Domestic Servants and Downtime: The Controversy over Cuban Law No. 1754

• In Event: Questioning the 'Margins' of Labor: The Precarity of Domestic Labor in Modern Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Weeks after the fall of infamous Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado in August of 1933, the new revolutionary government led by President Ramón Grau San Martín established an eight-hour workday, one among many social reforms the short-lived radical government passed. The eight-hour workday law, though progressive, explicitly excluded laborers who made up a significant portion of the Cuban labor force and employed some of its most vulnerable citizens: domestic workers.

In 1938, the government controlled by Fulgencio Batista attempted to rectify this exclusion by adding a paragraph to the 1933 law which did address the issue of domestics. Law Number 1754 of August 1938 specified, that domestic servants be guaranteed four 24-hour periods of paid rest per month and two hours of rest per day. Just four days later, the government announced the reversal of the law: it had been met with “nearly unanimous” opposition.

My paper will identify the actors responsible for the promulgation of this 1938 law and those who opposed its passing to examine the tenuous relationship between domestic service and other forms of labor in twentieth-century Cuba. At a time when the Cuban government sought to improve the lives of its workers, many Cubans protested a law that would have done the same for the men and women who took care of (and often lived in) their homes. My paper will examine the tension between domestic service as labor and domestic service as intimate relationship, exploring how notions of privacy influenced labor policy on the national level.

Author

• Anasa S Hicks, New York University