“JUST LIKE ONE OF THE FAMILY”? MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION by Bridget Anderson Domestic work in private households is, together with prostitution, the most significant employer of newly arrived female migrants. This thesis examines the phenomenon of the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the European Union, and begins to outline the challenges this poses to feminism, political theory and community organisations. At an empirical level it begins to map the employment of migrant women in domestic work in Europe, to describe the work they perform, their living and working conditions and their employment relations. At a theoretical level it is necessarily concerned with the inadequacy of conceptual tools designed to describe more “traditional” forms of employment (i.e. traditionally of concern to white male sociologists) or to describe the experience of “women” within the domestic sphere (i.e. the experience of white middle class women). The paid domestic worker, even when she does the same tasks as the wife/daughter/mother, is differently constructed, for she is expressing and reproducing the female employer’s status by serving as her “foil”. I argue that it is the worker’s “personhood” rather than their labour power, which the employer is attempting to “buy”. As well as labour cost and supply, racist stereotypes and the reproduction of such stereotypes are important in determining demand for domestic workers, and this results in a racist hierarchy which constructs some women as being particularly “suitable” for domestic work. Migrant domestic workers’ relation to the state encourages and reinforces the racialisation of domestic work and personal dependence on employers. While the applying of employment contracts to domestic workers may seem to offer some way forward there are many difficulties associated with applying employment contracts to the private domain, both theoretically and in workers’ real experiences. “JUST LIKE ONE OF THE FAMILY”? MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION by BRIDGET ANDERSON (1998) Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Leicester UMI Number: U483762 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U483762 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE POLITICAL FICTIONS AND REAL OPPRESSIONS 1 CHAPTER TWO METHODOLOGY 10 CHAPTER THREE LITERATURE REVIEW: DEFINING DOMESTIC WORK 36 CHAPTER FOUR THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF PAID DOMESTIC WORK IN EUROPE 62 CHAPTER FIVE LIVING AND WORKING CONDITIONS OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: GREECE, SPAIN AND ITALY 93 CHAPTER SIX LIVING AND WORKING CONDITIONS OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: FRANCE AND GERMANY 115 CHAPTER SEVEN COMMODIFICATION, MIGRATION AND DOMESTIC WORK 138 CHAPTER EIGHT RACISM AND DOMESTIC WORK: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE OTHER 160 CHAPTER NINE STATUS AND CONTRACT 192 CHAPTER TEN “YOUR PASSPORT IS YOUR LIFE”: DOMESTIC WORKERS AND THE STATE 212 ENDNOTE 241 APPENDIX 1 243 APPENDIX 2 244 APPENDIX 3 246 APPENDIX 4 247 APPENDIX 5 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL FICTIONS AND REAL OPPRESSIONS Domestic work in private households is, together with prostitution, the most significant employer of newly arrived female migrants. This thesis examines the phenomenon of the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the European Union, and begins to outline the challenges this poses to feminism, political theory and community organisations. At an empirical level it begins to map the employment of migrant women in domestic work in Europe, to describe the work they perform, their living and working conditions and their employment relations. At a theoretical level it is necessarily concerned with the inadequacy of conceptual tools designed to describe more “traditional” forms of employment (i.e. traditionally of concern to white male sociologists) or to describe the experience of “women” within the domestic sphere (i. e. the experience of white middle class women). There has been a tendency among feminist theorists to regard domestic work as the great leveller, a common burden imposed on women by patriarchal capitalism, and remarkably little problematising of paid domestic work with respect to such an analysis. Paid domestic labour may be “necessitated” by ideological, cultural and practical requirements, i.e. it is not the “fault” of the individual employer concerned that she takes on a paid worker, but that does not change the fact that it is not only men who benefit from paid domestic labour. The relationship between female employer and female worker is critical, and the use of paid domestic labour enables (predominantly) middle class women and men to avoid the conflicts of interest inherent in the gendered division of labour. To omit paid domestic labour is to ignore the divisions of race and class in reproductive work. Following a chapter on methodology, in Chapter Three I review the literature on women’s unpaid work in the home and on paid domestic work, and argue that the paid domestic worker, even when she does the same tasks as the wife/daughter/mother, is differently constructed. The domestic worker, whether “cleaner”, “nanny” or “servant” is fulfilling a role, and crucial to that role is her reproduction of the female employer’s status (middle-class, non-labourer, clean) in 1 contrast to herself (worker, degraded, dirty). Chapter Four outlines the social organisation of domestic work and suggests that workers’ immigration status (relation to the state) and whether or not they live-in with their employer (relation to employer) are key variables in determining their living and working conditions. Chapters Five and Six describes their living and working conditions and tests this hypothesis. Chapter Seven examines what is being bought and sold, what is being commodified in the case of paid domestic work, and I argue, with particular reference to the caring function of domestic labour, that it is the worker’s “personhood” rather than their labour power, which the employer is attempting to “buy”, and that the worker is thereby cast as unequal in the exchange. Chapter Eight looks at why racialised groups are employed in domestic work, and argues that, as well as labour cost and supply, racist stereotypes and the reproduction of such stereotypes play a crucial role in determining demand, and result in a racist hierarchy broadly constructed along national groups, which constructs some women as being more “suitable” for domestic work than others. While the applying of employment contracts to domestic workers in private households and the professionalisation of domestic work may seem to offer some way forward and counter some of the abuses associated with all these factors (the selling of “personhood”, overt racist discrimination) Chapter Nine looks at the difficulties of applying employment contracts to the private domain, both theoretically and in workers’ real experiences. Chapter Ten uses the position of domestic workers in relation to the formal sense of citizenship in terms of what passport a person holds, to throw light on the broader debates on citizenship and to argue that the relationship of domestic workers to the state encourages and reinforces the racialisation of domestic work. An analysis of the experiences of migrant domestic workers demonstrates the inadequacy of many of the conceptual tools developed by liberal political theory. I wish to draw attention to two political fictions that are revealed as problematic: that of property in the person, and the public/private divide. One must tread carefully when dealing with these and other political fictions: on the one hand they are constructed, they are not real, but on the other, they order social relations thereby forming the basis for real oppressions. “Race” for example is not a real category, but this does not deny that the experience of racial oppression and exploitation is real. 2 To understand it one must work with the political fiction and move beyond it. This thesis battles with many such fictions. PROPERTY IN THE PERSON “every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.” (Locke The Second Treatise of Government. 1689, D. Wootton (ed.) 1993: 274) This idea, that there is an intimate relationship between the body, property and labour has proved crucial for Western political philosophy. But there is a profound tension in the idea of property in the person, despite its “obviousness”. Locke signalled this in his acknowledgement that a man does not stand in the same relation to his body as he does to any other type of property (contra Pateman 1988: 56) because the body is sacred: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” (Locke 1689 inD. Wootton (ed.) 1993: 264) So a man does not have the right to kill himself, or put himself into slavery, because he is the work of God. Put another way, there is a contradiction between the idea of the body as an integral part of personhood and the idea of the body as property. But this tension has not been properly explored. Feminists have called for women’s ownership of their own bodies to be recognised. At the time of Locke’s writing of the Second Treatise of Civil Government for example, married women were chattels, the property of their husbands and European women’s continuing demands that their rights over their own bodies be recognised, particularly around questions of control over physical reproduction and male violence against women, may be seen as a struggle to apply the concept of property in the person equally to women and to men. But the migrant domestic worker slips into the analytical space between body as personhood and body as property. For as I argue in Chapter Seven, the domestic worker is selling, not her “labour power” (the property in the person), but her 3 personhood. I illustrate this with particular reference to the payment for “care”, which strains the political fiction of property in the person to breaking point. But it is property and its disposition by contract that from Locke onwards have formed the foundation of civil rights for Western political theorists. Those who lack even the property in the person it follows have no rights. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE It is not new to point out that the public and private are inextricably connected. As Pateman put it: “the dichotomy between the public and the private is... ultimately, what the feminist movement is about”. (Pateman 1983, cited Okin 1992: 315) But despite this there continues to be an assumption, both in sociological theory and in “common sense” that there is in reality a sharp divide between the regulation of the public and the private. The private/public polarisation implies and relates to other dualisms. Thus: Private Public traditional modem paternalistic/authoritarian bureaucratic personalistic materialistic customary relations civic relations affective instrumental primitive civilised irrational rational etc. But it must be remembered that this division is a fiction. Indeed the experiences and employment relations of migrant domestic workers suggest that the commonly accepted transition from traditional to modem, from unfree labour to free labour is incomplete. Migrant domestic workers are, I will argue, defined in a very real sense by their social relations, characterised by personal dependency on the employer re­ enforced by immigration legislation. Like individuals in Marx’s pre-capitalist world “their subjectivities are inseparable from their social position” (Sayer 1991: 18). But 4