Doing the Dirty Work?: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour

by Bridget Anderson

There has been a tendency amongst feminists to see domestic work as the great leveller, a common burden imposed on all women equally by patriarchy. This unique study of migrant domestic workers in the North uncovers some uncomfortable facts about the race and class aspects of domestic oppression. Based on original research, it looks at the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the North - a phenomenon which challenges feminsim and political theory at a fundamental level.

The book opens with an exploration of the public/private divide and an overview of the debates on women and power. The author goes on to provide a map of employment patterns of migrant women in domestic work in the North; she describes the work they perform, their living and working conditions and their employment relations. A chapter on the US explores the connections between slavery and contemporary domestic service while a section on commodification examines the extent to which migrant domestic workers are not selling their labour but their whole personhood. The book also looks at the role of the Other in managing dirt, death and pollution and the effects of the feminisation of the labour market - as middle class white women have greater presence in the public sphere, they are more likely to push responsibility for domestic work onto other women.

In its depiction of the treatment of women from the South by women in the North, the book asks some difficult questions about the common bond of womanhood. Packed with information on the numbers of migrant women working as domestics, the racism, immigration or employment legislation that constrains their lives, and testimonies from the workers themselves, this is the most comprehensive study of migrant domestic workers available.

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2000

About the author

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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Bridget Anderson's research interests include low waged labour migration, deportation, legal status, and citizenship. Publications include Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books 2000) and Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy (OUP 2010), co-edited with Martin Ruhs. She has worked with a wide range of national and international NGOs including the Trades Union Congress, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the International Labour Organisation. She is Deputy Director and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at Oxford University.

Reviews

[KT · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the Global North, examining the gender, race and class aspects of domestic oppression

The use of paid domestic labour enables (predominantly) middle-class women and men to avoid the conflicts of interest inherent in the gendered division of labour and the challenges, both personal and political, that this poses to the “nuclear family”; given paid domestic work in private households is disproportionately performed by racialised groups, to then omit paid domestic labour from feminist analysis is to ignore the divisions of race and class in social reproductive work.

The author argues that the paid domestic worker, even when performing the same tasks as the wife/daughter/mother, is differently constructed. The domestic worker, whether “cleaner”, “nanny” or “servant” is fulfilling a role, and crucial to that role is her reproduction of the female employer’s status in contrast to herself. Thus, with reference to the caring function of domestic labour, it is the worker’s “personhood”, rather than her labour power, which the employer is attempting to buy, and that the worker is thereby cast as unequal in the exchange.

Then the position of domestic workers in relation to the formal sense of citizenship illuminates the broader debates on citizenship and demonstrates that the relationship of domestic workers to the state encourages and reinforces the racialisation of domestic work

Excellent discussion of the political fictions/social constructions of property in the person and the public/private divide in their construction and ordering of social relations, thereby forming the basis for real oppression. Thus, to understand a political fiction one must both work with it and move beyond it.

Referencing Locke’s ideas of body, property and labour, in particular that the body is sacred and the inherent contradiction between the idea of the body as an integral part of personhood and the idea of the body as property. Recognising that at the time of Locke’s writing, married women in England were chattels (the property of their husbands), the struggle of applying the concept of property in the person equally to women as it is applied to men.
The tension between body as personhood and body as property is an area the author then dissects, as the migrant domestic worker slips into the analytical space between body as personhood and body as property. For the domestic worker is selling, not her “labour power” (the property in the person), but rather her personhood, which the author illustrates superbly with particular reference to the payment for care, which strains the political fiction of property in the person to breaking point.

The author argues that migrant domestic workers are defined by their social relations, characterised by personal dependency on the employer often reinforced by immigration legislation. The social imagining of the public and private as two separate spheres creates this gap, and the domestic worker, like the prostitute, occupies the imaginary space between the two worlds, symbolically ordered and imagined in very different ways.
The author acknowledges the “messy” nature of this research, in the same way that work on prostitution is, there are contradictions and tensions in individual experiences as well as theory. Domestic workers are as influenced as anybody else by prevailing discourses on the public and private, domestic work, immigration. While some feel their work is honourable, many more feel degraded and ashamed.
The contradictions around domestic work, paid and unpaid, are expressed in the “social consciousness” within which domestic workers and their employers struggle and negotiate. The polarities and pairings of private and public, of Madonna and whore, are not isolated or autonomous. Each contains the other within it, and each refers to and implies other dualisms.

Differences between women must be acknowledged in order to make connections, which is particularly important given the tendency among white, cisgendered, middle-class feminists to universalise their experiences, effectively erasing the experiences of most women. Not only has this erasure meant exclusion and privilege, rather than unity, but it has also led to serious defects in the analysis of women’s oppression and struggles.

Paying for reproductive labour raises challenging issues, particularly when it is being performed in the employer’s home. It is not simply paying for work that the employer does not have time to do. What is peculiar about the position of the domestic worker in terms of work is, first, her role in the household; and second, her lack of power an authority within the house. Being unable to set limits to her own tasks reinforces her role as the doer of “dirty” work. This lack of clarity is one of the key differences in analysing the experiences of domestic workers, even when one limits the field to the experiences of migrants. The same task may have multiple meanings, depending on the context. While some migrant domestic workers feel that they are paid adequately, and have no complaints about their living and working conditions, others are exploited and abused. It is therefore important to have some means of analysing the heterogeneity of their experiences.

In summary, the treatment of migrant domestic workers and the demand for them is symptomatic of fundamental contradiction and tensions within capitalism, which is both racist and patriarchal. The author calls for empirically based theory to promote alliances between migrant domestic workers, to understand what binds some women together and drives others apart, in re-centering reproductive work and examine critically how and what we are reproducing.

Highly recommended and essential reading to anyone interested in domestic labour