How Employers Decide: Rationalizing Worth in Domestic Worker Hiring and Management

• In Event: Reproducing Inequality at Work: Social Psychological Mechanisms (Co-Sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Abstract

How do ordinary individuals morally position themselves within structurally unequal (even exploitative) employment relationships? This study solicits the voices of domestic worker employers, who describe their strategies, decision-making processes, and rationalizations when hiring full-time, live-in migrant domestic workers from countries of the Global South. This specific labor relationship is unique, but it is hardly uncommon; migrant domestic workers comprise large proportions of the female labor force in countries across parts of Asia and the Middle East. While extant literature has almost entirely examined this labor relationship from the perspective of workers, however, this study focus on employers provides a novel aperture into the psycho-social processes of interpersonal boundary-making. I describe how employers regularly acknowledge ethical discomfort about their privileged position in starkly unequal power relations, yet fall back on various strategies to rationalize both their own status as employers and their own management decisions. Methodologically, I draw from long-term ethnographic research, scores of long-form interviews and cases with domestic workers, and formal interviews with 20 employing households, which have collectively employed over 50 domestic workers. The research makes novel contributions in the study of symbolic boundary-making and recognition gaps (Lamont 2023), showing how ordinary families both reproduce and think about macro-level global inequalities—of class, ethnicity, gender, and nationality—all within the intimate confines of ordinary private homes.

Author

• Kurt Kuehne, New York University Abu Dhabi