.

In 2011, the International Labor Organization (ILO) adopted the Domestic Worker Convention (no. 189), which established labor standards for household workers, including protection from abuse, provisions to ensure freedom of movement for migrant domestic workers, coverage under national minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and human rights laws, and access to contact information of private employers and appropriate legal resources, among others. Domestic worker advocates throughout Latin America rallied behind the ILO's Domestic Worker Convention to ensure its ratification at the national level. Latin American and Caribbean nations account for 55% of the national signatories to the convention; at the same time, 77% of domestic workers in the region remain informally employed. The roundtable discussion brought together scholars conducting research in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, and among Central Americans in the United States, to address the impact of the ILO convention and to share their research on domestic work and domestic worker movements. How have the changes in domestic work regulation affected the organizing efforts of domestic workers? How are domestic workers advocating for their rights in the wake of the ILO Convention?

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.

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.

This article examines the development of Filipina domestic workers' ideas regarding their work, as well as the relational models of work they apply in Greek households during their stay in the country over time. These models are produced in the context of an ambivalent legal environment, are constructed in relation to models applied by employers and are informed by Filipino ideas concerning reciprocity and the relational construction of power. Inside the Greek household and its hierarchical structures all these Filipino working models fail, confirming the resilience of the private/public split as Filipina domestic workers finally move from live-in to live-out work.

Colombia has taken a leading role in Latin America in recognizing domestic workers' rights, including rights to a salary, social security, and other benefits. Nevertheless, domestic workers remain largely informal, are neither organized nor aware of their labor rights; mistreatment, and racism remain common. Drawing on discussions about domestic work and the struggles for labor organization, in this article I explore this discrepancy. Women's experiences are marked by structural, symbolic, and everyday violence. The private nature of paid domestic work, socioeconomic differences, and the local labor market create a steep power imbalance between workers and employers. Instead of demanding their rights women thus appeal to employers' conscience to treat them well. In effect, the Colombian case highlights that progressive legislation is not enough to change domestic workers' plight. I argue that we need more immediate interventions, such as a universal basic income, welfare programs, or national employment guarantees, which would strengthen women's negotiating power in the labor market. The article contributes to discussions about class, labor rights, and inequality in the Global South and beyond.

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.

Harsha Walia is the winner of the 2022 Conrad M. Arensberg Award given by the Society for the Anthropology of Work for outstanding contributions to the anthropology of work from inside the discipline and beyond. Walia is a scholar, activist, and organizer committed to migrant justice and border abolition. She is also author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Fernwood Press 2021), Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press 2013), as well as numerous journal articles. Walia's analysis and her organizing with No One Is Illegal and other activist communities lay bare why border imperialism continues to feed into worker exploitation and why border abolition is imperative for migrant worker justice. This roundtable discussion is the culmination of collective thinking by anthropologists about how Walia's work has influenced their own, including their research, writing, and advocacy with their interlocutors who live and work across borders.