Domestica. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
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research assistants, Gloria González-López and Ernestine Avila, who were then Ph.D. students. We went to downtown bus stops and to a busy, intracity bus terminal at 6 A.M. on Monday and Tuesday mornings (a time when many live-in workers are returning to their jobs); and we collected other responses at a popular Westside park where nannies bring young children in the middle of weekday mornings and at evening English classes in Hollywood. This was not a random, representative survey. It drew on women employed in the tonier neighborhoods of Los Angeles' West-side, and it left out many Latina domestic workers who speak English well and who drive their own cars to work. Still, it sketches a portrait and provides us with very particular information not available through the census or Labor Department statistics. The survey collected basic demographic information, such as the worker's country of origin, number of years in the United States, marital status, number of children and where they reside, previous occupational experiences, and, most important, information on wages and hours. For this study, I've also consulted the Census Public Use Microdata Sample for Los Angeles, but because both this occupation and the immigrant population generally are largely underrepresented in the census, I do not wholly rely on those indicators.
Finally, the research for this book also draws on limited ethnographic observations made in public and private sites. I spoke to, listened to, and passed time with Latina domestic workers in various settings: at public parks, on buses, at bus kiosks near downtown, in west Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills, at the now-defunct Labor Defense Network legal clinics—where Latina and Latino immigrants doing all kinds of work came to seek legal remedies to job problems—in the waiting rooms of domestic employment agencies, at meetings and informal social gatherings of the Domestic Workers' Association of CHIRLA, and at the information and outreach program that was the DWA's precursor. Rather than limit myself to one method or one source of information, I have explored many different ways of knowing about this occupation.
OVERVIEW
Chapter 1 situates contemporary paid domestic work in place and time and explains why, as the twentieth century ended, paid domestic work became a growth occupation. Besides noting the macrostructural, demographic, and cultural forces that have spurred this occupational growth, the chapter also contrasts historical with contemporary racialization of paid domestic work in the United States, underscoring why the job is still held in low regard. Noting some recent trends in the international migration of labor, I argue that the migration and employment of domestic workers in the United States today is distinctively laissez-faire and forms part of what I call the new world domestic order. Beginning with the observation that paid domestic work is organized in different ways, Chapter 2 provides a close-up portrait of some of the domestic employees whom I interviewed. It describes how the job is experienced by live-in nanny/housekeepers, live-out nanny/housekeepers, and housecleaners, focusing on a few of the women and using data from the nonrandom survey of 153 Latina domestic workers to sketch their broader demographic and social profile.
Part 2 includes three chapters that examine the ways in which Latina immigrants enter and exit domestic jobs in Los Angeles. Chapter 3, on informal network hiring, focuses on the formation and inner workings of employer and employee networks. I argue that supply and demand alone are not enough: mechanisms for joining the two must be provided. The labor market for paid domestic work is constructed through the social network reference system, whose processes are important not only in job placement but also in effecting some job standardization, however imperfect. Chapter 4 examines the formalization of recruitment and hiring in domestic employment agencies, and Chapter 5 examines the various ways in which domestic jobs end. Both hiring practices and approaches to job termination reveal that paid domestic work is often not recognized or treated as a “real job.”
Part 3 examines social relations on the job. Chapter 6 focuses on labor control: the ability of employers to obtain the desired work behavior from their domestic employees, and the ways in which housecleaners and nanny/housekeepers, in turn, comply, resist, and negotiate. While there are broadly shared understandings of these jobs, the tasks are diffuse and there are no written standards to specify which services will be performed, or how they will be executed. Here's the paradox: many domestic workers want clear, fair directives, but their employers often shy away from defining the tasks they want performed. Because of the structure of the different jobs, the approaches of housecleaners and nanny/housekeepers to time and tasks vary; and their employers, of disparate generations and with various relationships to domestic life, also innovate different approaches to matters of labor control.
Chapter 7 concentrates on the topic that has drawn the most attention in the study of paid domestic work, personalism and maternalism. Many Latina immigrants currently employed in private domestic work in Los Angeles express their strong preference for employers who interact personalistically with them, while many of their employers say they would rather not engage in these sorts of relationships. To explain this gap, which contradicts the findings and analyses of previous studies, I distinguish personalism from maternalism and draw attention to the social locations of both employees and their employers. In Chapter 8,1 review existent labor regulations relevant to paid domestic work, and I explore different pathways to fairer job standards. As an advocate of occupational upgrading, not abolition, I consider how legislation, filing for back wage claims, and collective organizing (in Los Angeles, specifically the DWA), can help achieve this goal.
While this book focuses on private paid domestic work in Los Angeles, California, the occupation is expanding throughout the world. In the newly industrialized nations of Asia, in Europe, and in parts of Africa and Latin America, just as in the United States, many private domestic workers are women who have crossed nation-state borders.6 For these migrant women, globalization has intensified inequalities that require strategies for change.
This book is not neutral: it is undergirded and motivated by a modernist belief that a fuller appreciation of the experiences and perspectives of both private domestic workers and their employees can lead to positive change. As we come to understand the social world of paid domestic work, which takes form within the context of broader global and legal structures, what is often seen as only private will begin to be made public and thus able to inform efforts to achieve social justice.
Acknowledgments
This is a story about domestic lives, and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the women who allowed me to probe into the crevices of their lives and homes. They tolerated all sorts of intrusive, nosy questions that I would never consider asking them in other contexts, they sat and talked with me for hours, and they shared incredible stories of human resilience and tragedy. They may not agree with everything I have to say, but I hope that our mutual efforts eventually lead to greater justice.
The book is dedicated to Cristina Riegos, who was working toward that goal until her life was cut short by cancer. She brought tremendous creativity, charisma, and smarts to her job as an organizer among Latina immigrant domestic workers in Los Angeles. Because of her initial efforts, the Domestic Workers' Association, which I detail in the final chapter of this book, is still thriving.
I received research support from several funding sources. Most of the research was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council, through their Inter-University Program for Latino Research. At the University of Southern California, the Southern California Studies Center funded the research on domestic employment agencies, and the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences provided Zumberge grant seed money to get this project off the ground. Funded research allowed me to hire research assistants who took on the monumental task of typing the verbatim transcriptions of the interviews, as well as