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

BAIOCCHI, MARÍA LIS

Ottawa

Taller; What is Work? Rethinking the Formalization of Domestic Work as the Pathway to Dignity; 2023

Carleton University

In 2013, Argentina transformed household workers’ juridical status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. Since then, household workers’ legal equality has stood 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. This papers examines how household workers’ rights activists deal with these challenges in order to advance household workers’ labor rights. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Buenos Aires between 2016 and 2018, I analyze the repertoire of creative strategies that activists promote among household workers to access their labor rights. Building on the feminist symbolic interactionist literature on “doing difference,” 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 and racialized 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 mar 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.