Abstract
Jennifer Fish’s Domestic Workers of the World Unite! A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights is a thought-provoking look into the domestic workers’ global rights movement. Fish draws on six years of fieldwork following organizers of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN) across five continents. Fish was present during the two conferences of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 2010 and 2011 that ultimately passed the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention (C189) in June 2011. This is the “the largest and most tangible recognition of the value of paid household labor” and the ILO standards on domestic work are an important “benchmark in the construction of a more egalitarian global community” (p. 250).
Domestic workers have long been considered “unorganizable.” How then, Fish asks, did domestic workers become part of a transnational movement that went from “impossible to inevitable” (p. 42) in a short period of time? The book deftly breaks down the reasons. Fish highlights the regional organizations that created the foundation for transnational organizing and traces alliances with global organizations such as Women in Informal Employment: Globalization and Organizing (WIEGO) and the International Union of Food, Agriculture, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco, and Allied Workers’ Association (IUF). For the first time, workers arrived in Geneva and forced the ILO to directly engage with the workers their policies would affect. This exposed the ILO’s inexperience in dealing with “actual workers.”
Fish underscores key tensions in the global domestic workers’ movement, including the long-standing debate regarding the nature of domestic work. Is this a “special” work category because the work occurs in the private home, requires emotional labor, and makes workers dependent on the whims of employers? Or is this a job like any other? Although I wonder what Fish’s take is on this question, she documents that workers argued domestic work was just like any other work and that there existed a common set of issues across geographical space that could only be addressed by an institution of global governance. Fish credits this strategy as one of the main reasons domestic workers were able to get C189. Nevertheless, the IDWN grappled with whether the organization represented all domestic workers, given that organizers largely spoke in English and Spanish and that some regions, such as workers in Arab countries, were excluded because those countries forbade domestic workers from organizing. This raises questions for sociological and feminist inquiry, which often emphasize historical context and the particular constellation of power in specific locales. “Global” statements regarding the conditions of women, even within a particular work category, are often critiqued as “universalizing.” This book forces us to consider how we negotiate national and global realities in our scholarship. It asks us to reexamine the strategic value of articulating a common experience, however imperfectly, in order to win global rights.
Workers themselves were conflicted about the stance that domestic work was like any other work because they simultaneously felt that they were in need of “special protections.” This reflects a structural reality of vulnerabilities along vectors of power such as gender, class, race, citizenship status, and colonial legacies. Fish argues that these intersections made the global domestic workers’ movement an “anchor movement” for other issues, such as migrant rights, sex trafficking, child labor, women’s rights, and poverty. This attracted a coalition of NGOs that then sold “the tragedy of domestic work” to funders, reinforcing the narrative that the West must “save” the Third World (p. 189). Domestic workers asserted their own agency to counter this construction but also used the strategy of “selling vulnerability” themselves to make emotional appeals for global protections.
Additionally, NGOs and WIEGO-IUF organizers had more experience in navigating the ILO and therefore helped domestic workers craft their message. This might be criticized as producing domestic workers as “puppets” for larger organizations (p. 197). Fish, however, argues that these alliances were mutually beneficial and that the guidance provided by these organizations played an important role in winning C189. Fish forces us to contemplate these unequal power dynamics and consider that perhaps strategic concessions, not ideological purity, move policy-making forward.
Domestic workers were disappointed that migrants were mostly left out of C189. Workers argued that national laws cannot ensure fair labor when so many migrants work in countries without citizenship rights. Several European countries joined Arab countries to block the extension of benefits to “outsiders.” There were, however, important victories. Some stipulations of C189 include these: the time workers are “on call” must be compensated and not considered free time; workers have a right to one rest period per day and one day off every seven days; workers have the right to keep possession of their own travel documents; and employers must provide humane live-in accommodations. That workers had to articulate these rights indicates the level of abuse many domestic workers suffer. Perhaps the greatest victory of C189 is that employers’ private homes are now considered public work-sites. This both increases the accountability of employers for working conditions and elevates domestic work to an officially recognized occupation.
Fish’s account of how domestic workers both disrupted and participated in the bureaucratic workings of the ILO, used songs and personal narratives to gain empathy, and used their bodies to protest and elicit compassion from ILO decision-makers is moving. Workers asked ILO delegates if their presence in Geneva would have been possible without a domestic worker at home, thus making the issue personal for representatives. The book may also create moments of self-reflection for readers who have domestic workers but have not previously thought of themselves as employers.
Although Fish does not consider the former Soviet Union, the timing of C189 is significant for this region. The Soviet state took some responsibility for domestic labor. Yet many former Soviet countries with budget crises learned from the West that, if they call this labor “housework,” women will do it for free (Solari 2018). Fish notes that some feminist scholars critique C189. They argue it ensures that care will continue to be sold as a commodity on the global market and the labor will continue to be performed by poor, migrant women while letting men off the hook. Ironically, in former Soviet countries where housework has devolved from the state onto the shoulders of women, domestic labor may not be paid something closer to its real value until care becomes a commodity in the region. Fish leaves us with unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tensions that can further discussions in other contexts.
We do not know what impact C189 will have on the lives of individual domestic workers, but Fish provides compelling reasons for optimism. The IDWN transformed into a global labor union. This is the only international labor federation “run by women for work dominated by women” (p. 230). The movement is a “blueprint for transnational organizing” and reminds us that even the most marginalized have the potential to mobilize (p. 226). C189 changes what is imaginable for human rights and for the role of global institutions as mediators of “fair globalization” (p. 26). This makes Domestic Workers of the World Unite! a must-read.