"I Make Myself Necessary": On Domestic Work, Equal Labor Rights, and Weapons of the Weak

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Nueva Orleans

Congreso; 17th Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association: Performance, Politics, and Power; 2019

Cultural Studies Association

In 2013, the Argentine state promulgated Law 26844, a landmark legislation that ended more than half a century of de jure discrimination against domestic workers by guaranteeing them rights equal to virtually all other workers under the law. But, while in the words of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the new legal framework has entailed "a legal equalization of rights," significant material structural inequalities remain between domestic workers and their employers that render the negotiation of rights as equal subjects before the law virtually impossible. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic research in Buenos Aires and its Metropolitan area, this paper examines the ways in which workers access rights in their daily lives in the context of what Crenshaw (1991) would describe as persistent interlocking structures of oppression at the intersection of gender, class, status, race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship. I look at how workers navigate their putative equality before the law in a private setting such as a household where traditional organized labor movement strategies to have leverage with employers, such as strikes, protests, and unionizing, are virtually impossible to implement. Drawing from the experiences of domestic workers with the new legal framework, I suggest that workers often resort to a creative repertoire of performative practices in order to gain respect for their labor rights. Among others, these include the exercise of patience with employers who violate the legal deadline to hire them in a formal manner, the exercise of leniency in the context of labor disputes, the exercise of cordiality with the expectation of acquisition of rights, the exercise of indirect instead of direct communication with their employers, the exercise of lying over their intentions to continue on the job unless their newfound rights are respected, and the exercise of concealment of their actual income in order to access rights such as salary raises. I suggest that workers' exercise of these performative practices--or what Scott (2013) would describe as "weapons of the weak"--in order to access labor rights sheds light on the problems that arise from the divorce of a politics of recognition from a politics of redistribution (Fraser 2000) and on the necessity to move beyond a rights-based toward a justice-based paradigm (Narayan 1997) in addressing issues of dignity and equality for domestic workers.