On September 17, 1959, María received the first summons of what would be a long, but relatively simple and inexpensive trial. She probably was not expecting this call before a court of law. The person behind her summons was Celia, a former household worker who three months before had worked at her home as a maid for just eleven days. By this time as far as María was concerned, Celia was part of a finished story, but subsequent events would prove otherwise.
A week later, María came before the Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW) to explain her relationship with Celia. María claimed to have dismissed Celia as an incompetent worker. María also said that she offered the money owed to Celia, but that Celia did not collect these wages at the time. María, however, did not offer that money to the authorities, and therefore, the trial continued. Celia and María did not meet at the settlement hearing. María attended and left ahead of schedule because she had to report to work (she was a teacher). She never returned to the court at any other point during the trial, which would last nearly two more years. Perhaps she assumed that her statement to the authorities was enough. In October 1959 the court ruled in favor of Celia, ordering María to pay $443 to her. However, no payment would be made until July 1961, after the intervention of several public officers, lawyers, and judges.
Celia could only win redress after 1956, with passage of decree 326—the first legal code for Argentinean domestic service, a code that would be in force until 2013.Footnote 1 In 1956, the government also created the Tribunal of Domestic Work (TDW—Tribunal de Trabajo Doméstico, initially called Consejo del Trabajo Doméstico) to arbitrate labor relations within domestic service. Not only did the labor rights of household workers become legally protected, but a state agency safeguarded them. The sanction of a legal code for domestic service and the creation of the TDW gave workers a space to present their demands, generating new anxieties among employers.
Conflicts over the definition of what was “fair” were not resolved exclusively in terms of legally sanctioned rights because entering into judgments questioned the personal character of both workers and employers. Although scholars usually present economy and intimacy as hostile spheres, they are deeply intertwined, especially in domestic service, where the worker has private knowledge of the household and the employer has control over the movement of the worker in an isolated space.Footnote 2 The “affective ambivalence”Footnote 3 surrounding the relation between household workers and their employers in Argentina had different impacts on the definition of employers’ and workers’ duties and obligations during the twentieth century. This ambivalence translated into distinct strategies before the courts of law, which show an alternative use of a language of rationality and labor relations on the one hand, and of affection and family-like bonds, on the other. Based on a close reading of more than 800 case records, this article analyzes household workers’ discursive strategies before the TDW. We contextualize worker discursive strategies before the TDW in light of the laws that regulated domestic service and actual transformations in the occupation during the second half of the twentieth century.
Three time periods marked significant changes in the workers’ strategies before the TDW, which were related to transformations in domestic service and, more broadly, the world of work. During its initial years, despite being created during the government of Pedro Aramburu—that implied, as we shall see, some differences in the way conflicts between workers and employers were supposed to be solved—the TDW followed a logic introduced by the previous Peronist governments that had changed workers’ perceptions of the state, the law, and, particularly, social justice. The labor movement had accomplished significant goals since the early decades of the twentieth century—such as the passing of important labor laws regarding working hours, accidents at work, and weekly rest. Only under the Peronist administrations many of the labor rights previously recognized could be actually enforced, and others—such as vacations, supplementary annual salary and pension benefits—were extended to the majority of Argentinean workers. In addition, state agencies assumed an explicit position defending workers’ rights. Strong social mobilization in the early 1970s was accompanied by a change in workers' strategies before the TDW towards a predominance of a language of labor rights. By this time, one of the household workers’ unions and different labor lawyers had become more involved in the trials initiated before the TDW. The language of labor rights gained a well-established legitimacy during the 1970s and 1980s that persisted despite the dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983. We end with the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, years characterized by increasingly precarious working conditions, a notable rise in unemployment, and passage of laws permitting labor flexibilization.
As we show, the overlap of languages of rationality and affection persisted during the entire period under analysis. However, they did not have the same significance over time. Specific articulations of affect or rationality legitimated workers’ rights at different moments in relation to particular labor relations. Despite the particularities of any individual cases, patterns of argument emerged, connected to changes in the world of labor and transformations in the dynamics of domestic service. We consider workers’ motivations to issue a lawsuit against their former employers, showing how they deployed discursive strategies before the TDW.
Domestic Service and Labor rights in Argentina
From the early twentieth century, the Argentine Congress passed various worker protections.Footnote 4 But, as in other places, these laws systematically excluded domestic service. Policymakers and the public alike justified exclusion from general labor legislation and delay in passing a special legal code on the grounds that domestic service was part of family life.Footnote 5
The shifting boundary between work and family, intimacy and the cash nexus, was articulated with major changes in domestic service in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in the mid-1930s and during the 1940s, on several occasions, civil courts decided whether or not a monetary remuneration in exchange for domestic work was appropriate in cases in which there was an affective relationship between the parties.Footnote 6 At the same time, the “live-out” domestic service started to replace the previously predominant form of “live-in” work. Yet the legal contours of the category domestic service narrowed in the 1940s. Occupations previously included under that label, such as private drivers and doormen, acquired an independent status guaranteed by specific legislation originating from the bond these occupations had with either specialized knowledge or the “public” world.Footnote 7 Overall, this redefinition separated occupations identified as “masculine” and, in this sense, contributed to the feminization of domestic service that had already started in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 8
During this first period, legislators and elites considered domestic service as an occupation with a peculiar nature, which required special legal regulation. Decree Law 326, sanctioned in 1956, defined domestic service as an activity performed at the employer's home, from which the employer did not obtain an economic profit.Footnote 9 This exceptional nature of domestic service also involved the limitation of household workers’ labor rights. This limitation that was not only present in the Decree Law 326, but also in most of the bills aimed at regulating the sector that were sponsored in the previous decades by members of different political parties. Almost twenty years later in 1974, the sanction of the Employment Contract Law (ECL—Ley de Contrato de Trabajo in Spanish) confirmed domestic service as having “special” status, which rationalized exemption from the labor rights guaranteed to almost every other worker.
A year before the Decree Law 326 was sanctioned in 1955, Congress had discussed another bill to regulate domestic service, which was sponsored by Peronism. This project had received preliminary approval, but approval was interrupted by the coup that overthrew Perón. This bill also limited household workers’ labor rights, but unlike the Decree Law 326, it encouraged collective agreements in the sector. In fact, the main difference between the project that failed to be approved in 1955 and the decree signed by the government of Aramburu in 1956 was precisely the solutions they had foreseen for the conflicts between workers and employers: while the project promoted by the Peronism impelled collective labor agreements, Decree Law 326 established the individual negotiation of these conflicts before the TDW.Footnote 10
By 1964, domestic service was the top occupation for women who participated in the Buenos Aires labor market, constituting twenty percent of the workforce. It was also the most feminized one: more than ninety-six percent of the workers in this sector were women. Women with lower levels of formal education were concentrated in the field: in 1964 more than sixty-eight percent of them had only attended primary school, while thirteen percent were without any formal education.Footnote 11
During the whole period analyzed, domestic service continued to grow largely in the informal sector, which reduced the workers’ ability to enforce their legal rights.Footnote 12 Thus the amount of remuneration, contractual forms, and duties to be performed were left to the judgment of the employers.Footnote 13 This situation intensified during the 1990s, when the absence of alternative stable jobs generated the conditions in which a large quantity of women entered into informalized working activities, particularly in domestic service.Footnote 14 According to the census, in 2001 out of a total of 10,913,187 economically active people, 760,673 were employed in domestic service; of these, 700,435 were women.Footnote 15 Confirming this data, the Permanent Household Survey calculated for the fourth quarter of 2004 that more than 910,000 women were employed in domestic service, representing 17.2 percent of all women participating in the labor market in the whole country.Footnote 16
Between 1990 and 2002, the rate of urban female economic activity rose from thirty-eight percent to forty-eight percent, reflected mostly in work in the informal sector, especially in domestic service. This accelerated increase in the rates of female activity was linked to a greater demand for domestic service from middle- and upper-class women. However, this demand unfolded in a context of economic crisis, reduction of family income, and high unemployment rates among both men and women.Footnote 17 The participation of women in the labor market varied according to social sector.Footnote 18 Household workers still had a lower level of education and were among the groups with lower levels of individual income.Footnote 19
In the first years of the twenty-first century, after nearly four decades with no new public policies, the state actively intervened in domestic service labor relations. At this point, informal work became visible as a serious social problem. Although employment rates recovered from 1990s standards, informal employment grew steadily and became one of the main sources of inequality in the Argentinean labor market. In this context, different policies aimed at reducing informal work were implemented. Among them, the Argentinean government has launched a package of measures with different levels of acceptance and effectiveness. It increased the formal registration of household workers, thus broadening and guaranteeing workers’ rights, and included a new law to regulate domestic service aimed at making household workers’ labor rights “equal to other workers.”Footnote 20 Domestic service, however, is still one of the sectors with higher informality rates and lower salaries.
The First Years of the Tribunal of Domestic Work
When the National Ministry of Labor created the TDW in 1956, opposition resembled the reaction of employers to the establishment of nonspecialized labor courts in 1944: The tribunal in question favored the workers. Whether or not outcomes were biased, the TDW did offer an easier and more egalitarian procedure, even compared to the general labor courts. The process centered on conciliation hearings. Only with the failure of mediation was the procedure opened to the presentation of evidence. In that case, the most important elements were the witnesses’ and parties’ statements before the Court authorities.
Contrary to what would occur in the decades to come, at first employers usually recognized having a labor relation with the plaintiffs. The most common disputes were over the right to compensation with dismissal. Most workers claimed to have been fired, because that gave them a right to compensation. Defendants usually contested such claims, arguing that the workers had abandoned their jobs. Another common dispute arose around the amount of wages.
Many initiators of complaints had not lived at their employers’ homes, although in the early years of the court, most did reside with their employers. Yet even those employed under the live-out system worked for the same employer at least five days a week. It is difficult to establish the tasks performed by any household worker because these generally were not detailed in the lawsuits, but we know they included cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and sometimes child or elder care.
Initially, the letter of the law was relatively unimportant in determining the TDW's resolutions. Both employers and workers often ignored their legal rights and obligations, a situation that was not always remedied by the tribunal officers. Their ultimate goal was to reach an agreement, which could be established at any point in the trial. Employers repeatedly claimed that they did not know what the law stated, yet they usually came before the tribunal accompanied by an attorney. Household workers did not. As legal advice was optional, workers often made do without a lawyer, at least during the first conciliation hearings, although this changed if the process proceeded to the presentation of evidence. Employers’ and workers’ lawyers also had different profiles. While workers’ lawyers were usually men who specialized in labor law and had some bond to unions—not necessarily household workers’ unions—employers’ lawyers could either be men or women, usually specialized in civil law, and contacted through family or personal relationships.
Although union representatives could participate, at first few were present. Among the 293 case records preserved from 1960, the union was involved in only forty. At the time, there existed at least one union—the Sindicato Unión Personal Auxiliar de Casas Particulares; it occasionally had some participation in the lawsuits, though it is not possible to know how many members it had. Attorneys and counselors, on the other hand, gave significant space to workers’ and employers’ voices. Questions asked of the witnesses often included detailed descriptions of situations experienced by either party as unfair. Personal stories and affective discourses were also dominant in the charges and responses written by lawyers. Although it depended on the particular features of each case (many ended at the first settlement hearing), in those cases opened to the presentation of evidence, usually both employers’ and workers’ strategies were built using a language of affection and familial relationships.
Whose voice did these stories express? It is clear that narratives do not directly express the voice of the workers. The files from the TDW only conserve written documents produced mainly by lawyers and legal administrators, who mediate the workers’ voice. The most detailed files for analysis, even in the first years of the Tribunal, are those in which both the employers and employees turned to a legal representative. How important was this mediation? Did it completely erase the workers’ voice? Experiencing a similar problem while looking at the archives from the Inquisition, the historian Carlo Ginzburg argues that these types of sources are more or less explicitly dialogic texts, in which different voices were registered, although not on an equal footing.Footnote 21 In this sense, even though it is not always possible to distinguish the voice of the workers from the voice of the lawyers and legal administrators, in some cases the detailed descriptions of situations experienced within the working relationship, the indignation expressed in the tone of some demands, denunciations, and questions, suggest worker involvement in the articulation of these discourses.
Legal provisions actually enabled this appeal to personal qualities observable in the workers’ strategies during the first years of the TDW. In at least three articles Decree-Law No. 326 introduced personal considerations into the legal text itself. Article number five established that it was the obligation of the workers to “remain loyal and respectful to the employer” and their family.Footnote 22 Article six listed among causes for dismissal “offenses against the security, honor, interests of the employer or their family” as well as “dishonesty from the employee, [and] personal untidiness.”Footnote 23 Finally, article seven maintained that “the employee can consider themselves dismissed and with rights of compensation payment … when they receive maltreatment or abuse from their employer” or their relatives.Footnote 24 On repeated occasions these arguments justified workers’ claims, based on the framework of the cited articles from Decree-Law No. 326.
Accusations, however, were not limited to appeals to the text of the law, but often involved the construction of an image of the worker as a helpless woman who, having nothing more than her employment, had been obliged to endure abuse from her employers. In a complaint initiated in 1957, for example, one worker argued that her employer had violently forced her to vacate the room that she occupied in the house, and that she “had to take refuge at a friend's house” without being able to take her belongings “for fear of violence” from her former employer. In the same vein, she claimed that during the time she had worked for him, she was “the victim of numerous, proven, instances of excesses of violence, abuse and maltreatment.”Footnote 25 Similar plaintive descriptions of violent attitudes and ill-treatment undoubtedly called the personal character of the former employer into question. In a claim initiated in 1962, a worker alleged that her previous employer had a violent personality that had caused not only the breach of the working relationship, but also “separation of [from] the family home of [her] husband.”Footnote 26
These types of textual traces also appear in employer discourses. The correspondence between the narrative types constructed by workers and employers, as though they were mirror images, is significant. Beyond the communication between the “legal counsel” participants—lawyers, counselors and other legal workers—we can consider the home as a space in which knowledge and representations circulated about how relationships of domestic service should be like that, in the litigant's view, could have legal value.
In this sense, the employers (often women) also accused the workers of having maltreated them. In 1964, for example, the children of an employer claimed that “we found out through other landlords that Mama went out to ask for help because María Teresa [the employee] threatened her with a knife and it wasn't the first time that she had done it.”Footnote 27
In the employers’ discourses, this maltreatment was presented as particularly reprehensible, as they insisted that workers owed them gratitude for having hired them, saving them from a future of poverty and misery. In the same sense, the workers frequently pointed out that, in spite of poor working conditions, they remained in their jobs despite their own needs in order not to abandon employers and their families. In 1964, one worker initiated a complaint against the children of her former employer who by then had died. In presenting this case, the lawyer asserted that despite her former employer not having paid wages for more than three years, the worker “continued in her service because she couldn't bring herself to leave her, all the more so when she [the employer] found it impossible to even perform basic movements by herself, after she broke her arm leaving her paralyzed and unable to recover given her advanced age.”Footnote 28
Given the ambiguous affection pervading domestic service,Footnote 29 we find employers considered worker initiation of a claim before the TDW as an affront to this affective-labor relationship. Such emotive disappointment and anger are also perceptible in the claims of some workers. Thus, in a claim begun in 1960, a worker asserted that she had taken care of the daughter of her employers “to a point that she considered her a part of the family.”Footnote 30 To the same effect, that same year another worker asked for her previous employers to be “punished” for their lack of reciprocity related to the “selfless” behavior she had lavished on them:
… she served … with selflessness, loyalty, honesty, efficiency and dedication, when one day she fell sick and had to be hospitalized to receive medical attention, her bosses, for whom she always made every effort for, not only left her to fend for herself, but also demanded her savings be paid to another person who would replace her in the household duties … she kept on working in a state of sickness until all her physical strength was completely worn out; it ended by her employers dismissing her without warning or recognition … now, with all her extrajudicial resources exhausted, she turns to the courts so that the senior judges sanction those that deserve it …Footnote 31
As the previous excerpt reveals, workers presented the care and affection they gave to the employers’ family as justification for complaints before the TDW, beyond the legally defined rights. In a case initiated in 1966, a worker claimed for salaries, bonuses, and vacations corresponding to the duration of the labor relationship, arguing that her employer had never paid her in the five years that she had worked for her. In her defense, the employer called various witnesses who made no reference to the key issue of the complaint: the unpaid wages. Instead, they repeatedly testified to the employer's worth, explaining that she “was exclusively dedicated to her son's care and to her classes [the employer was a teacher], living a completely honest life.”Footnote 32 The worker countered that
When her [the employer's] little son was born, [her former employer] promised her a raise … so she would look after him like her own son, like a mother … She cared for the little child during the whole day and even some nights because the defendant went out … [In fact], the defendant was absent from home all day … including many nights … For this reason the little boy loved the worker more than his own mother.Footnote 33
Implied here was that the employer was a bad mother, with a dubious sexual morality—“who was out all day … including many nights”—in contrast to the worker, presented as a substitute devout and loving mother.Footnote 34 In her defense, the employer argued that because the worker had eczema on her arms and hands, she could not do many of the household chores, including taking care of the employer's son. Both the employer and the worker organized their strategies before the TDW as a competition over which one fulfilled best the role of mother and housewife.
This competition may be explained by the place that the figure of the housewife gained in the mid-twentieth century. Politicians, experts, and opinion makers gave a new relevance to this figure in the public realm, encouraging women—identified in their discourses as “responsible housewives”—to change their consumption habits.Footnote 35 Media, advertisements, and social reformers also encouraged working-class women to see themselves as housewives.Footnote 36 Catholic reformers, for example, referred to household workers as housewives to be, that is, poor young women waiting to get married and learning from their employers how to become good housewives.Footnote 37 In this regard, it is not surprising that household workers presented themselves in their lawsuits as better housewives and mothers than their former employers.
The case presented above also displays one response to the “maternalist” character of this labor relation.Footnote 38 The worker claimed that the employer did not pay her salary to prevent her from “falling in love with a ‘chinito’”—a pejorative expression used to refer to people from the provinces, both in racial and classist terms—“who could take all her money away.” The plaintiff also claimed that the employer had not given her vacations and that she did not even let her out on her day off because as an “inland provincial woman,” “she was going to be deceived” and “who knows what could happen to her.”Footnote 39
In this regard, the worker's demand also contested ethnic, class, and gender stereotypes. Significant geographic and social mobility characterized Argentinean society in the twentieth century. Mass migration from Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—concentrated in the littoral regions—was followed by internal migrations from the north to Buenos Aires and other cities, which intensified from the 1930s. In reaction, “middle-class” identity involved distinguishing oneself from workers whose standard of living would come closer to their own because of Peronist and subsequent policies that raised wages and lowered the price of consumer goods. In this opposition, the middle class identified itself as descended from white Europeans, but characterized the working class as cabecitas negras (literally “little black heads”), the descendants of internal migrants.Footnote 40
At stake in these uses of the law was the definition of justice and citizenship. Though the TDW was created during Aramburu's administration, it put into play ideas of justice shaped during Perón's administration. Peronism marked a change in the workers’ perception of law and the state, which became a space of their own, where “love and institutionalism constituted a plaster difficult to distinguish,”Footnote 41 and where social justice was weaved into an emotional fabric. As some analysts have observed, this perception would become intensified after the end of Perón's government.Footnote 42
The use of a personal language to support social justice was probably more compelling for female workers in the context of anti-Peronism that followed the 1955 coup d’état. Under Peronism, maternalist rhetoric justified the recognition of women's rights, such as voting.Footnote 43 Maternalism reinforced the language of familylike relationships that upheld the value of domestic work, including household workers. For instance, arguments for the Peronist bill to recognize household workers’ labor rights, which the National Congress discussed in 1955, deployed familial terms. During the debate to pass it, Delia Parodi, the Peronist congresswoman who submitted this bill to the Congress, argued that
[t]heir work [household workers’] is also cooperation because it does not give [the employer any] money, but it gives him life. … It is solidarity, in addition to work and cooperation. Solidarity that is neither paid nor purchased, but is provided and offered generously, because the feelings that the worker provides—feelings are always priceless—arise by empathy to the fellow man. The attentiveness provided in the care for the sick, children, or disabled; the understanding of someone else's family misfortune; the participation in the most intimate and confidant sphere of the home; all this is neither a task nor work: it is becoming family …Footnote 44
In the same vein, arguments for Decree Law 326 drew upon such language, emphasizing the need to preserve the “harmony,” “peacefulness,” and “intimate structure” of the domestic world:
Such legislation should, at the same time, ensure the maintenance of a spirit of mutual respect and harmony that combines the interests of employees and employers for the benefit of the employee, the full exercise of the rights of housewives and tranquility of the domestic life … consequently, the regime of the benefits to be agreed to that sector of the national work must carefully determine the duties and rights of each party, also containing the provisions necessary for the good order of domestic life to be preserved and respected in its intimate structure.Footnote 45
From the perspective of household workers, during the first years of the TDW, it made sense to appeal to a language of affection, associated with the private, even in the public realm, in order to support demands for labor justice.
Rationality, “Legal Reciprocity,” and Labor Rights: Workers’ Strategies in the 1970s and 1980s
Important changes in the domestic work sector occurred during the 1970s and 1980s that would lead to less intimacy. Chief among these was the growth in part-time work performed some days a week. By 1980, 77.62 percent of the Argentinean household workers worked under such a live-out system.Footnote 46 Most workers did not share as much time or space as others once did with their employers’ household and family. This was especially true for those workers who worked for different employers, an arrangement that was also becoming more common in Buenos Aires.
These changes had an impact on the dynamics of the lawsuits brought before the TDW. With the extension of the “live-out” system and temporary work, employers usually appealed by arguing that the plaintiff had worked for them less than sixteen hours a week, which excluded them from the protections of Decree-Law No. 326 and permitted rejection of complaints. Workers’ strategies before the TDW also shifted. To the testifying of witnesses—common to the previous period—workers added documentary evidence to show how the labor relation ended, entering telegrams of dismissal exchanged with former employers. Workers had presented such documents before, but they became a normal piece of evidence only in the 1970s.
There was a formulaic quality to these telegrams: workers usually claimed that their former employers had arbitrarily denied them the possibility to perform their work and, therefore, they considered themselves dismissed. The uniformity of the telegrams and the regularity with which workers presented them as evidence suggest more knowledge of the judicial process: workers’ strategies had become more legally informed, with greater participation on the part of lawyers in the process.
Additionally, and probably in relation to intensified intervention by lawyers in the tribunal process, a change in the dominant language of demands developed. Unlike employers, who continued to build their discourses using a language of affection, workers adopted a more impersonal tone, emphasizing the facts that characterized labor relations and the rights that issued from them rather than highlighting their affective bonds. Lawyers representing workers (both from the trade union and privately hired) sought to avoid casting disputes between employer and employee as being of a personal nature; otherwise there was a likelihood that a trial would drag on, delaying settlement. Although some cases were presented in a language of affection, in general terms, workers’ discursive strategies followed those precepts.
During testimony, unlike earlier years, lawyers designed questions to prove the “objective” elements of the employment relationship (working days and hours, stipulated wages, etc.), as seen in a lawsuit initiated in 1981, which read in part:
[Does he] swear under oath that it is true … [that] the plaintiff served under his orders in domestic service; [that] she performed tasks under his orders since 1 January 1958; [that] she used to work overtime; [that] the plaintiff became ill in June 1980; [that] she communicated that fact [to her former employer] …Footnote 47
Although the personal dimension never fully disappeared, remaining in the motivation to persist with a case, for example—the language used in claims transformed. A discourse tending toward standardization and categorization prevailed: if the affective dimension enabled reference to personal histories and anecdotes, the language of rights was more rigid and less permeable to idiosyncratic variations. Thus, complaints from the late 1970s expressed this trend:
During the time of the labor relation, the plaintiff complied effectively and permanently with her obligations derived from the work contract. However, the defendants did not do the same with those obligations they were responsible for; they did not pay her the supplementary annual salaries, holidays, or comply with the obligation to make pension contributions for her. Finally, in early January 1978, before the plaintiff's insistent claims asking them to pay her those items and the salary of December 1977, the defendant denied her [the possibility to] work.Footnote 48
During the long time the relation lasted, the plaintiff always fulfilled her tasks properly and showed loyalty to her employers; [however,] they did not [fulfill their obligations], [in fact, the employers] never paid the pension and social contributions required by law.Footnote 49
These excerpts display a recurring narrative. Workers’ claims were discursively anchored on their former employers’ lack of reciprocity, but reciprocity was now expressed in relation to obedience to the law: workers repeatedly insisted that, although they had fulfilled the legal obligations derived from the labor contract, their former employers had not. In the workers’ discourses, while labor rights emanated from the employment contract, the workers’ right to bring a lawsuit against their former employers originated in the lack of reciprocity on the part of employers in fulfilling that contract. As long as the employment contract supposed obligations for both parties, it made employers and workers equal parties before the law and judiciary bodies, at least in discursive terms.
The language of rationality gained relevance in a scenario in which labor rights underwent considerable advance. In a context of strong mobilization on the part of major trade unions, Congress passed the Employment Contract Law (ECL) in 1974, under Perón's third administration. The ECL established a minimum of labor rights for nearly all Argentinean workers who, until that date, had to rely on their union's ability to negotiate collective working agreements. The law granted minimum salary, social and health security, vacations, and other labor rights to virtually every worker.Footnote 50
The ECL represented an important social achievement for women workers. It prohibited labor market discrimination of any kind on the basis of gender. It also granted the right to ninety days of maternity leave to all female workers and stated that every establishment that employed more than fifty women had to provide daycare centers for their children.Footnote 51 These stipulations were part of a change in gender politics experienced in these decades, in which both international pressure to pass gender equality laws and different women's and feminist associations grew.Footnote 52
Nonetheless, household workers were excluded from ECL protections. Despite the universalism woven into the discourse of labor rights, household workers remained outside most of the protections granted to other workers. However, while in 1956 domestic service was almost unanimously considered a special activity that required a specific legal code, by the early 1970s some labor law advocates called for its inclusion in general labor regulations.Footnote 53 After the incorporation of domestic service into the pension system in 1956, for example, an article in Derecho del Trabajo—the most important Argentinean journal for labor law at the time—maintained that household workers’ rights were not supposed to be at the same level as those of other workers’: domestic service was not a “real profession” because only women performed it, and then only until they married.Footnote 54 Nearly two decades later, the same journal published an article that named as unjustifiable the rights deficit that household workers faced compared to other workers.Footnote 55 Though not the prevalent discourse regarding domestic service, the notion of work like any other work pervaded labor suits initiated before the TDW.
Despite the ECL's explicit exclusions, its passage changed the dynamics observed within the TDW. The annual number of lawsuits initiated before this tribunal nearly doubled after 1974. Between 1956 and 1973 the annual number of lawsuits surpassed the 500 mark only twice (684 in 1957 and 538 in 1968), but in 1974 the number of lawsuits reached 1079, and in 1975, they jumped to 1233. Moreover, equality before the law became a recurrent trope in workers’ discourses. Their cases contested legal exclusion, with much more involvement of labor lawyers.
Between 1976 and 1983, the years of dictatorship, lawsuits before the TDW returned to pre-1974 numbers and only began to grow again after 1982. The articulation of complaints, however, did not substantially change. Despite the profound transformations experienced in Argentinean society between 1979 and 1986, the years of the following two excerpts, both claims were written in the language of rationality, labor rights, and “legal reciprocity.” In 1979, one domestic worker confessed, “She always performed her duties with dedication and zeal on behalf of her employer, maintaining absolute loyalty and confidentiality; instead, the defendant never paid her pension and health contributions as required by law.”Footnote 56 In 1986, another charged, “Even though [the plaintiff] performed each and every one of her obligations, the defendant deliberately breached her legal obligations.”Footnote 57
Rationality and Affection in a Context of Labor Instability: Household Workers’ Strategies in the 1990s and 2000s
Toward the end of the century, the language of rationality and labor rights continued to predominate in the workers’ demands before the TDW, but this time during years of growing labor instability. Neoliberal policies threatened labor rights, and protected jobs in the industrial and the construction sectors decreased while precarious and unprotected jobs in the service and public sectors burgeoned.Footnote 58 In this context, a language of affection and familialism returned in TDW lawsuits initiated by workers. As observed in the previous period, the presentation of documentary evidence in the files for the TDW constituted an extended practice, aimed at the demonstration of the labor relation and the conditions in which this was developed. Evidence extended to other types of documents, which could include handwritten letters, lists of activities to be performed by the employee, notebooks, shopping lists, photos with their employers, and postcards sent from abroad.
This type of evidence allowed for the reintroduction of some elements belonging to personal narratives expressed in the language of familylike relationships. Photographs, letters, and postcards could be presented as evidence of the character of the employee, especially her honesty, her willingness to work, the affection that united her with her employers, the abuse that they had inflicted on her within this relationship, and her vulnerable situation. For example, in 1999 a worker provided as evidence a series of short notes (cut-out pages, invitations, cards) in which the employers made different requests and recommendations related to the duties to be carried out. In one of these notes the worker was requested to “wait until the end of the month” for her wages and a reference was made to a problem that one of her employers was having at their own workplace. The worker presented these notes as evidence not only of the existence of the labor relation but also of her good will and disposition to work even without receiving her salary on time and in an appropriate manner. In cases in which the labor relation had lasted for several years and implied a more intimate bond, the presentation of this type of material impeded the resolution of the conflict. Employers often countered by portraying the removal of documents from their home and their presentation before a tribunal as a personal offense that threatened both their privacy and their public image.
For example, in 2005 a case, a worker demanded adequate wages and pension contributions for a labor relation of more than twenty-eight years. Her lawyer underscored that she always undertook other duties connected to the family business that the employers ran from their home in addition to the tasks expected of her as a household worker, without receiving any remuneration in return. To prove both issues, the claim included a great quantity of documents, including various instructions from the employers to the worker that could be read as showing the type of duties that the worker carried out. The employers hardened their position, meaning that it was not possible to reach an agreement. Even after the tribunal ruled in favor of the worker, the employers appealed, extending the lawsuit by more than nine years. In response to the presentation of these documents, the employers started to question not merely the facts as described by the worker, but also her personal qualities. In their response to the complaint, the employers presented an official document from the police of the province of Buenos Aires. In it reference was made to a report from the employers against the worker about dollars and jewelry missing from their home, which they presumed to have been stolen. They deployed this document to explain the lack of trust that afterward had characterized their relationship with the worker, calling her honesty into question.
In another submission, the worker's lawyer incorporated two photographs into the file in which she appeared next to the children of her former employers. These items responded to the accusations against the honesty of the worker, highlighting the trust that the employers had in her, seen through her participation in various familial events, as well as her handling of money for the payment of different services.
The appeal to a language of affection and familylike relationships was more evident in cases that reveal some of the peculiarities of the domestic service in this period, in which care work replaced cleaning and home maintenance as the major requirement of domestic workers. The growth of the participation of women from middle-income sectors in the labor market generated a new demand for domestic service, especially for childcare and care of the elderly in the hours in which employer women would be absent from the home. Additionally, as a result of growing life expectancy and the absence of subsidies for old people, care of the elderly increased markedly, in particular in the city of Buenos Aires and other urban centers.
The centrality of care in the domestic service relationship comes through in the statements of employers before the TDW. On numerous occasions, as a response to the workers’ complaints about unfair dismissals, the employers alleged that the working relationship had been terminated due to the incompetence of the workers related to cleaning, and they argued that if they had kept them in service, it was for the care they gave to the children and the elderly relatives, which they could not do without.
This centrality also appeared in workers’ complaints, particularly in trials started by elder caregivers who were left without employment when the aged person died.
An inquiry started in 1998 by a worker who tended to an elderly couple for more than seven years illustrates this dynamic. Written in the voice of the employee, the lawyer's brief asserted,
They have given me many things; I had a wonderful relationship with the grandparents. First the old man died, and then the problems started because the children, who had never showed up before, started to demand things of me and accuse me of causing problems that had never existed before.
The worker, who called her employers “the grandparents,” said that she had loved them “like her own family, [and that] she was like a daughter” to them. This situation had changed after the death of one of the old couple. From that moment, a child of the couple “began to demand tasks which hadn't been agreed upon and to abuse the trust and unconditional love” that the worker had for the old woman she looked after, who couldn't defend her from her son because of her serious health and senility problems. The worker's lawyer described “maltreatment” and “humiliation” in the complaint, which the plaintiff started to experience from the children of the old woman. She maintained that the handing over of invoices for all the purchases she made, the repeated telephone calls (up to five times a day), and the “constant visits” by different relatives of the old woman had made the employee's life unbearable. However, the lawyer alleged that, owing both to the scarcity of jobs and the affection that bound her to the old woman, the complainant had decided to continue working.
In the judicial proceedings, initiated after the old woman died, the lawyer emphasized how difficult it was for the worker to decide to proceed with legal action against people who “had helped her so much in her life.” In addition, the old woman herself had said to the worker that her “children only wanted to keep her and her husband's house, that they had never kept her company like the worker had and that therefore she [the worker] should defend herself.” In these types of cases, the relationship of the workers with families of the employers provoked a high degree of tension, since in many cases the family only indirectly knew the person who cared for their parents. In this sense, the accusation of indolence and ignorance of the situation made agreement between both sides difficult.
These types of considerations gained more ground in light of changes to the world of work during the 1990s, characterized by a marked increase in unemployment, serious precarity and a deterioration of labor rights. The value of real wages had reached its peak in the 1970s, but during the 1990s returned to the levels of the mid-twentieth century. Explaining this decline was the growth of precarious employment to the detriment of protected work. In the case of women, such employment concentrated in domestic service.Footnote 59 This context was also characterized by a displacement of labor unions from their centrality in Argentinean political life, and the growth of various social movements structured around demands related to recognition and difference.Footnote 60
In this situation, the language of affection and family could support claims that arguments based on rationality and labor rights connected to commodified working relations could not guarantee. Thus some domestic workers tried to prove the intensity of affective bonds that had tied them to their former employers, contrasting their familial relationship to the limits of those bonds between the beneficiaries of their care and actual relatives. The workers sought to oppose the coldness of those who should have behaved with affection, with warmth like their own. In a scenario in which labor rights were profoundly questioned, household workers could see the language of personal relations as a better way to support their rights.
Final Thoughts
As Viviana Zelizer has shown, intimacy and economy are not opposite spheres in social life.Footnote 61 In the case of domestic service, where labor and family relations are not entirely discernible, they are, in fact, particularly intertwined. In this article we analyzed workers’ discursive strategies before the TDW, which show perpetual shifting articulation over time between a language of rationality and labor rights and a language of affection and familiar relationships.
While rooted in the peculiarities of domestic service, the conflicts initiated before this Tribunal speak of broader processes in Argentinean society. Specific articulations of a language of affection and family-like relationships and a language of rationality and labor rights were connected to the particular contexts in which they took place, both regarding changes in domestic service and, more generally, in the world of work, but they ultimately depended on the distinctive features of each case brought to court. These articulations also speak of particular ways in which household workers related to their—mostly-female employers, showing that gender relations had a key place in the ways labor inequalities were structured and experienced by one of the largest group of workers in the Argentinean labor market.
Although in Latin America it is possible to find different experiences of strong household workers’ unions, this is not the case of Argentina.Footnote 62 Household workers have unionized since the early twentieth century, and today there are more than twenty household workers unions recognized by the National Ministry of Labor, two of which have a history of more than half a century. Some analysts have even pointed out that at least one of the unions was strong by the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 63 Still, the unions’ relevance in the improvement of domestic service labor conditions has been rather limited. Recent reforms in legislation and policies aimed at formalizing domestic employment, for example, have emerged from the top down, with little pressure from the unions.Footnote 64
As in other places, scholars have noted that the isolation experienced in their workplace and the social depreciation of their work are among the most important difficulties household workers have found in developing strong unions.Footnote 65 Neither their isolation, however, nor the social depreciation of their work, prevented them from articulating practices of resistance. Household workers’ uses of the law reveal their agency within a context of intense inequality. Despite their isolation, their uses of the law show the circulation of knowledge among workers—through the union, though not exclusively—and also, as we have seen, between workers and employers. Moreover, confronting the social depreciation of their work, we have seen that workers appealed to different discourses, depending on the context, to show its value both to the Tribunal authorities and to their former employers.
Although the law established restrictions on the rights of household workers, it also enabled them to appeal to state institutions for what they considered fair. Indeed, as we have seen, workers’ claims often exceeded the provisions of the letter of the law. Furthermore, in many cases, workers bringing a lawsuit not only sought financial compensation but also a repair in symbolic terms. This type of resistance did not lead to a change in legislation or the working conditions of the majority of household workers. The possibility of collective agreements—such as foreseen in the Peronist bill that was ultimately not passed—would have had a broader impact on household workers’ collective action. Nevertheless, the resistance shown in the lawsuits brought before the TDW changed the perceptions of domestic service relations and introduced a horizon of state mediation between employers and workers, thus positioning this relationship more clearly in the public sphere.
