Addressing the Opportunities, Challenges and Lessons of Paid Domestic Work

Addressing the Opportunities, Challenges and Lessons of Paid Domestic Work

Paid domestic work involves working for a household, where duties generally include cleaning, laundering, cooking and care work. Roughly 100 million domestic workers being employed worldwide, mostly women from marginalized backgrounds. The employment relationship is highly personalized between employers and domestic workers, where employers tend to view their domestic worker “like family” to their household, obscuring the labor relations and generating power inequalities and work imbalances. Domestic work typically falls outside the conventional regulatory frameworks in many nations. It is only recently that many countries have attempted to formalize domestic work and protect domestic workers from abuse, servility and exploitation. Domestic workers took the opportunity to come together to create awareness of their severely oppressive and appalling employment conditions. Together they have attempted to formalize domestic work and ensure workplace rights for all domestic workers. However, formalizing domestic work is not without its challenges, given the different ways in which national legislation deals with the conditions of paid domestic work. Regarding working hours, domestic workers have some of the longest and most unpredictable working hours of all groups of workers. Wages remain precariously low and not all domestic workers enjoy job security and stability. This session invites clinical sociologists to analyze the opportunities and challenges of paid domestic work and to develop solutions improving the working conditions, status and value of paid domestic work in all societies.