"We Gotta Be Strategic, Compañeras": Advancing Household Workers' Labor Rights through "Doing Difference" in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Mérida (modalidad virtual)

Congreso; International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences IUAES2021 Congress: Heritages, Global Interconnections in a Possible World; 2021

International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences

The past decade has witnessed significant advancements in household workers´ labor rights. At the international level, in 2011 the International Labor Organization adopted the Domestic Workers Convention 189 (C189), which established standards and guidelines for the improvement of the working conditions of household workers worldwide. At the regional level, as of 2021 over a dozen countries in Latin America have ratified C189 and several have promulgated laws that advance household workers´ labor rights. Since 2014, Argentina is one of these countries to both have ratified C189 and count with national legislation that recognizes household workers´ labor rights. In this context, household workers´ legal equality stands in stark contrast to the material and symbolic intersectional inequalities they continue to endure vis-à-vis their employers, and which pose challenges to their access to labor rights in everyday life. This papers examines the ways in which household workers´ rights activists deal with these challenges in order to advance household workers´ labor rights. Based on ethnographic research conducted with a household workers´ union and a migrant women´s human rights organization in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area between 2016 and 2018, I analyze the repertoire of creative strategies that activists promote among household workers to access their labor rights in everyday life. Building on the feminist symbolic interactionist literature on "doing difference" (e.g., Deutsch (2007); West and Fenstermaker (1995); West and Zimmerman (1987)), I show how activists promote a discourse of labor rights and obligations among workers in tandem with promoting their exercise of deliberate performances of hegemonic working-class gendered behavior in front of their employers to gain access to their labor rights. Household workers´ rights activists encourage workers to “do difference” by engaging in gendered, classed, and racialized performances that can facilitate their access to formal labor rights and thus enable them to overcome to some degree the inequalities that mark their everyday existence. Activists´ promotion of a discourse of labor rights and obligations in conjunction with these performative practices speak to their understanding of how power operates in the household worker-employer relationship and thus of the need they see in facilitating access to labor rights in a way that would avoid disrupting the symbolic order that places workers and employers in intersectionally unequal positions vis-à-vis one another and that would consequently avoid threatening workers´ livelihoods and lives.