Hard Numbers and “Velvet Triangles”: Mobilising Statistics for the ILO Convention on Domestic Work

After nearly half a century, domestic workers were again tabled on the agenda of the International Labour Conference in 2008. Three short years later, Conference delegates voted to establish the International Labour Organization’s Convention on Domestic Work (C189). This paper explores the insight that the campaign to push for C189 was taken up by a feminist “velvet triangle”. These networks are usually comprised of women in social movements, feminist bureaucrats and academics. They are characterized by informality and personal networks. The informality of these alliances and the absence of rigid rules are due in part to the gendered marginality of an issue area, allowing for improvisation and agile coalitions. This paper specifically traces the relations between bureaucrats in the ILO, researchers in Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) and the global trade unions in one important element of the campaign – mobilising statistics on domestic workers worldwide. Statistics are used not only as a “tool for proof”, or even a “tool for governance” but also as a “tool for coordination”. The paper demonstrates how the production and mobilisation of statistical estimates were crucial in making domestic workers more visible and the sector more tractable. This process helped make the case for labour standard-setting after nearly a century of exclusion. Making domestic work literally count was also key in calls to measure and valorise this type of work in the economy. The paper attends to the under-explored effects of the “power of cognitive resources” in the literature, and why and how academics are an important element in velvet triangles.