Urban Space and Domestic Workers’ Organizing Practices in India and South Africa

This paper discusses the differences in mobilization strategies of domestic workers across various national contexts. Historically, domestic workers have faced challenges in organizing due to the fact that their workplaces are their employers' private homes. However, in recent decades, domestic workers have managed to overcome this obstacle and build collective organizations. Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork from India and South Africa, the article demonstrates that while the privacy of employers' homes has posed a hindrance to organizing efforts, domestic workers have innovatively focused on multiple and unique sites for mobilization. For instance, domestic workers' organizations in India and South Africa strategically utilize locations such as shopping malls, bus stands, promenades, and low-income residential areas to mobilize workers. Despite the similarity in the innovative use of non-workplace sites for mobilization, there are significant differences between the organizations in the two national contexts, which reflects how domestic workers have navigated the intersecting structures of race, caste, gender, and class in their respective national contexts. Building on scholarship highlighting the dialectical relationship between geography and social structures, the paper argues that while urban space shows historically specific structures of power, domestic workers’ organizing practices reveal how marginalized groups transform and/or reconfigure those structures through their use of spaces.