“Slaves No More”: Making Global Labor Standards for Domestic Workers

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Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 411 Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish “Slaves No More”: Making Global Labor Standards for Domestic Workers On June 16, 2011, household workers worldwide won the first international set of standards that acknowledged their right to decent work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) approved Convention 189, a treaty-like document that extends labor protections around wages, hours, and overall working conditions to domestic workers1 , following ratification by nation states.2 As Sofia Trevino from Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, a feminist NGO at Harvard University, recalled, “It took years of organizing to get to this moment.”3 South African Myrtle Witbooi, chair of the International Domestic Workers Network, defined the meaning of the event thus: “Our dream became a reality, and we are free—slaves no more, but workers.”4 1. We follow the terminology agreed by worker groups despite their reservation that the word “domestic” reinforces conflation with labors of love, because it is the term deployed in legal systems. IRENE (International Restructuring Education Network Europe), Respect and Rights: Protection for Domestic/ Household Workers (Tilburg: IRENE and Geneva: IUF, August 2008); organizational report. 2. See Helen Schwenken, “From Maid to Worker,” Queries 7, no. 1 (2012): 14–21. 3. Sofia Trevino, C189: Conventional Wisdom, directed by Jennifer N. Fish, Rachel Crockett, and Robin Ormiston (Norfolk: Sisi Sojourner Productions, 2012) DVD. 4. International Domestic Workers Network, “A Message from Myrtle Witbooi , IDWN Chair,” IDWN News, October 2011, http://www.idwn.info/sites/ default/files/publications/IDWN_Newsletter_2011.pdf. 412 Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish Deliberating on global standards for domestic workers was not an entirely new issue for the International Labor Organization (ILO), a holdover from the League of Nations that, as a specialized agency of the United Nations, passes conventions and nonbinding recommendations and assists governments to implement such regulations. Unique among UN agencies, the ILO is tripartite, with national delegations consisting of government, worker, and employer representatives.5 Following WWII, when sociologists and policy makers alike predicted the end of domestic service, the ILO surveyed member nations on the plight of household workers . It understood domestic work as part of the problem of an expanded movement of women into employment and sought solutions to what was looming as a crisis of care and household maintenance.6 The initiative 5. See Gerry Rodgers, Eddy Lee, Lee Sweptson, and Jasmien Van Daele, eds., The ILO and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Carol Riegelman Lubin and Anne Winslow, Social Justice for Women: The International Labor Organization and Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 6. See Lewis Coser, “Servants: The Obsolescence of an Occupation Role,” Social Forces 52 (1973): 31–40; and International Labor Organization, ILC Proceedings , 30th Session,1947: 592, Archives, International Labor Office, Geneva, International Domestic Workers Network leaders celebrate the passing of Convention 189 with Juan Somavia, ILO Director General, June 16, 2011. Courtesty of WIEGO. Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish 413 fizzled out in the early 1950s; and in subsequent decades the study of the conditions of domestic workers failed to galvanize any action. Why did it take over sixty years for domestic workers to gain recognition under the ILO? What accounts for the apparent global sea change that has legitimized a prototypical form of feminized labor, hidden in the household and involving familiarity and intimacy—prime reasons that domestic work long stood outside of public scrutiny and legal regulation ? When we first posed these questions, our common commitment to the grassroots organizing of those with the most at stake in this process— domestic workers themselves—made us wish to claim that their agency had made the difference. But this initial impulse proved too simple, we found, as we began to probe the interplay between local struggles, transnational networks, and institutional action. In explaining how organized domestic workers and their NGO and trade union allies used the ILO process for recognition and rights, we came to see how the rules of the ILO and available cultural representations shaped the agency that domestic workers wielded, even as workers seized these procedural and discursive tools for strategic...

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