Reconceptualising domination in the private sphere: paid domestic workers problematise the household as a workplace

The fight to have domestic work recognised as ‘work like any other’ has been at the centre of the sector’s modern history. From the early-twentieth-century Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (Schwartz 2019), the North American Household Technicians movement (Nadasen 2015), to even more recent mobilizations during the time of the ‘gig economy’, trade unions and alliances representing domestic labourers have struggled head-on with the way their work is perceived and treated. The aim of their claims was to include domestic work in the forms of activity covered by labour law, from which it has historically been excluded. This meant allowing those engaged in this work to be given the same unemployment benefits, sick pay, and any other employment-related rights as laborers in other sectors. According to the law in the UK and the US, domestic work is truly unlike all others. Yet even if it were not, even if labour law were augmented enough to make room for the particularities that come with domestic labour, there nevertheless would be a fundamental limit to how much the working relations could be improved: the place of work is in the private sphere of the home. The application of the legislation is, in fundamental way, subject to the will of the employer and the arbitrariness of the person whose house is being cleaned. No matter how great an improvement in conditions, and no matter how profound a shift in our cultural perceptions, this is a contingency that no legislation can do away with: the setting in which labour is undertaken, for domestic workers, could change one day to the next if the employer decides so. In this paper, and in response to the work of social reproduction theorists, I will show how the writings of domestic workers problematise the basic relationship between the public and private spheres, uncovering the difficulties – and biases – labour law has in making sense of work that cuts across the distinction.