When the Workplace is a Home: A Dialogue on the Complexities of Power, Care, and Human Rights for Domestic Workers

Abstract

This piece features a conversation about the complexities of negotiating power, care, and human rights for domestic workers in Argentina, Chile, and the United States. Issues discussed include questions of power and labor; challenges and complexities of living and working in someone else's home; passage from patronage and servanthood to full labor rights for domestic workers; affective relationships between workers and employers and their role in labor regulation; gendered nature of domestic work and its role in workers’ labor and human rights; worker organizing before, during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic; and vulnerabilities facing and specificities of migrant domestic work.