Building Solidarity in the Shadow of the Law: The Role of Law in Domestic Employer Organizing

• In Event: Regulation and Precarious Work

Abstract

In recent years, the United States domestic worker movement has had significant success in challenging domestic workers’ historic exclusion from New Deal Era worker protections. And yet, the distinct material conditions of domestic work—care work performed in private homes, almost entirely by women—continue to pose political and organizational problems as workers seek recognition under industrial legal frameworks. Domestic workers’ organizations have tended not to adopt the adversarial stance that many industrial unions historically took vis-à-vis their employers. Instead of organizing against domestic employers, they seek to organize with them. This Article is a qualitative study of a unique organization, Partners in Caring (PIC), whose primary purpose is to build solidarity across this divide. PIC is funded by domestic worker groups to organize, educate, and mobilize domestic employers, in support of domestic worker rights.

This Article builds upon research in the study of law, social movements, and social change to empirically identify the discursive strategies and organizing tactics through which PIC seeks to cultivate a collective identity among high-road employers. I argue that PIC attempts to do this by challenging the dichotomy social movement scholars have constructed between “beneficiary constituents” (those who directly benefit from movement work) and “conscience constituents” (those who ideologically support the movement’s demands). PIC insists that their employer-members can and should be both at the same time. Nevertheless, PIC leaders sometimes struggle to reconcile the tensions that emerge as they alternate appealing to employers’ self-interest and political commitments. Perhaps unexpectedly, PIC turns to law to reconcile the material and ideational. In their educational work, PIC trainers oscillate between invoking law as a resource, a constraint, and a goal. And they point to tensions between work, tax, and immigration law to naturalize the complicated emotions that arise when domestic employers experience discordance between their dual roles.

Author

• Diana Reddy, University of California Berkeley