"Señora, cuándo me va a poner en blanco?": Domestic Workers' Emotional Labor in Becoming Subjects with Rights in Buenos Aires, Argentina

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Barcelona

Congreso; XXXVI Latin American Studies Association Annual Congress LASA2018: Latin American Studies in a Globalized World; 2018

Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos (LASA)

In 2013, Argentina 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 wage-workers, thus ending more than 50 years of de jure discrimination against this group of laborers. Based on over a year of ethnographic research with domestic workers in Buenos Aires, I suggest that rather than replacing the structures of pseudo-kinship (Pacecca and Courtis 2010) or the gift-exchange economies (Canevaro 2009) that have, historically, regulated relationships between workers and employers, workers must often rely on these very structures to guarantee that their employers hire them formally. I suggest that rather than the Argentine state's capacity to compel employers through legal mechanisms to comply with Law 26844, it is the exercise of domestic workers' emotional labor (Hochschild 2003)--which includes, among other things, patience, persuasion, and the manipulation of affect--that allows them to achieve the goal of becoming formally employed. While it is an undisputable fact that Law 26844 guarantees full labor rights for domestic workers that were inexistent before this legislation was promulgated, I suggest that, at the same time, the state problematically constructs the worker as an individual responsible for making sure that her rights are respected, rather than holding employers accountable for not complying with their obligations. I suggest that this conundrum makes manifest problems in the state's attempt to politicize the sphere it has historically rendered apolitical: the home.