The Marketization of Domestic Work in Uruguay and Spain

As classical sociologists like Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx observed, the division of the (private) household and the (public) working place is one of the main paradigms where capitalism actually differs from feudalism. In this sense, capitalism has revolutionized the public as well as the private sphere – the family and private household. Domestic and care work constitute the social reproduction which forms part of the everyday life in this private sphere. It can be reduced to a certain extend or neglected for a short time, but it cannot be avoided completely. Therefore, in a democratic market economy, the available options are limited: Domestic work is either done as unpaid work, hence within families or by the head of the household, or as paid work, hence by employees in the household.

While the gendered division of labor and lack of recognition given to unpaid work in the household have been extensively studied over the past forty years, paid domestic work has historically received little attention. This is surprising since housekeeping is one of the oldest professions in the world, and still highly gendered and informal: According to the ILO (2013), 83 percent of domestic workers worldwide are women, often migrants, and therefore typical labor market "outsiders". After the decline of welfare provision in many countries, different factors are favoring a growing marketization of care work and domestic work. Since the 1990s, these employees constitute a growing labor force, with up to one third of all migrant women working in this profession. Social reproduction, which had been covered by the role of the housewife in the male breadwinner model of the post-war period, is now increasingly being outsourced.

Paid and unpaid domestic work are therefore increasingly competing against each other, favored by the feminization of the labor market and globalized labor migration. As the same work is distributed not only between the members of a household, but moved on to household employees, the allocation of domestic work changes from the family to the market, without leaving the site of the private household. This change in the allocation can be referred to as the marketization of domestic work. These dynamics and the political process behind them constitute the regulation of domestic work and will be explored in my paper through a comparative-historical analysis.

While some countries are developing policies to confront informality in this profession, paid domestic work remains highly unregulated in others. Here, unions, employers, and parties as well as international organizations (such as the ILO and WIEGO) are pursuing different goals. The paper examines the moral ideas and seemingly rational interests of collective actors involved in the regulation of domestic work of Spain and Uruguay. In Uruguay, exemplary legislation was adopted in 2006, and it was the first country to ratify the ILO convention 189 on “Decent Work for Domestic Workers” in 2012. While collective actors here are struggling to include this sector into standard employment, the profession is still highly informal in Spain, where basic institutions of industrial relations such as employers' organization and instruments such as labor inspection are either missing or not implemented.

On the basis of document analysis and expert interview the paper shows that regulating domestic labor is possible, allowing for coalitions between unpaid housewives and paid domestic workers through a shared order of worth. The comparative analysis moreover shows that its specificities as a highly informal profession at the lower end of the service sector create an institutional mismatch, with paid domestic employees competing against unpaid housekeeping in the traditional gendered division of labor in Spain. The marketization of domestic work therefore depends on moral ideas on who should and should not work in private households, challenging the everyday life in the private household as well as traditional representatives in trade unions, employers´ organizations and governments.