Exploring the legal context and arguments put forth by women who sued for their wages, this article illustrates how contested definitions of “work” and “intimacy” played a fundamental role in the arguments that both domestic workers and those whom they challenged in court made. It discusses a sample of legal complaints concerning labor arrangements (specifically, wage contracts, or contratos de soldada) from the Brazilian National Archives involving women working in the households of single men or widowers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Brought by both former slaves and Portuguese immigrants and other “free” women, domestic workers advanced demands for compensation, claiming wages and entitlements that clearly defined their connection to their masters as “work,” even when personal intimacy and sex were also present. The article also considers the place occupied by “free” domestic work in a slave society, relating it to the changing legal and social context of nineteenth-century Brazil.

This article focuses on the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910), a small, grassroots union organized by young female domestic servants in the years leading up to the First World War. This union emerged against a backdrop of labor unrest as well as an increasingly militant women's movement. The article looks at how the Domestic Workers’ Union drew inspiration from the latter but also encountered hostility from some feminists unhappy with the idea of their own servants becoming organized. I argue that the uneven and ambivalent response of the women's movement toward the question of domestic worker organizing is significant not simply as an expression of the social divisions that undoubtedly characterized this movement, but also as reflecting a wider debate within early twentieth-century British feminism over what constituted useful and valuable work for women. Attitudes toward domestic worker organizing were therefore predicated upon feminists’ interrogation of the very nature of domestic labor. Was it inherently inferior to masculine and/or professional forms of work? Was it intrinsically different from factory work, or could it be reorganized and rationalized to fit within the industrial paradigm? Under what conditions should domestic labor be performed, and, perhaps most importantly, who should do it?

Largely denied membership in organized labor and access to basic labor protections, black domestic workers of St. Louis employed the local chapter of the Urban League's Women's Division to carve out a space for themselves in a growing, predominantly white, male labor movement and in the multiple coalitions that configured the New Deal. Domestics used household employment reform codes to lay the groundwork for dignity to manifest itself in their labor and contractual agreements. From the Household Workers Mass Meeting of 1933 to the close of the St. Louis Urban League's first phase in the late 1940s, black working-class women joined forces with progressive black women who led the Urban League's Women's Division to reform domestic employment through negotiation, enforcement, collective action, and everyday resistance. A border city with a large and settled black working class located within its core, St. Louis had acute class, gender, and racial divisions that shaped the terms of black women's economic activism. The Gateway City's mix of urban Midwestern-, northern-, and southern-style geopolitics propelled domestics’ mobilization, offering space for dissident women to call for changes to the social, political, and economic order.

On November 28, 1946, a group of Puerto Rican women picketed the Chicago offices of Castle, Barton, and Associates, a private employment agency that had brought them to the city to become domestic workers. They protested low wages, long hours, and deductions from their pay for transportation and other costs. Their resistance challenged the Puerto Rican and United States governments to both recognize local labor exploitation and grapple with Puerto Rican rights as those of migrant United States citizens. These women made demands on the Puerto Rican state to regulate migrant contract work and sponsor training programs for domestic work. They would succeed as colonial subjects to gain recognition as workers. Nonetheless, they failed to win well-paid, safe, and desirable jobs. This history of Puerto Rican women's domestic work and their struggle for regulation illuminates a formative moment in the history of Puerto Rican women's organizing and activism for labor rights.

Between 1946 and 1949, the Pilbara Walk-Off of Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Northwest of Western Australia came to symbolize the demand for Aboriginal rights and independence and is now recognized as a key event in the Aboriginal land rights movement. While the Pilbara strike has received attention from many historians, the involvement of Aboriginal domestic workers in the action has not. But the strike provided an unprecedented opportunity for Aboriginal domestic workers to mobilize and organize. This article examines the historical role and impact of Aboriginal domestic workers in the Pilbara strike. Drawing upon Aboriginal oral histories and correspondence of employers at the time as well as official records, this study argues that the involvement of the domestic workers made Aboriginal domestic labor visible, and in doing so challenged the racial and gender foundations of hierarchy and power that underpinned the pastoral economy of colonization.

This article analyzes the relationship between masculinity and domestic service by exploring how servants resisted the changing culture and realities of their work in colonial Dar es Salaam, the capital of British colonial Tanganyika. Domestic servants formed nearly half the working class in the city, and ninety-seven percent of servants were African men. Considered during the early decades of colonialism to be a well-paid, skilled, and respectable occupation, domestic service transformed in the 1940s and 1950s, due to the World War II economic crisis, soaring urban population, and introduction of new labor regulations. The primary threats to servants’ masculinity during the latter half of the colonial era were the growing limitations the occupation placed on men's abilities to achieve the financial and social capital required to achieve senior status and respect within their families and the African community. In response to rising exploitation and declining wages, servants formed Tanganyika's first African labor union.

This article analyzes household workers’ discursive strategies before the Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW) between 1956 and 2013. The TDW is an institution created in 1956 to arbitrate labor relations within domestic service in Buenos Aires. This article shows that workers’ strategies use alternatively a language of rationality and labor relations on the one hand, and of affection and family-like bonds on the other. The overlap of languages of rationality and affection persisted during the entire period under analysis. However, it did not have the same significance over time. Specific articulations of affect or rationality legitimated workers’ rights at different moments in relation to particular labor relations. Based on a close reading of more than 800 case records, the article shows that, despite the particularities of any individual cases, patterns of argument emerged, connected to changes in the world of labor and transformations in the dynamics of domestic service.

Most efforts of the current domestic workers’ rights movement in the United States have focused on ending the exclusion of domestic workers from employment protections that were institutionalized during the New Deal in the 1930s. These victories have been significant in both policy and culture. They have brought public attention to the invisibilized world of domestic work, and state recognition has validated this often-degraded occupation as “real work.” However, enforcement has been a problem. As domestic worker organizing has matured, it has expanded to include pushing the boundaries of state-ensured minimum standards as well as raising standards in the industry through direct intervention in the relationship between workers and employers. These programs are significant in that they reflect a different strategic approach—often with the goal of base building—than the earlier model of domestic worker advocacy and organizing.

Paid household labor has fertilized the development of national economies, while also nourishing the capitalist labor systems that has allowed globalization to thrive. However, this transnational sector has remained historically invisible, devalued, and unprotected from national and international legislative frameworks. In 2010, the International Labor Organization (ILO) finally embraced this challenge through two years of negotiations on the world's first international convention to assure “Decent Work for Domestic Workers.” These tripartite debates set the stage for the largest inclusion of “actual workers” in policy making. The debates also mobilized the world's first international domestic workers’ movement. This report from the field highlights a distinct process whereby workers themselves played a pivotal role in the creation of international labor policy. According to International Domestic Workers Federation president Myrtle Witbooi, this “new beginning” set “a benchmark for decent work and social equality.”

In 1958 the International Ladies Garment Workers Union waged a strike in the dress industry. The union's central goal was to curb the growing influence of organized crime, particularly among the factories being set up in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The Garment Workers’ leadership saw the conflict as a pivotal test for their organization. Drawing on newly available source materials, including FBI files and the records of a Senate investigation, this article argues that the union's approach to this strike reflected the complex realities it faced in dealing with corruption in the garment industry. Organized crime played long term and fundamental roles in the New York Garment District and especially in the industry's trucking sector. The union had found itself forced to accommodate aspects of the mob's role in order to build its organization. The 1958 strike was about curbing the mob sector and, in effect, renegotiating the previously made arrangements. It was, the article argues, a kind of real-world anticorruption effort, waged by union members and union leaders at some risk to themselves in mob-dominated towns such as Pittston, Pennsylvania.

This article explores how the prolonged and erosive deindustrialization in China's struggling state-owned enterprises (SOE), an inevitable result of the neoliberal shift in industrialization policy from socialist import-substitution industrialization to globalized export-oriented industrialization, has changed workers’ perceptions of themselves and their work. Based on in-depth interviews with workers and participant observation in one enterprise—Nanfang Steel—this study describes how what it means to be a worker has changed over two generations of SOE workers. The “glorious” identity of the worker, promoted by the state during the Maoist era, and emphatically proclaimed by elder workers despite its internal limitations and contradictions, has been dismantled by the neoliberal reform and has instead metamorphosed into a newly developed and “stigma-laden” cultural identity created by contemporary hegemonic discourse and then bitterly internalized by currently employed younger workers.