Servants No More: Mistreatment, Resistance, and the Redrawing of Class Boundaries in Paid Domestic Work in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Vancouver

Congreso; American Anthropological Association / Canadian Anthropology Society Annual Meeting: Changing Climates: Struggle, Collaboration, and Justice; 2019

American Anthropological Association y Canadian Anthropology Society

In 2013, the Argentine state promulgated Law 26844, putting in place the Special Regime of Labor Contract for the Personnel of Private Households. In this manner, Argentina joined a handful of countries in guaranteeing domestic workers the same rights as other workers, thus ending more than 50 years of de jure discrimination against this group of laborers. The law now renders the space of the home a space that the Argentine state can regulate as a workplace, legally transforming former ?servants? into ?workers? (Jaramillo Fonnegra and Rosas 2014). In practice, however, the supposed upward mobility guaranteed by the law is contested by employers in very specific ways: through continued low wages, low rates of registration, and systematic mistreatment of workers. Drawing from in-depth interviews with domestic workers, this paper suggests that these contestations on the part of employers amount to clear challenges to the redrawing of the boundaries of class between employers and their domestic workers?in an attempt to avoid losing any sort of class priviliege vis-à-vis domestic workers. At the same time, in the face of such circumstances, workers draw from strategies to resist these demarcations of class on the part of employers and demand that their place as workers be recognized and respected. In doing so, workers underline the limits of traditional social movement strategies for dealing with labor conflict and show the many other creative ways in which subjects in contexts of oppression can resist such conditions and render more livable their own realities.