CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The Covid-19 pandemic confronted all countries of the world with exceptional challenges. The sanitary crisis required extreme measures. Countries were lockdown-completely or partially-for several months. As a result, the usual way to organize social life was abruptly disrupted. In developing countries where half of the workers obtain their incomes working on the informal market, the states had to experiment on establishing a novel protection net using available institutions. Within informal workers, paid domestic workers represent a special vulnerable group for whom the legal framework is modest and weakly enforced. When the lockdown started in the mid-March, paid domestic workers were not considered as essential workers, and they weren´t authorized to work. In most of the countries, the governments decide to make employers responsible for the payment of wages during this time. However, since the restrictions of circulation continuous, the governments began to develop new strategies to insure domestic workers´ income. From a comparative perspective, the paper aims to understand the variety of institutional responses concerning paid domestic work in Latin America. Taking into account all regulations enacted during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the countries of the South Cone, the paper will focus on the main dilemma for governments: to consider domestic workers as workers or as poor people. The paper will be organized in three sections. The first section describes paid domestic work sector in the region. The second section analyzes the policies addressed to domestic workers as workers, and the third the policies addressed to domestic workers as working poor. The conclusion discusses the ambivalence between these two types of policies.

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