"You can't have it all": Patterns of gender and class segregation in paid domestic work in the city of Buenos Aires.

DÉBORA GORBÁN; ANIA TIZZIANI

Living and working in poverty: trajectories of children, youth and adults in Latin America

Palgrave - Macmillan

Año: 2019; p. 125 - 146

This chapter focuses on the labor trajectories of a group of women who enter or have entered the labor market mainly through paid domestic work. Like other forms of highly feminized and undervalued employment, domestic service is considered a fundamental space forthe analysis of different ways of structuring inequalities, be they related to gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, or citizenshipstatus. In Latin America, this occupation is one of the main ways that women from popular social sectors enter the labor market, and the horizon of occupations that lies before these women is often very limited. The activities in question are considered to be "unskilled", and generally provide low incomes, low levels of social protection, and highly unfavorable working conditions. The labor alternatives experienced by the women that took part in this study are in keepingwith this description: the vast majority of them enter domestic service at a young age, which interrupts their formal schooling. Migratory paths are another factor that characterize this set ofworkers and have had significant effects on forms of hiring through which women start working in this sector ("live-in" work in informal jobs). In this chapter we aim to examine patterns of gender and class segregation in the labor market by analyzing the social and labor trajectories of domestic workers. Studying these trajectories will enable us to see how the characteristics of the ways that they enter the market (instability, limited legal regulation and social protection, long hours and an intense pace of work that makes it hard for them to access schooling or training, among other things) considerably limit the occupational mobility of these workers. For this reason, the form of labor mobility observed among domestic workers is strictly horizontal, in that it consists of movement within the complex universe of domestic service in search of better working conditions. In cases when workers do find a way out of domestic employment, it is into other occupations with similar characteristics (non-domestic cleaning, beauty salons, etc.). Basedon a qualitative study that we have been carrying out in the city of Buenos Aires since 2009, we will examine these two forms of mobility (within the sector and into other occupations) so as to account forthe dynamics of inequality (in relation to both gender and class) that limit the horizon of opportunities for women from popular socialsectors in the world of work.