Profiles of Political Leadership: Domestic Worker’s Unions in Brazil

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

Abstract

In 2013 Brazilian domestic workers, their unions, organization and leadership quickly became an important point of discussion, as their exclusion from constitutional rights ended with the ratification of Constitutional Amendment 72. This legislation was the culmination of a 70-year-long organized union struggle for domestic worker reforms. While there is an abundance of history of Brazilian domestic workers, very little is known about contemporary leadership and their strategies for legislative success. Who are the leaders that helped to guide the unions and how do they articulate domestic worker’s right to rights? In the case of Brazil, where poor women of African descent are overrepresented in the market for domestic workers, I hypothesize that the leaders draw from an intersectional understanding of their subject positioning to continue their struggle for rights and recognition. I define intersectional to mean “the intermingled and intersecting forms of oppression including race, class and gender” grounded in the literatures of Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Dorothy Roberts. Using interview data from a 2011-13 semi-structured surveys of leaders in Brasília, São Paulo and Salvador, I conduct an empirical analysis of executive leadership in domestic workers’ unions to explain how an intersectional understanding of their subject positioning figures into their ability to deliberate, participate in and build a social movement when the state has been unable to provide them their workers’ rights for decades.

Author

• Jaira J Harrington, University of Chicago