UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Domesticated Democracy? Labor Rights at Home in Lima and New York City Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kc758f9 Author Maich, Katherine Eva Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Domesticated Democracy? Labor Rights at Home in Lima and New York City By Katherine Eva Maich A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Raka Ray, Chair Professor Kim Voss Professor Laura Enriquez Professor Jonathan Simon Summer 2017 Domesticated Democracy? Labor Rights at Home in Lima and New York City ã 2017 by Katherine Eva Maich All Rights Reserved Abstract Domesticated Democracy? Labor Rights at Home in Lima and New York City By Katherine Eva Maich Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Raka Ray, Chair Domestic workers’ struggles for labor rights—both historically and currently—draw attention to the private sphere of the home as an unregulated site of gendered and racialized labor that has often been overlooked across historical moments and economic configurations. Usually performed by indigenous and immigrant women, domestic work tends to be undervalued via a lack of prestige, respect, labor protections, and sufficient pay, though it remains socially necessary work within the global economy. Yet the privacy of the home often masks the social relations of intimacy, power, love, and exploitation that take place inside of it, as domestic workers reproduce family life and the ideologies of home by cleaning, cooking, and caring for those who live there. This dissertation builds upon a large multidisciplinary body of scholarship that has focused on the intersectional inequalities of class, caste, gender, race, and ethnicity embedded within domestic employer-worker relationship in varying contexts, and yet has failed to fully theorize how those relationships change when legally regulated, and in what ways those laws then shape anew the household. Yet due to the entrenched nature of the dominant discourse around the home as separate from work, it is by definition more difficult to draw attention to the labor performed there. I ask, given the place of the home as constitutive of the private sphere, how do we regulate it as a workplace? How do we bring legislated labor protections into the home? And, once there, how do they shape the lives of the very domestic workers they were designed to protect? Through a global North/South comparison set in New York City and Lima, Peru, two large urban centers of migration with recent legislation for domestic workers, I focus on the home and show that in order to consider the home as a site of work, we must also understand it as a site of law. In both sites, I explore how household workers have been categorized, understood, and excluded by employing an analysis that brings history to bear upon our contemporary understandings of efforts to bring labor law into the space of the home. Drawing from 10 months of ethnography in Lima and 8 months in New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, legislative transcripts, and demographic survey data, I show how progressive labor 1 laws for domestic workers are stifled by historically-entrenched patterns of racialization and labor informality. Drawing from 10 months of ethnography in Lima and 8 months in New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, legislative transcripts, and demographic survey data, I show how progressive labor laws for domestic workers are stifled by historically-entrenched patterns of racialization and labor informality. I find that the Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations, codifying preexisting inequalities and shaping a labor regime of colonial domesticity around body, space, and time inside Lima’s contemporary homes. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration, thus establishing a labor regime of immigrant domesticity instead of improving working conditions. Separately and together, then, my fieldwork from both sites sharpens our understanding of how, despite important legislative victories for domestic workers, the home has not (yet) been democratized. 2 For my parents, Paul and Jessica Maich, who always remind me that the sky’s the limit i Table of Contents List of Figures, Tables, and Images ...............................................................................................iii Acknowledgements.........................................................................................................................iv Chapter 1: Introduction: Conceptualizing the Home as a Site of Work, as a Site of Law .....................................................1 Chapter 2: Architecture of Access: Race, Space, the City, and the Peruvian Colonial Imaginary........................................................29 Chapter 3: Insider Vulnerability: Constructing Colonial Domesticity inside Lima’s Homes............................................................53 Chapter 4: From Slavery to Service: Continuing Struggles to Regulate Domestic Worker Rights in the United States.........................76 Chapter 5: Outsider Vulnerability: Producing Immigrant Domesticity in New York City...................................................................97 Chapter 6: Conclusion: Toward New Sites of Labor, Toward New Labor Rights............................................................112 Methodological Appendix...........................................................................................................122 Comparative Laws Appendix......................................................................................................130 Bibliography................................................................................................................................133 ii List of Figures, Tables, and Images Figures Figure 1.1: The Production of Insider and Outsider Vulnerability................................................11 Tables Table 1.1: Features of the Industry of Domestic Work in Lima and New York City...................23 Table 4.1: Impact of Immigration Status Upon Working Conditions and Earnings.....................90 Table 6.1: Comparative Overview of Legislation in Lima and New York City.........................113 Images Image 2.1: Map of Lima, Peru, with Concentrated Housing Clusters...........................................35 Image 2.2: Reforma Agraria, 1968-1973, by Jesús Ruiz Durand .................................................48 Image 3.1: Household Worker in Uniform, Miraflores District, Lima, Peru................................59 Image 3.2: Household Uniform Shop, Miraflores District, Lima, Peru........................................61 Image 3.3: Casa En La Planicie, La Molina, Lima, Peru, 2010....................................................63 Image 3.4: First and Second Floor Blueprints of Casa En La Planicie.........................................64 Image 3.5: Size Comparison of the bedrooms of Casa En La Planicie…....................................65 Image 4.1: Domestic Worker in formal uniform, Upper East Side, Manhattan............................86 Image 4.2: Domestic Worker in casual wear, Upper East Side, Manhattan..................................87 iii Acknowledgements This dissertation is very much the product of a collective labor of love. At Berkeley, I was welcomed by an incredible group of colleagues and was lucky to cross paths and establish community with so many talented and generous scholars, including Eli Friedman, Marcel Paret, Jennifer Carlson, Abigail Andrews, Barry Eidlin, Ryan Calder, Mike Levien, Tianna Paschel, Fidan Elcioglu, Adam Reich, Gabe Hetland, Elif Lostuvali, Ofer Sharone, and Ryan Center. I am forever grateful to Margo Mahan for hosting me and urging me to choose Berkeley. Freeden Oeur, always my elder, shared wonderful concerts and generously answered far too many of my questions about grad school, next steps, and the future. The “Team Raka” collective, then and now, has been a source of intellectual discovery, cross-cohort bonding, wonderful meals and a lot of fun over the years, all thanks to Raka Ray’s hospitality. I am lucky to have overlapped initially with Dawn Dow, Kate Mason, Kimberly Hoang, Jordanna Matlon, Sarah Anne Minkin, Kemi Balogun, Katie Hasson, Nazanin Shahrokni, Abbie, and Jenny, and more recently with Gowri Vijayakumar, Joy Hightower, Carter Koppelman, Louise Ly, Gill Gualtieri, Lindsay Berkowitz, and Michaela Simmons. I came to Berkeley immediately after earning my Master of Science in Labor Studies from the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Those two years were formative for shaping my intellectual and political interests, which only further came to fruition through my time at Berkeley. Wonderful faculty, including Stephanie Luce, Paula Chakravartty, Eve Weinbaum, Tom Juravich, Ann Ferguson, Joyce Berkman, Dale Melcher, and Harris Freeman, supported me while I embarked on my continued graduate journey. While at Amherst, I was lucky enough to meet many smart and focused colleagues, two of whom have remained close friends throughout the often-daunting geographical distance. Clare Hammonds first dazzled me