Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity

Louisa Acciari

doi:10.25222/larr.594

Abstract

Domestic workers, as essentially black women in highly precarious conditions, lacking social protection, and often not recognized as proper workers, are considered particularly hard, or even impossible, to organize compared to the “standard” male industrial worker. Yet they have been mobilizing for decades in several countries, including Brazil, where they won new labor rights in 2015. Through an ethnographic study of domestic workers’ unions in Brazil, I argue that what has made their mobilization possible is precisely the intersectional dimension of their oppression. While gender, race, and class have produced multiple forms of exclusion, these vectors of oppression have also enabled domestic workers to build alliances with women’s, black, and workers’ movements, thus giving domestic workers more visibility and more resources to organize their members. I have identified three forms of alliance building, each determined by domestic workers’ unions’ particular framing of gender, race, and class issues: rigid autonomy, critical alliance, and encompassing unionism.

Highlights

Domestic workers’ struggle in Brazil has to do with gender, race and class
This article draws on fieldwork conducted with six local unions affiliated to FENATRAD in the cities of São Paulo, Franca, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, Volta Redonda, and Nova Iguaçu between 2015 and 2017
Some of the leaders have a seat in local councils, and all three unions are close to the PT congresswoman Benedita da Silva, a black woman and former domestic worker herself

Summary

Introduction

Domestic workers’ struggle in Brazil has to do with gender, race and class. There is still a remnant, or a historical process, from the movement against slavery. I argue that this specific intersection of gender, race, and class oppressions within the (post) colonial and capitalist economy has produced domestic workers as an underclass of servants It is because they are poor black women descendants of slaves that domestic workers were not recognized as proper workers until the approval of the 2013 Constitutional Amendment (PEC 72/2013), and its decrees of application (Law 150/2015), which declares them equal to other workers. As black Brazilian feminists argue (Carneiro 2018; Gonzalez 1984), domestic work continues to be perceived as the “natural” place of black women, thereby perpetuating the legacy of slavery and justifying their lower social status This position of marginality further reflects the devaluation of care work in general, framed as a natural feminine task rather than an actual valuable work, which translates into lower wages, lack of social recognition and adequate labor regulations for care workers (Hirata and Guimarães 2012; Kowalchuk 2017; Parreñas 2001). I argue that an intersectional praxis can be a factor of success, I show the challenges and difficulties of such a praxis

Methods

Findings

Conclusion