Encountering the Law: Discourses of Citizenship, Strategies of Subterfuge, and the Ambivalences of Access to Rights in Paid Domestic Work in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Pittsburgh

Jornada; 19th Annual University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Grad Expo; 2019

University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

In 2013, Argentina passed 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. In this paper, I draw from ethnographic research at a domestic workers´ rights organization in Buenos Aires. I analyze the organization´s discourses and practices of empowerment in the context of the new legal framework, identify the ways in which domestic workers learn about this framework, and show the challenges they identify in access to rights. Taking this organization as a case study, I suggest that domestic workers´ rights organizations mobilize a discourse of empowerment aimed at instilling a different kind of subjectivity in the worker in her identity as a worker--as a citizen responsible for advancing her own rights through her knowledge of the law, through the symbolic resignification of domestic work as "work," and through the social revalorization of this labor. At the same time, such discourse of citizenship goes hand-in-hand with making workers aware of strategies of subterfuge that they could engage in daily life to access labor rights. I also analyze workers´ responses and how the limitations posed by the inequalities that mark the relationships with their employers shape their responses to the idea and practice of "empowerment." I suggest that workers´ experiences with "empowerment" shed light on the complex position domestic workers occupy as members of the working class and on the challenges inherent in rendering a private home a workplace.