Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptualising Paid Domestic Work
- 2 Behind the Words: Introducing the Research Project and Respondents
- 3 Nuances in the Politics of Demand for Outsourced Housecleaning
- 4 The Imperfect Contours of Outsourced Domestic Cleaning as Dirty Work
- 5 Domestic Cleaning: Work or Labour
- 6 Meanings of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
- 7 The Occupational Relations of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
- 8 Concluding the Book, Continuing the Journey
- Appendices
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - The Occupational Relations of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptualising Paid Domestic Work
- 2 Behind the Words: Introducing the Research Project and Respondents
- 3 Nuances in the Politics of Demand for Outsourced Housecleaning
- 4 The Imperfect Contours of Outsourced Domestic Cleaning as Dirty Work
- 5 Domestic Cleaning: Work or Labour
- 6 Meanings of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
- 7 The Occupational Relations of Domestic Cleaning as Work and Labour
- 8 Concluding the Book, Continuing the Journey
- Appendices
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Bhavna lived with her mother in the family home. Bhavna's mother managed the household with the help of domestic workers. As Bhavna talked about her relationship with the workers, the contextual nature of institutionalised misrecognition became apparent:
‘[I]n India, it is very different. It is not possible to eliminate that kind of social thing … A good friend of mine … is a house cleaner in [the US] … I met her when I went [there] … we hug … I mean, she's just like … you and me, … she's absolutely equal, my equal, there's nothing like she's a house cleaner … But in India it's not possible … because it is so deeply embedded in the social structure here … abroad the living standard more or less is the same everywhere … even the cleaners, everybody has good living standard, everybody has a car, everybody can go to the same restaurants … But here, the difference in money is so much, so extreme, and then people think that money brings them power and that gives them power to be able to say anything to them. … [So] if I invite him to have lunch with me, he’ll stop working for me. I can't ask him to do any other work for me.’
Introduction
Two factors informed the analysis presented in this chapter, which builds on and adds to the already extensively elucidated socio-cultural processes of power that shape occupational relations in paid domestic work (see Chapter 1). First, the UK respondents’ class identities were not in absolute opposition. Five service-users were first-generation middleclass, and Libby's service-provider also worked for her (still) working-class grandmother, who had herself been in domestic service. Four serviceproviders identified as middle-class. In India, upwardly mobile lowercaste people also outsource domestic work. Second, as the quotation from a conversation with Bhavna, a freelancer in publishing, illustrates, the intersectional influences of gender, race, class/caste, and our relative valuation of housework shape the cultural injustices experienced by the cleaning service-provider.
Fraser (1996, 2013) has argued that material and cultural injustices are mutually constitutive and their simultaneous redress is necessary for people to function as ‘full partners and participants’ in all their social relations – ‘formal legal equality’ is not enough.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Work, Labour and CleaningThe Social Contexts of Outsourcing Housework, pp. 167 - 190Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019