Right to health, right to live: domestic workers facing the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents the results from a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on domestic workers in 14 Latin American countries. The data reveal a massive employment and social crisis, with about half of respondents having been dismissed or suspended while they had no access to social protection. We further demonstrate the harms on the health and safety of domestic workers, with evidence of pre-existing health conditions making them more vulnerable, lack of adequate protection at the workplace, and an increase in violations of rights. We argue that this situation of extreme vulnerability creates a crisis of social reproduction, making more acute the underlying contradiction between the necessity for domestic workers’ labour to sustain the economy and their precarious working and living conditions. This situation has been worsened by COVID-19 to the point that not only jobs, but also lives are being threatened, and with it, the provision of reproductive labour across Latin America.