1 From “La Ayuda” to “Trabajadora del Hogar”: Domestic Workers’ Fight for Labor Rights in Mexico
smga2021
Written By: Sara Garza González
Introduction
My family likes to show affection through playful teasing, and being the youngest of three siblings, I was often the easier target to pick on. My brother is seven years older than me and my sister is five years older than me; when I was finishing Kindergarten, my sister was finishing elementary school and my brother was finishing middle school. Evidently, they were in their prime era for mocking and I was in my prime era for being mocked. When I was in Kindergarten, I would usually come home from school earlier and take a nap before my siblings got home from school. I would wake up and start eating lunch by the time they arrived, and one way they enjoyed teasing me was by stealing my food as they waited for Gloria to finish cooking their food. However, as soon as they attempted to snatch my food away, Gloria would always bellow out “QUIETOS” (stay put) and my siblings would instantly obey. Nobody could ever disobey Yoya.
Gloria, also known as Yoya, Yoyis, Golla, and Goyita, is the domestic worker that has worked in our home for the past 28 years. In the 21 years I have been alive, she has taught me lessons that stem from learning how to count with beans to understanding how to serve and work with one’s community to achieve more equitable circumstances. Gloria is the epitome of strength and sensitivity; I would not be writing this piece without the support and wisdom she has shared with me for 21 years, fueling the desire to continue co-creating knowledge with Mexican domestic workers and be an ally in the fight they are leading (pictured above with me).
Before I continue discussing a topic that concerns my country and the wider transnational communities, I want to be transparent with my positionalities in society and with this issue. I am a White Mexican cis-woman from Tampico, Mexico who had the privilege to attend a private K-12 school that taught in both English and Spanish; I am middle class and I go to college in the U.S. with a significant scholarship. My experiences with education and resource availability are vastly different compared to those that female Mexican domestic workers have access to throughout their lifetime due to racial and socioeconomic inequalities and discrimination. I cannot talk about domestic work without crediting Yoya and the other female domestic workers who inspired my work that began in high school, guiding me to question the social conditions of Mexican female domestic workers.
My work formally began in 2019 when I conducted a quantitative, post-positivist study on the relationship between age and job and/or life satisfaction levels of local domestic workers in my hometown, Tampico, Mexico. I originally wanted to create an in-person, qualitative study using storytelling interviews for a more personalized and interviewee-led data collection style, but unfortunately, my school did not have the tools and resources needed for qualitative data analysis; COVID-19 also constrained survey collection because it could only be conducted through the phone. Additionally, my school’s IRB further hindered my ability to create a research study that was centered and led by domestic workers since they forced me to get their employer’s consent. In other words, if the employee consented but the employer did not, I was not allowed to survey the domestic worker, and even if I was able to conduct the survey, many employers requested to be present as I asked the questions to the domestic worker over the phone. The lack of agency that Mexican domestic workers endure undeniably stems from racial, class, and gender inequalities that completely permeate every situation they face.
The findings that I was able to report were solely quantitative and extremely superficial, yet promising for future directions. The results indicated a strong positive correlation between job and life satisfaction levels; the more satisfied they were with their job, the more satisfied they were with their life, and vice versa. These results are promising because they illustrate how when workers feel more valued and that they work a dignified job, they have greater fulfillment in their lives. However, these outcomes could also be interesting when analyzing capitalism’s role in determining our self-worth. Moreover, this initial research kindled curiosities about what leaders in the labor rights fight for domestic workers are advocating for, both in Mexico and across other countries.
Therefore, in this paper, I will discuss how Marcelina Bautista Bautista, the labor rights organizer for Mexican domestic workers, has achieved tangible change by working alongside the community of domestic workers and allies who support the movement. I will do so by looking at this case through the following four theoretical frameworks—Debjani Chakravarty’s idea of co-creation of knowledge, C. Wright Mills’ idea of Sociological Imagination, Manuel Castells’ idea of Project Identity, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of non-static, decentralized social movements—to show how the movement gained traction through community organizing that centers on domestic workers.
After showing how this movement was successful in gaining momentum by centering the lived experiences of domestic workers, I will explain how valuing jobs based on monetary productivity has led to the lack of government and public accountability when regulating domestic labor rights. Using Amaia Pérez Orozco’s idea of Capital-Life Conflict and Lourdes Beneria’s concept of the Arbitrary Valuation Method, I will argue how capitalism neglects domestic work as the backbone of our economy, leading to the profound devaluing of domestic workers. In demonstrating how crucial their labor is to sustaining life, I hope to motivate further government and public support for domestic workers’ rights.
Theoretical Frameworks Regarding Domestic Work
- Data and Knowledge Co-Creation
The process of the co-creation of knowledge is Chakravarty’s main argument in “On Being and Providing ‘Data’: Politics of Transnational Feminist Collaboration and Academic Division of Labor” (Chakravarty, 2015). She emphasizes how often we see poor women of color that do not fit into the heteronormative ideals as the other, and how the research that is done on vulnerable communities should not aim to force the Global North’s ideals onto them but rather collaboratively construct new intersectional knowledge together where Whites, cis-straight people, and/or the rich are not seen as the norm. Accordingly, if I were to restructure my high school research using this framework, I would ask the participants to share what they thought the topic of the research should be about and to codesign the project, with the purpose of meeting the needs they deemed essential for the domestic worker community and not my academic needs as a researcher in a privileged position. As Chakravarty shares in her piece, it is imperative to emphasize how no one conducts ethnic research on people from privileged communities since they are seen as the norm and point of comparison for marginalized communities, and rather start co-developing knowledge that validates the essential role that personal and collective experiences play in providing data.
- The Sociological Imagination & Project Identity
Sociological Imagination is a framework devised by C. Wright Mills that demonstrates the interconnections between social structures and what we deem as individual issues. He notes examples that originate “…from the examination of a single family to the comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world…” (Mills, 1959, p. 3). Namely, personal context and socio-historical forces hold relationships that shape our everyday lives, in turn enabling us to view social issues, such as the violation of domestic workers’ rights, as an evaluation of the structures that perpetuate such harm instead of solely an individual problem of each domestic worker. Although it is important to co-develop knowledge from personal experience as Chakravarty states, it is also important to view societal structures of power.
Building on Mills’ ideas, Castells (2004) develops the idea of Project Identity as one of three ways to describe his theory of Collective Identity. In his words, a project identity “emerges when social actors, on the basis of whatever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure” (pp. 26-29). This idea relates to Mills’ sociological imagination because it also understands and affirms the substantial role that structures of power play in individual lives. However, Castells enhances this theory by analyzing how social movements arise after identifying the symbiotic relationship between social context and personal issues; through social movements that ground on project identity, advocates help transform society’s fixed ideas through actions that often lead to changes in the law and public policy. He also mentions how usually, the advocates are people and communities who are most affected by the socio-economic challenges, which also relates to Chakravarty’s idea of using personal experience as a catalyst for social change.
- Importance of Decentralization
Gloria Anzaldúa’s framework of La conciencia de la mestiza fits perfectly with the struggle of integrating diverse positionalities that exist within a social issue, especially when attempting to build from numerous personal experiences and analyses of social structures. In this piece, when Anzaldúa elaborates on the theory of “somos una gente” specifically, she argues for non-static frameworks that constantly question the knowledge being co-created and seek horizontally based social movements (Anzaldúa, 1999, pp. 107-108). She recognizes how much societal structures divide people, but that there also exist bridges between these divisions that create allyships among different identities. Collective organizing between the private sector, the public (i.e., domestic workers and employers), and the federal and state government is vital for a sustainable, equitable present and future where workers of the home are genuinely recognized with dignity, justice, and rights for their honorable labor.
- “La economía del cuidado” & “Arbitrary Valuation Method”
To continue understanding paid domestic work, we have to look at how care work has historically been seen as “feminine” and therefore expendable and easy to exploit. Perez Orozco (2022) describes this as the capital-life conflict which arises from capitalism hierarchizing lives based on productivity and “human capital,” as well as relations in society that privilege some (White, rich, cishet people) and oppress others (BIPOC, poor, and queer people). Assigning unequal value to diverse lives is the result of capitalism, which teaches us that to reach our aspirations, we need to accumulate and dispossess the lives of others and the planet. “Highly valued” lives are juxtaposed against the numerous people whose value is determined by how much service they can provide to the privileged, and whose living circumstances are very unequal. Moreover, the closer a person gets to positions of power, the fewer invisibilized care work responsibilities they have and the more this burden of sustaining life is forced upon marginalized communities, specifically upon poor, racialized women who do the work that “we rather not do to live better” (Perez Orozco, 2022, paras. 5–7). Beneria’s arbitrary valuation method theory enhances Perez Orozco’s capital-life conflict theory by demonstrating that domestic work is not valued because of how heteronormative Economic theorists have assessed job value—traditionally done by White males, self-reliant, and both scarce and in high demand. Thus, domestic work, a field that is predominantly occupied by poor women of color, is based on co-dependency and collective efforts, and is definitely not scarce since everyone needs care, is profoundly undervalued. For this reason, Beneria argues that although the traditional “valuation method (which wage per hour or price per unit to assign to obtain the total value of an activity)” seems completely arbitrary (Beneria, 2003, pp. 193), it has profound real-world consequences that cause severe inequalities for communities that have been marginalized by this same capitalistic structures.
The Case: Contextual Background
Domestic work constitutes any type of labor that is done for or within a home or homes, including tasks such as cleaning the house, cooking, washing and ironing clothes, or caring for children or the elderly, and it can be paid or unpaid labor (“Organización Internacional del trabajo,” 2010). I will only address paid domestic work in Mexico in this paper and mainly discuss issues that concern female employees since they constitute 90% of domestic workers in Mexico, as well as the ones leading the fight for their rights, co-creating the knowledge, and sharing the most information on this topic (“UN Women–Americas and the Caribbean,” 2022). However, I will start by comparing the social conditions that domestic workers who are female experience versus those who are male since there exist disparities between both groups.
According to the National Survey of Employment and Occupation 2019, Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo (ENOE) in Spanish, there are 2.5 million people ages 15 and up in Mexico who work as paid employees of the home, representing 4.5% of the total people in Mexico who are employed. Nearly 97% of them work informally; they have no contract stipulating their pay, work hours, social insurance, or worker rights. The demographics of domestic workers in Mexico traditionally have been Indigenous women who belong to a lower socioeconomic group, occupying almost 90% of all jobs in domestic work (“Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía,” 2019). In addition, 39.2% of female domestic workers finished their schooling up to elementary school compared to 26.7% of male domestic workers, 37.6% finished their schooling up to middle school compared to 35.7% of male domestic workers, and 16.4% finished their schooling up to high school compared to 34.1% of male domestic workers; the remaining percentages of people (about 7% of females and 3% of males) did not have access to any level of schooling. Approximately 50% of female domestic workers receive minimum wage salaries compared to 27% of their male counterparts. Solely 2.1% of female domestic workers have access to social services such as work benefits, whereas 11.7% of their male counterparts receive these benefits (“Consejo Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación,” 2019).
Overall, these statistics that compare the social circumstances of females versus males further support the need for intersectional frameworks to understand how domestic work operates in Mexico, not only because it is a job that is usually occupied by poor people of color, but also because poor women of color receive lower wages than poor men of color even though the latter represents approximately 10% of that workforce. Pictures below depict several daily job-related tasks in the life of a domestic worker; not depicted are the national care chains implicated when domestic workers exit their homes to take care of children at more privileged households, typically housed by people who are White and from middle/upper socioeconomic status, as shown by this video.
Currently, the work that is being done by leaders in the labor rights fight for domestic workers in Mexico centers on reforming and regulating this job through legislation, labor rights education and outreach support for domestic workers, database-building to account for the most detailed information possible, and media coverage that also targets the need for employers to become allies that sincerely enforce the new domestic labor laws being created. CACEH organizers have also adapted workshops on legal rights, public policy, and advocacy into the activities of the domestic workers’ busy lives. For instance, these trainings are carried out in subway stations, bus depots, or Sunday afternoons in parks where the workers usually gather so that these do not disrupt their tight schedules (CACEH, 2010). The female domestic workers who already are part of the organization are also the leaders of this effort, “training their peers, promoting their rights, initiating public policy campaigns, and transforming the way Mexican society views domestic labor and its workers” (Ashoka, 2002, paras. 2-3). This way, communication is facilitated between colleagues, and the voices who are most relevant in this movement are heard and fostered. To further understand this social progress, I will interpret domestic work and its labor rights social movement using the previously mentioned theoretical frameworks to show how these theories help explain the practice that Marcelina Bautista Bautista is leading.
Analysis: Domestic Work Via the Integration of Social & Labor Movement Frameworks
Marcelina Bautista’s social movement CACEH perfectly represents Chakravarty’s framework: a social movement that stems from personal experience and does not use privileged communities as points of comparison, but rather collectively makes decisions with leaders that have endured the same discrimination. After the mistreatment and abuse she suffered as a domestic worker when she migrated from Oaxaca to Mexico City at age 14, she was determined to change these circumstances for all Mexican domestic workers, hoping to expand this movement across nations. She was part of the global domestic workers’ movement for numerous years, and in 2000, Marcelina founded the Center for Support and Training of Domestic Workers (Centro de Apoyo y Capacitación para Empleadas del Hogar [CACEH] in Spanish) in Mexico City. Using personal experience as a catalyst for this social movement, CACEH also prioritizes having leaders who factor societal structures into their analyses and who are part of the communities that have been most affected by this issue, further exemplifying not only Chakravarty’s aforementioned framework but also Mills’ sociological imagination framework and Castells’ project identity framework.
Correspondingly, CACEH is led by current and former domestic workers and operates alongside workers, their employers, the media, and citizen-sector organizations to achieve their goals for dignified labor (CACEH, 2010). They also credit their achievements, such as a pilot program that incorporates domestic workers into the social security system and the ratification of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention in Mexican Labor Law, to how they continuously acknowledge that the violation of domestic workers’ rights is not an individual issue but rather the reflection of systematic oppressions in society, as well as to how personally identifying with a social movement greatly helps transform society’s fixed ideas into law and public policy reform.
Similarly, this social movement pioneered by domestic workers encapsulates Anzaldua’s Mestiza framework regarding the idea of bridging diverse communities and their respective epistemologies, specifically domestic workers’ labor which can be seen as becoming shapeshifters and bridgers. Anzaldua states that shapeshifters and bridgers are “threshold people, those who move within and among multiple worlds and use their movements in the service of transformation” (DeMirjyn, 2020, p. 7), which is exactly what domestic workers and labor rights activists are achieving with their continuous efforts. For example, they are working with the Institute of International Education (IIE), a nonprofit that seeks to create programs of study and training for students, educators, and professionals from various sectors, to start a network of domestic workers across Oaxaca as well as in Jalisco; this is their first step towards building a national network of domestic labor rights organizers from within the workforce, having representation from each of the 32 states in Mexico (Ismail et al., 2022). CACEH’s efforts to spread this movement beyond Mexico City through organizations (e.g., IIE) that have access to restructuring systems of power like the public education sector, are key for maintaining and carrying on their success.
Employing the aforementioned non-static theoretical frameworks that constantly question underlying systems of oppression that enable abusive labor relationships and reject the co-creation of knowledge is absolutely necessary for social movements, as shown by CACEH’s practices. However, just as importantly, we need to implement labor care economics that studies frameworks such as the capital-life conflict and the work valuation method in order to foster strong government and public support for the regulation of paid care work. Both Perez Orozco (2022) and Beneria (2003) propose la economía del cuidado which offers better conditions and labor protection laws for domestic workers by recognizing how the world does not move without household workers and care workers whose labor sustains life. They recognize how care is supplied through “asymmetric flows from women to men, from grassroots classes to rich classes, from the Global South to the Global North, from the countryside to the cities, from racialized populations to white populations” (paras. 11-13), and therefore using these frameworks to analyze how our economy works is essential not only to meet basic labor rights but to also make women of color visible to society.
A country that has started to achieve this is Uruguay; they have a national care support system that understands how the care economy actually functions and impacts the livelihoods of marginalized communities, a key piece for achieving longevity in the domestic workers’ rights movement. Uruguay was the first country to ratify the Domestic Workers Convention No. 189, and it is currently one of the countries with the most advanced legislation regarding the protection of domestic workers. They have included a premium for time service, instituted compensation for night work, created a paid holiday (Domestic Worker Day in August), formed a tripartite commission that oversees the health of workers, campaigned for country-wide social security coverage, and continuously raised the minimum wage (International Labour Organization, 2013). These successes are prioritized when we view care and domestic work for what it is: the backbone of the economy and the foundation of society.
Conclusion
In Mexico, the social movement for domestic workers’ labor rights is spearheaded by CACEH, an organization created by domestic workers and people from marginalized communities that saw the need to address the lack of agency endured by female Mexican domestic workers. Through numerous frameworks, such as the co-creation of knowledge, sociological imagination, project identity, and decentralization of social movements, I have conveyed how CACEH’s practices reflect these theories and hence explain their accomplishments towards regulating the labor rights of domestic workers. By focusing on lived personal and collective experiences from this community, CACEH has been able to start achieving changes in legislation and Mexican law. However, to assure the sustainability of the movement, it is vital to address how we have historically assigned value to different jobs, leading to a lack of government and public accountability when regulating domestic labor rights. The capital-life conflict and the arbitrary valuation method frameworks are extremely helpful to exemplify capitalism’s role in the devaluation of domestic workers.
The purpose of this paper was to not only amplify the voices of female Mexican domestic workers in an academic, English setting, but also immortalize the extremely important labor that domestic workers and CACEH have worked so arduously for and created vast social change. I deeply hope for this work to not end here but rather begin a transnational discussion of our role in global care chains. When we recognize how domestic workers and care workers are exploited by modern capitalism to attain the productivity aspirations of upper socioeconomic statuses, as well as understand how they incessantly nourish life, then we can continue working towards further formalizing domestic work as a dignified job, equip domestic workers and employers with the tools and resources needed for adequate implementation of labor rights, and motivate government and public support for domestic workers labor rights to truly reflect the worth of care work. As for future research and analysis, it would be interesting to evaluate the relationships between paid and unpaid domestic and care work, both within a country and also transnationally. This way, we can understand in a more comprehensive way the global care chains operate and seek better regulation and compensation for domestic and care work.
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