Plantations on Easy Street: Racialized Divisions of Household Work in New York

• In Event: 519 - Section on Race, Class and Gender Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 06. Intersectionality and Inequality in the Life Course

Abstract

This paper takes on the question of the rights of workers in varying contexts of gendered and racialized inequality through its examination of the way that attempts at legal, progressive legislation and social inclusion of historically marginalized workers in fact reveals deeply rooted legacies of colonialism and slavery. Based on household workers’ long history of exclusion from rights, I examine the case of New York City after the 2010 Bill of Rights was passed, which recognizes domestic workers and their working conditions, pay, benefits, and rights.

New immigrants in New York comprise the city’s population of domestic workers in various worker organiations, and this population is highly divided along racial and ethnic lines. Even with the new law, many of these women labor in poor working conditions, with low pay and no benefits, while caring for the children and elderly of wealthy New York families. I argue that by the law’s obscuring relevant differences in legal access for women who do the work in New York, the law starts to pull back at the seams of the emperor’s well-worn clothes, revealing the underlying racialized past of New York as played out through contemporary efforts to govern practices of inequality and servitude. Domestic work thus demonstrates the lingering legacies on inequality that overshadow class relations, as the practice reproduces complex social hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, race, and geography in contemporary U.S. society and elsewhere.

Author

• Katherine Maich, University of California, Berkeley