Experiences Of Domestic Workers Research Articles

An exploration of work-related experiences of domestic workers in Accra, Ghana

This study explored work-related lived experiences of domestic workers in the Ghanaian context. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted in-depth interviews with 14 domestic workers in Accra to develop insights into how various characteristics associated with domestic workers’ jobs shape their psychological well-being and how they thrive in the face of their experiences. The study revealed that domestic workers face exploitation and abuse, have no written formal work contracts, and enter that kind of work as a means to addressing existential needs. It was further observed that the work situations of domestic workers expose them to potential psychological distress, and many of them use emotion regulation to cope with abuse and exploitation on the job. However, the study also found evidence that domestic workers derive satisfaction from their job when they are given fair employment conditions. These findings suggest the need for policies and interventions targeted at providing psychosocial support and regulating the domestic work sector to safeguard the health and wellbeing of domestic workers.

Ela era doméstica

Nesse artigo apresento caminhos da pesquisa, resultados e reflexões sobre experiências de trabalhadoras domésticas e donas de casa da região do Triângulo Mineiro. No trabalho de pesquisa, na atuação junto a essas mulheres, nas atualizações dos referenciais teóricos aponto para o desejo e importância de compreender as trajetórias dessas sujeitas, a partir do significado que dão às suas experiências, a partir da forma como organizam suas falas e o sentido que conferem às suas vidas. Ancorada nas contribuições teórico-metodológicas da história social, principalmente de Thompson; Williams, e das contribuições da História Oral, com Portelli a pesquisa de campo foi realizada. As recém traduzidas obras das feministas negras como Ângela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde têm uma contribuição essencial para pensar o tema do trabalho doméstico e sua necessária revisão para o feminismo que contemple a maioria.

Domestic workers’ lived realities of empowerment and disempowerment within the South African labour legislative context: Two sides of the same “coin”

South Africa is heralded as a global ambassador for the rights of domestic workers. Empowerment, however, remains an elusive concept within the sector. Fear-based disempowerment still characterises the employment relationship, resulting in an absence of an employee voice. The dire need to survive renders this sector silent. This article explores the role that legislative awareness can play in the everyday lives of domestic workers. By means of a post-positive, forwardlooking positive psychological and phenomenological research design the researchers sought to access the voiced experiences of domestic workers within their employment context. Consequently, purposive, respondent-driven selfsampling knowledgeable participants were recruited. In-depth interviewing generated the data. The distinct voice of each participant was noted during an open inductive approach to data analysis. Findings indicated that empowerment was an unknown construct for all participants. They lacked the confidence to engage their employers on employment issues. Nevertheless, domestic workers should embrace ownership and endeavour to empower themselves. This would sanction their right to assert their expectations of employment standards with confidence and use the judicial system to bring about compliant actions. The article concludes with the notion that legislative awareness could result in empowered actions though informed employee voices.

Of silent maids, skilled gardeners and careful madams: gendered dynamics and strategies of migrant domestic workers in Accra, Ghana

Recent studies indicate that many migrants are engaged mainly in the informal sector in low-paid, short-term, and insecure occupations in cities. Using a qualitative research approach, this paper examines the gendered experiences, livelihood strategies and wellbeing of migrants engaged in domestic work in Accra, Ghana. Employing structure-agency theoretical perspectives, the paper also discusses how migrant domestic workers employ their own agency to counter exploitation. The findings show clear gendered patterns of employment in domestic work, with men having stronger agency to negotiate better conditions of work and remuneration. The paper argues that despite the heterogeneity and diversity of the work conditions and experiences of domestic workers in Accra, the importance of gender as a crucial factor mediating the experiences of both male and female domestic workers and their impacts on their wellbeing must be recognised in policies to address and regulate domestic work in Ghana.

New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (review)

Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 328 pp. The subject of this book is part of the large-scale movement of tens of millions of Chinese men and women from rural areas to urban cities, where they engage in the marginal manual labor city residents increasingly reject, from construction work and factory labor to various forms of service work. Hairong Yan focuses on the experiences of domestic workers (baomu) in Beijing, an under-researched topic. Shifting between Beijing and Anhui province, she describes the role rural women play in the unfolding consumer economy of upper and middle-class Beijing. Highlighting the class realities of the post-Mao transformation of Chinese society, she unpacks the neoliberal basis of these changes. Yet, in places, this theoretical critique, supported by a range of textual sources, drowns out the actual voices of domestic laborers. This is unfortunate, because the book shows such initial promise. Yan succinctly sketches out the contradictions in the post-Maoist emphasis on utilizing labor from marginal areas in the countryside as the primary labor source of China's economic development (12). Chapter 1 provides an historical context to the recent emergence of a mobile labor class among Chinese peasants, noting its links with both the redistribution of land (28) and the social erasure of a meaningful identity for rural youth (51). While has become the foundation of Party ideology, this always occurs elsewhere other than the countryside. Chapter 2 describes the links between the development of a domestic labor economy in major cities with the post-1979 enhanced status of intellectuals and private business owners. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the key concept of suzhi, (quality), an ambiguous term that implies civility, self-discipline, proper moral behavior, and a general sense of modern consciousness. For both state leaders and intellectuals, a lack of peasant quality is now seen as the key roadblock to further national development (113). Chapter 4 describes the recruiting process of domestic workers, while Chapter 5 analyzes the self development discourse (ziwo fazhan) promoted as the means to raising peasant quality (187), a discourse that Yan argues erases any discussion of economic class realities (190). In the final chapter, Yan describes the ambiguous place of migrant workers in Chinese society; for many, they cannot ever truly return home, yet are never accepted as at home in the cities where they spend their working lives. As Yan's analysis unfolds, it remains rather thin on ethnographic depth, relying instead on newspaper accounts, contemporary fiction, and the arguments of other researchers. For example, when she turns to the gritty reality of labor recruitment and placement, Yan relies on what apparently was a one-time visit to a recruiter in Anhui, which is followed by a description of one training session for domestic workers in Beijing (148- 165). This highlights the potential pitfalls of a multi-sited study that also seeks to move beyond thick ethnographic description: the there of the story and more importantly the women of this story become secondary to a theoretically rigorous, yet obtuse analysis that times threatens to drown out lived experience. While adding to the on-going analysis of both a state and broader society focus on suzhi, Yan argues that this represents a new form of discourse, one which aims to transform the process of development into a policy focused on re-molding citizen-subjects into proper modern subjects. Yet, while she shows how this new state and Party emphasis on personal, individual development as the pathway to modernity is a rejection of the Maoist emphasis on the radical transformation of the collective nation, she does not note how this policy is a continuation of a broader modernist discourse that harkens back to the 1911 Revolution. …

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Domestic Workers' Experiences of Power and Oppression in South Africa

This study examines the work experiences of domestic workers in the context of socio-economic-political legislation promulgated to protect their social rights in the new South Africa. It gains insight into the power relations and embedded tensions between employers and domestic workers with the aim of identifying forms of oppression affecting domestic workers. In-depth interviews were conducted with nine female domestic workers employed in African households and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results indicate that despite inclusion in labour legislation, domestic workers remain a vulnerable group. They experience oppression in the form of exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, violence and some class-based cultural imperialism. Despite this, agency and resistance in the face of oppression was a key finding. Although some gains may have been obtained through inclusion in legislation, the asymmetrical power relationship with employers remains problematic.