Preliminary Programme

For most of the 20th century, those who earned income through work in the home stood outside of laws regulating wages and hours, guaranteeing the right to organize, and protecting health and safety. Home-care (or support) workers resembled other isolated household laborers, such as domestic servants, who had little leverage-other than quitting-over wages, hours or workloads. But, in contrast to domestic servants, who gained coverage under the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974, those who provided home supportive services to the ill, disabled, and elderly found themselves outside the labor law. In California, courts responded to union organizing drives by classifying home-care workers as independent contractors, though their low-income clients paid them out of funds provided by the state's In Home Supportive Services program. In 1992, the California legislature authorized counties to establish public authorities to administer home-care programs and become the employer of record for home-care workers and thus obtain additional funds for training, health insurance, and wage increases to supplement MediCal and Medicare funding of this service. Lobbied for by the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the redefining of home-care workers as employees was to facilitate unionization. Represented by the United Domestic Workers and by SEIU, home-care workers began a struggle for recognition and respect.

This paper reconstructs the history of home-care workers as subjects and objects of labor law and unionization in California over the last decades of the twentieth century. Drawing upon feminist theories of carework, it considers the defining of these supportive services as "unskilled." Not only have cultural conceptions of caregiving shaped the nature of the work and its status, but so has who actually has performed the labor. Like the majority of caregivers, home-care workers have been 90% female and mostly middle-aged. A predominant proportion have been Latina. A good proportion (40% in the late 1990s) actually cared for their own relatives. Thus the struggle for including these workers under labor law belongs to a larger story about the valuing of labor among those who are devalued.

I will draw upon the records of the organizing campaign, public and private, as well as oral interviews with key players. I have access to records of the labor lawyer who wrote the California law, as well as access to the United Domestic Workers and other participants in the campaign. I will also use newspapers, government documents, and relevant secondary literature to analyze this struggle in light of the question: What is work? Who is a worker? (Show less)

As one of the paradoxes of ‘the age of information technology’, the 21fst century, ‘new maids’ have become part of the European household in similar numbers as they did a hundred years ago. However, currently domestic workers are often migrant women from Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America. A large number of them are illegal – or better: illegalised - in a twofold way: First, they do not have a residence permit and second they are not registered as workers; they therefore work in the twilight zone of the informal labour market. This dual illegalisation results in a number of problems which makes their living and working conditions extremely unstable: Without a legal residence and work permit they are excluded from citizenship rights as the right of medical care, education (for themselves and their children), regular working hours, wage continuation in case of illness, paid vacation etc. Undoubtedly, these structural factors have a great impact on the lives of all undocumented migrant domestic workers. However, one important result of the research project ‘Gender, Ethnicity and Identity. The new Maids in the Age of Globalisation’ (see: www.uni-muenster.de/FGEI) so far is the fact that there are remarkable individual differences in the way migrant domestic workers deal with this situation. These differences can only be examined by focusing on resources which arise from their biographical experiences. Therefore, the paper will examine the ‘biographical resources’ of undocumented migrant domestic workers, deriving from life history interviews. (Show less)

The paper is an initial attempt to investigate how cultural identities and labour relations of domestic workers, their employers and their families are shaped, contested and redefined in Indonesia from the 1930s to the present. (Paid) domestic labour within state-boundaries raises different questions from those who work abroad, both with respect to state policies (where, for instance, internal class relations and gender politics play a role) and with respect to social (labour and women’s) movements. The Indonesian setting illustrates class, religious, and ethnic dimensions within different contexts; these may actually turn out to be as substantial as in the case of migrants crossing state borders. This project takes the 1930s for economic and political reasons, as these are the years of slump and retrenchments in many sectors, while the Dutch colonial presence was still felt. Such a historical perspective invites a discussion of the effects of macro-processes of change on the employment patterns of domestic labour and on the relations between employers and domestic workers.
Particularly two areas will be the focus of this paper namely Yogyakarta in the heart of Java, and Medan in North Sumatra. Yogyakarta is an old Javanese town, embedded in Javanese traditions, strengthened and institutionalised by the strong presence of the old Javanese court (and also by tourism). Most domestic workers in this town come from the outlying villages and there is some measure of cultural homogeneity in most domestic labour relationships. In contrast, Medan was the administrative centre of the colonial Dutch government from which the Sumatran plantation regime was established and run. Since the late nineteenth century Javanese indentured workers have constituted the plantation labour force. Many of the children and grandchildren of these plantation workers who no longer want to work on the plantations go to Medan to search for other forms of employment. The Batak who predominate in Medan consist of various sub-groups. Most of these subgroups are Christian; but there is also a small but highly visible group of Batak Mandailing who are mainly Muslim.
This project focuses on these two cities in order to investigate the impact of their particular histories on domestic work relations. First, it investigates how the shift towards paid domestic work has taken place in these different settings. Secondly we will examine whether and how these different traditions still have an impact on present-day domestic relations. In general one assumes that whereas the Javanese middle classes generally employ domestic workers with the same ethnic and religious background (even if the meanings of being Javanese and Muslim may well be different between middle class urbanites and the rural lower classes), in Medan, where the most common model is that Muslim Javanese work for Christian Batak families, differences are more striking. However how these assumptions coincide or corroborate empirical evidence still remains to be seen. The research uses secondary and primary material, including oral histories of the different communities. (Show less)