Tactical Solidarities in Precarious Labor: Navigating Caste, Gender and Class Hierarchies in Paid Domestic Work

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 5: Gender, Care, and the (Re)Production of Inequality

Abstract

This paper examines solidarity frameworks that emerge as workers involved in intimate labors like paid domestic work balance movement participation in collective action and workplace negotiations of labor conditions. Feminist scholarship on collective action in commodified reproductive labor has highlighted how worker organizations attempt to build solidarity across intersecting social identities through centering shared experiences of workplace devaluation. Further, these studies establish that innovative class-based organizing can produce common causes across differences that drive mobilization for movement participation and offsets the marginalization due to lack of state regulation and formalization. However, less attention has been paid to what divergences in solidarity emerge as individuals navigate fraught social relationships at workplace which are shaped by caste, gender, and other socio-cultural axes of identity. Drawing from sixteen months of fieldwork in Delhi, India, I draw on worker narratives to investigate emergent tensions between framing their participation in the movement and their workplace relationships with their employers. I argue that, in contrast to drawing on a dominant framing of class-based ties, workers engage tactical solidarities ‒ an array of context-dependent enactments of collective identity. In doing so, I establish how socio-cultural inequalities centered on important variables like caste identity, leads to the production of situational, negotiated, and sometimes conflicting frames of solidarity. By highlighting the relational and embedded nature of labor politics, I also provide a critique of the limitations of dominant Eurocentric models of labor organizing that draw from discourses on industrial work. Thus, this paper reconceptualizes intersectionality, while important in innovative movement building, also as potentially strenuous rather than inherently convergent. In this way, I contribute to existing scholarly debates on feminized informal labor, collective action under global capitalism and transnational feminist discourse on worker rights

Author

• Kritika Pandey, University of Southern California