Review of: Jennifer N. Fish (2017) Domestic Workers of the World Unite: A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights

Sonal Sharma
2019 Global Labour Journal  
In the last two decades, there has been a deluge of writing across social science disciplines on the issue of paid domestic work. This change was much needed as, for a long time, at the level of both theory and labour politics there has been a dearth of engagement with this occupation due to its peculiar nature: in domestic work, the "employer" is not a profit-making firm but a private household, and the workplace is not a factory or public site but an upper-class or middle-class home. This
more » ... ge can also be attributed to the fact that under neo-liberal capitalism paid domestic work, among other precarious occupations, is one of the activities that has significantly increased in size. As domestic workers -who are overwhelmingly women -in different parts of the world go on making history by gaining labour rights for themselves, one is forced to ask: how have some of the most marginalised workers managed to achieve what, at one point, seemed impossible. Jennifer N. Fish's Domestic Workers of the World Unite: A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights is a timely intervention in this regard. A sociologist with more than a decade-long association with domestic workers' movements, Fish presents a rich analysis of the making of what she calls the "global domestic workers' movement" and the movement's success in gaining recognition for domestic workers in the form of International Labour Organization (ILO) convention C189 on domestic work. Primarily drawing on the "life narratives of domestic workers" across the world, the key question the book engages with is "how workers at the grassroot level used a formal UN system to codify an identity and secure their labour rights" (p. 8). The question of how the workers used a formal body like the United Nations to win a legitimate and legal identity for themselves is a critical one because domestic workers were never considered "workers" -be it in the national labour laws of different countries or the organised labour movements. The story of the global domestic workers' movement is presented through seven chapters. The first two chapters trace the history of the domestic workers' movement from both global and national standpoints. By virtue of working behind closed doors of homes, domestic workers have been seen as difficult to organise. Fish powerfully captures the personal moments of individual domestic workers in which they questioned the invisibility they were subjected to and decided to transform it by organising workers in their local areas. It is these "small" efforts by women domestic workers themselves in different parts of the world that eventually culminated in a "global movement". Chapter Three shows how these impossible-to-organise workers and the groups representing them managed to find innovative ways to organise and represent themselves before the ILO. Getting a fair representation of the workers' voices on their prospective rights was key, as the conditions and standards of domestic work were different in different countries. In other words, one could not speak of one homogeneous experience. Furthermore, the obstacles in
doi:10.15173/glj.v10i2.3978 fatcat:2tyvww7f55dhjnxagucvne4zzm