Most women enjoy receiving flowers, and Latina domestic workers are no exception. In addition to the twenty-three nanny/housekeepers and housecleaners and the thirty-seven employers, I also formally interviewed three attorneys specializing in legal issues surrounding private paid domestic work and five individuals who owned or worked in domestic employment agencies. Altogether, I conducted in-depth, audiotaped interviews with sixty-eight people. And without my tape recorder, I spoke more casually with many more domestic workers, employers, and several organizers and attorneys. Throughout the text, pseudonyms are used for all employers, employees, and agency personnel, but not for the advocacy attorneys.
The interview materials are the most crucial source of information in this book. By using them, I have sought to enable the voices of employers and employees tc be heard. To be sure, this is not a kind of ventriloquism, as qualitative, interview research used to be viewed—with the ventriloquist (me) simply mouthing other people's stories. I am deliberately using their words to put forth a specific argument about contemporary paid domestic work. In postmodern anthropology the illusion is broken, and the power of the ventriloquist to select and form the dialogue is fully revealed: but those in the audience, who hear and interpret the dialogue, also have agency My position is that this is an interactive process, and the voices that emerge in the interviews, like other sources of information, provide us with only a partial view of the whole. In addition, it is important to note that much of what people reveal in interviews is shaped not only by their relationship to the interviewer but also by particulars and upheavals in their own lives at the time. The salience of these issues changes from day to day, week to week. For this reason, I have tried to avoid taking people's words out of context and to sketch, wherever possible, the proper setting for understanding the interviewee's experiences and perspectives.
Data from a survey questionnaire administered to 153 Latina immigrant domestic workers at a public park, at bus stops, and at evening ESL classes also inform this book. I administered the survey together with two research assistants, Gloria González-López and Ernestine Avila, who were then Ph.D. students. We went to downtown bus stops and to a busy, intracity bus terminal at 6 A.M. on Monday and Tuesday mornings (a time when many live-in workers are returning to their jobs); and we collected other responses at a popular Westside park where nannies bring young children in the middle of weekday mornings and at evening English classes in Hollywood. This was not a random, representative survey. It drew on women employed in the tonier neighborhoods of Los Angeles' West-side, and it left out many Latina domestic workers who speak English well and who drive their own cars to work. Still, it sketches a portrait and provides us with very particular information not available through the census or Labor Department statistics. The survey collected basic demographic information, such as the worker's country of origin, number of years in the United States, marital status, number of children and where they reside, previous occupational experiences, and, most important, information on wages and hours. For this study, I've also consulted the Census Public Use Microdata Sample for Los Angeles, but because both this occupation and the immigrant population generally are largely underrepresented in the census, I do not wholly rely on those indicators.
Finally, the research for this book also draws on limited ethnographic observations made in public and private sites. I spoke to, listened to, and passed time with Latina domestic workers in various settings: at public parks, on buses, at bus kiosks near downtown, in west Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills, at the now-defunct Labor Defense Network legal clinics—where Latina and Latino immigrants doing all kinds of work came to seek legal remedies to job problems—in the waiting rooms of domestic employment agencies, at meetings and informal social gatherings of the Domestic Workers' Association of CHIRLA, and at the information and outreach program that was the DWA's precursor. Rather than limit myself to one method or one source of information, I have explored many different ways of knowing about this occupation.
OVERVIEW
Chapter 1 situates contemporary paid domestic work in place and time and explains why, as the twentieth century ended, paid domestic work became a growth occupation. Besides noting the macrostructural, demographic, and cultural forces that have spurred this occupational growth, the chapter also contrasts historical with contemporary racialization of paid domestic work in the United States, underscoring why the job is still held in low regard. Noting some recent trends in the international migration of labor, I argue that the migration and employment of domestic workers in the United States today is distinctively laissez-faire and forms part of what I call the new world domestic order. Beginning with the observation that paid domestic work is organized in different ways, Chapter 2 provides a close-up portrait of some of the domestic employees whom I interviewed. It describes how the job is experienced by live-in nanny/housekeepers, live-out nanny/housekeepers, and housecleaners, focusing on a few of the women and using data from the nonrandom survey of 153 Latina domestic workers to sketch their broader demographic and social profile.
Part 2 includes three chapters that examine the ways in which Latina immigrants enter and exit domestic jobs in Los Angeles. Chapter 3, on informal network hiring, focuses on the formation and inner workings of employer and employee networks. I argue that supply and demand alone are not enough: mechanisms for joining the two must be provided. The labor market for paid domestic work is constructed through the social network reference system, whose processes are important not only in job placement but also in effecting some job standardization, however imperfect. Chapter 4 examines the formalization of recruitment and hiring in domestic employment agencies, and Chapter 5 examines the various ways in which domestic jobs end. Both hiring practices and approaches to job termination reveal that paid domestic work is often not recognized or treated as a “real job.”
Part 3 examines social relations on the job. Chapter 6 focuses on labor control: the ability of employers to obtain the desired work behavior from their domestic employees, and the ways in which housecleaners and nanny/housekeepers, in turn, comply, resist, and negotiate. While there are broadly shared understandings of these jobs, the tasks are diffuse and there are no written standards to specify which services will be performed, or how they will be executed. Here's the paradox: many domestic workers want clear, fair directives, but their employers often shy away from defining the tasks they want performed. Because of the structure of the different jobs, the approaches of housecleaners and nanny/housekeepers to time and tasks vary; and their employers, of disparate generations and with various relationships to domestic life, also innovate different approaches to matters of labor control.
Chapter 7 concentrates on the topic that has drawn the most attention in the study of paid domestic work, personalism and maternalism. Many Latina immigrants currently employed in private domestic work in Los Angeles express their strong preference for employers who interact personalistically with them, while many of their employers say they would rather not engage in these sorts of relationships. To explain this gap, which contradicts the findings and analyses of previous studies, I distinguish personalism from maternalism and draw attention to the social locations of both employees and their employers. In Chapter 8,1 review existent labor regulations relevant to paid domestic work, and I explore different pathways to fairer job standards. As an advocate of occupational upgrading, not abolition, I consider how legislation, filing for back wage claims, and collective organizing (in Los Angeles, specifically the DWA), can help achieve this goal.
While this book focuses on private paid domestic work in Los Angeles, California, the occupation is expanding throughout the world. In the newly industrialized nations of Asia, in
