‘Servants’ and ‘Maids’? Redefining Skill and Professionalism in Domestic Work

Research on domestic work often addresses the low status and social stigmatisation of this occupation, which contradicts their importance in modern societies. Paid domestic work is vital for the well-being of employers’ households and the effective functioning of labour markets by enabling women to engage in and retain productive employment outside their home. Domestic work is often treated as “unskilled” in many parts of the world due to its particular association with social reproduction and its location within private households. Conventional skill measures in workplaces typically prioritise expertise acquired through credentials or experience, and perceive jobs associated with ‘feminine traits’ as ‘unskilled’. The skills and emotional labour in domestic work typically go unrecognised in public policies and discourses.

Just as the social construction of ‘skill’ is deeply biased, the socio-cultural construction of professionalism reflects the deep bias that promotes standardisation and devalues emotional, affective labour and capital. Scholars argue that by over-emphasising credentials and certification, we might invisibilise ‘inarticulate’ forms of embodied knowledge, obscuring how skill acquisition is embedded in social relations.

With this as context, this study contributes to ongoing scholarly debates about emotional labour, skills and the socio-cultural construction of professionalism in domestic work. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with migrant domestic workers in London, in combination with observational and ethnographic data, the study demonstrates that domestic work is skilled. These skills are learned, not natural, and they are embedded in the performance of emotional labour. For domestic workers, ‘professionalism’ lies in emotional and ethical dispositions and skills in emotional labour are professionally constructed. Our study also reveals domestic workers’ creative negotiation of the two conflicting discourses of professionalisation and counter-professionalisation to construct professionalism. Taking domestic work as a quintessential case for the current problematisation of professionalism, we critically examine what ‘going professionalised’ means to workers in peripheral occupations.