Colonial Domesticity: Law and Democracy for Peruvian Household Workers

• In Event: 015 - Regular Session. Care Work/Caring Labor

Abstract

Household workers’ struggles for labor rights draw attention to the unregulated private sphere of the home as a site of labor, especially in highly unequal Latin America. In 2003, the first democratically elected indigenous president of Peru signed national household worker legislation into effect, signifying an important grassroots victory after years of organizing under repression. However, the law grants few rights, fails to codify a minimum wage, and legalizes discrimination against household workers, complicating an employment relationship already shaped by social hierarchies of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and geography. As most indigenous, internal migrant workers leave the provinces to clean, cook and care for Lima’s wealthy, European-descendant families, the law’s colonial origin prescribes workplace practices of the home. Drawing from 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lima, this paper lays a foundation for a historical understanding of social inclusion legislation in a modernizing state with a lingering colonial character.

Through an analysis of the law’s articles combined with workers’ voices and experiences under the law, I argue that the law demonstrates lingering colonial domesticity, as the home itself has not yet been democratized. As numerous Latin American countries have ratified national and international household worker legislation in the last several years, this study holds importance for our understanding of the law, democracy, and worker rights. In Lima, this “profoundly antidemocratic sociality,” (Spitta 2007:298), household workers’ struggles have emerged from democratic struggles and yet, this article shows how the home has not yet been democratized.

Author

• Katherine Maich, University of California, Berkeley