Elizabeth Hutchison's new book adopts a historical perspective to address the struggles of Chilean domestic workers for the recognition of their rights. It is the result of more than three decades of investigation, which involved research in various archives and consulting numerous historical sources, including workers’ and activists’ life stories, union archives, parliamentary debates, and bills. Hutchison's study shows that the alleged absence of domestic workers in the historical archives is nothing more than an image that results from a process of invisibilization, which minimized their importance for labour history and validated their marginalization from the labour movement. The book highlights the relevance of paid domestic work in the reproduction of Chilean households and in the economic survival of poor families, and also how social asymmetries were configured and disputed in Chile throughout the past century.
Workers Like All the Rest of Them analyses the strategies of domestic workers to demand rights and improve their working conditions at different historical moments and their ability to adapt to distinct political scenarios. The chapters follow a chronological order starting with the first struggles of domestic workers against their exclusion from the labour rights sanctioned in the 1920s, to their activism during the military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. The book presents workers as active agents, capable of developing strategic alliances, with the socialists, the Catholic Church, the feminist movement, and it addresses the changes both in workers’ demands and in the language in which they expressed them, showing how they responded to broader social, political, and economic transformations, as well as in the worlds of work and in the occupation itself. In this way, the book “disrupts the orthodox binaries of public-private, skilled-unskilled and productive-reproductive labor and obscured the role of service workers in the history of Chilean class relations” (p. 26), challenging established historiographical interpretations of the history of domestic service, work, and the state in Latin America.
The book also calls into question the image of domestic service as a colonial remnant, demonstrating both how the modern state influenced domestic service labour conditions and the impact domestic workers had on the history of state regulations. Liberal codes and laws passed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century posited domestic service as a special trade that needed its own regulations, and therefore excluded it from various labour rights and protections that were legally guaranteed to workers in other trades. However, unlike their peers in other Latin American countries, Chilean domestic workers managed to have their labour defined as “work”. Even though its status was different, these regulations still allowed domestic workers to mobilize the support of state agents, such as lawyers, doctors, social workers, and inspectors in making their labour conditions a matter of public debate.
Hutchison's analysis reveals the relevance of gender politics in the way labour rights and protections were designed and the exclusions on which they were based. At the beginning of the twentieth century, domestic service was an occupation in which both men and women worked. Several decades later, however, domestic service would be almost exclusively performed by women. Its exclusion from labour rights granted to other trades encouraged specialized domestic workers – mostly men – to demand their occupations be treated as something different from domestic service. Its increasing feminization was also propelled by the “continuing influx of girls and young women from poor rural families to Santiago and other urban areas” (p. 60), and was accompanied by the creation of separate organizations for specialized workers, as well as by the marginalization of female domestic workers’ organizations within the labour movement.
By the mid-twentieth century, “the most effective mobilization of women employed in domestic service […] was led not by unions but rather by Catholic clergy” (p. 68). Religious organizations, especially those linked to the Catholic Workers Youth and Social Catholicism, provided an important support for domestic workers activism, including resources, legal services, personnel, and also a ready parish-level network. During the 1950s, Catholic organizations rarely allied with unions or participated in party politics, and were more focused on domestic workers’ social and practical needs. However, the political polarization and social mobilization that characterized the 1960s, the rise of Christian Democracy, and the apogee of liberation theology in Catholic circles “created new opportunities for the visibility and empowerment of domestic workers” (p. 103), and for greater unionization. It also provided a momentum for legislative action, such as the bill on domestic service proposed in 1970 and its revised, and more radicalized, versions discussed among domestic workers’ groups throughout the country the following year. The rhetoric of organizations also changed, from “proper service and human dignity to a union challenge to employers’ unchecked abuse” (p. 113).
Hutchison points out not only how gender and class shaped the history of work and the state, but also their paradoxical effects. Within the framework of the dictatorial government of Augusto Pinochet, domestic workers did not suffer the reversal of their political and legal status, as other workers did, because their rights had never been recognized in the labour code. Instead, they experienced the frustration of the approval of the bills that could have incorporated them into legislation. Furthermore, “in the midst of the military's campaign of systematic violence against workers and their organizations […], Chilean domestic workers’ organizations actually flourished under military rule” (p. 128). The invisibility of the domestic workers as workers allowed them to continue fighting for their rights and for better labour conditions even under the dictatorial government. Their links with the Catholic Church and the development of cooperative relations with feminist organizations allowed them to develop new strategies, which resulted in their strong participation in the movement that pushed for the restoration of democracy.
Workers Like All the Rest of Them shows how the history of domestic workers influences the way we think about their rights today, and explains the obstacles they continue to face to enforce them. The book allows us to situate the current dynamics in long-term processes, and so enables us to see what is new about the present struggles of domestic workers. Hutchison's research is of great interest, not only for academics focused on Latin American labour history, but also for workers and activists. It will undoubtedly contribute to strengthening our historical perspective on the current transformations in domestic work, as well as on the advances and limitations in terms of labour rights for this sector.
