“Domestic Workers of the World Unite!” (cover) proclaims the poster marking the October 2013 founding congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, of a new global labor federation and the first one dominated by women: the International Domestic Workers Federation. Since the 1980s, associations of domestic (also called household) workers in the Americas and Asia, joined by regional groups in Africa and migrant organizations in Europe, have demanded recognition to gain rights like all other workers, even if their workplaces are private dwellings rather than factories, farms, stores, or offices. The increase in numbers of countries extending such national labor standards and the success of Convention #189, “Decent Work for Domestic Workers” at the International Labor Organization (ILO) projected household workers onto the world stage as never before. As labor movements go, so does scholarship.

Research on household employment itself, however, has a long history, going back a century. Some of the early literature responded to “the servant problem” while other reports belonged to social surveys of urban populations.Footnote ¹ During the last four decades, historians have found in paid household work, once referred to as “domestic service,” a topic to explore race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and class. Associated with the forced labor of slaves and colonized subjects as well as the unpaid labor of wives and daughters, household work has heightened the contradictions behind the idea of free labor when servility and dependency appear as central components of the job, especially in the minds of employers. Its presence signals inequality between women, the proverbial mistress and maid, as well as between men and women, households, and nations. Numerous fine studies have uncovered the social histories of specific groups. For US history alone, we have books on Yankee rural “help,” African Americans in post-emancipation Atlanta and in Northern cities during both the first and second “Great Migrations,” Japanese immigrants in California, Irish in the Northeast, Native Americans in boarding schools, and Mexicans in the Southwest.Footnote ² As Italian historian Raffaella Sarti has documented, scholarship on Europe, its colonies, and the global South is expansive, ranging from the medieval period to the present. These works address the modernization of service in Britain and France, Victorian sexualities, Latin American patterns of migration, male servants throughout colonial Africa, and Mui Tsai (a bondage system in which poor families placed daughters) and other arrangements in Asia.Footnote ³

While considering the relationships between mistresses and maids, employers and workers, some research further connects social conditions to social policy.Footnote ⁴ In doing so, these authors join pioneering investigations of a century ago. Particularly notable are Erna Magnus's 1934 survey of the status of domestic workers worldwide, which recommended to the ILO the extension of social protections and the right to organize to such workers, and Esther Cooper's 1940 thesis, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism,” which viewed black domestic workers in the United States as the vanguard of the working class.Footnote ⁵

Feminist scholars across the disciplines particularly have explored household labor in a transnational context and we have focused on work performed in the home, under theories of social reproduction, to probe the centrality of the intimate labors of cooking, cleaning, and caring to the larger political economy and structures of power and authority globally as well as within nation states. How societies organize the provision of housework, care work, sex work, socialization, and training—integral components of reproductive labor—has major ramifications for the extraction of labor power within households and between the sexes, classes, and racial/ethnic groups.Footnote ⁶ Though daughters and sometimes mothers long have migrated from rural to urban within nations and from one country and region to another, finding employment as servants and household workers, the global supply chain of the late twentieth century represents a particularly acute transference of reproductive labor that has generated policy reports as well as a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship.Footnote ⁷ Most of this scholarship, however, discusses the last few decades.

When it comes to labor history, one of the oldest forms of work known to humankind, household labor has an ambiguous place. Our aim in this special issue is less with unpaid family labor than with household work as an occupation—that is, as a form of commodified labor—though contributors Laura Schwartz and Henrique Espada Lima reveal the entwining of the unpaid with the paid. We bring together a range of articles that examine the ways in which household workers have organized, resisted, and engaged in labor actions in specific times and places.

Despite the scholarship on paid domestic labor, including attention to patterns of resistance among household workers, notions of industrial production and collective workspaces still guide many of the frameworks of labor resistance. Schwartz underscores the legacy of earlier understandings: in her case, how Edwardian suffragists who employed servants dismissed household work as work like any other, judging it inferior to professions dominated by men, though the women they hired sought recognition as workers on the basis of deployed skills. Unions, reformers, policy makers, and others have assumed that household workers are difficult or impossible to organize because of the home location, scattered worksites often isolated from other workers, and the proximity of workers to their employers. Presumably such workers—some who have depended on their jobs for housing, most who were low-waged and could not afford to be out of work, and many who needed recommendations from current employers for future work—have wielded little power in relation to their employers. Despite the robust presence of associations of domestic workers in the United States under the Household Technicians of America in the early 1970s, for example, the AFL-CIO could not imagine adapting “organizing, collective bargaining and grievance machinery … to a situation where workers have several different employers in the course of a week.”Footnote ⁸ These considerations have kept household labor on the margins of how scholars conceptualize and theorize labor resistance as well as made them marginal to much trade union organizing—until the recent interest in the informal sector by labor federations like the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) and country-specific bodies, like Uruguay's Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores—Convención Nacional de Trabajadores (PIT-CNT).

The articles in this issue illustrate the various ways in which household workers could organize and resist—often under very difficult conditions. In some cases they utilized what James Scott called the weapons of the weak: they quit, malingered, and appropriated household items, including the labor of enslaved persons they were trusted to supervise as Espada Lima discovered for nineteenth-century Brazil. In other cases, they organized strikes and engaged in mass action. They went to court and filed complaints before administrative bodies. Collectively these articles challenge assumptions about household workers’ complacency or disempowerment. At the same time, because this volume draws on examples of domestic worker organizing from various time periods and different parts of the world, historical context, contingency, and temporality are important in thinking about how, when, and why household workers resist, as they are with all worker actions. Such recognition tempers an overreliance on worker agency as the driving force behind labor history without discounting individual and collective steps taken.

The moments that create possibilities for resistance are multiple. They include the transition from slavery to free labor in nineteenth-century Brazil, a militant women's movement and labor unrest in Britain in the period before World War One, the crisis of the Great Depression in the United States, the post-World War Two migration of Puerto Ricans to Chicago and New York, labor unrest on Australian outback pastoral lands, the anticolonial struggle in Tanzania after World War Two, and legacies of Peronism in Argentina.

Some of the most dramatic struggles occurred when household workers organized strikes, as they did in Australia in the late 1940s, where household workers joined a general walkout, and in Tanganyika in the 1950s, where male household workers formed a union. In other cases household workers utilized whatever legal avenues were open to them, such as state-sanctioned tribunals in Argentina, the labor standards making process during the New Deal in the United States, and the oversight offered migrants by the Puerto Rican Employment and Identification Bureau. Many of the case studies here illustrate how household workers relied on the notion of rights and the law to seek compensation or improve the circumstances of their work. In the United States, as Keona K. Ervin illustrates, African American household workers developed their own notion of rights because of their exclusion from labor law. But, as Inés Pérez and Santiago Canevaro trace over the last half of the twentieth century for Argentina, they also deployed language of affect when appeals to the special relationship between worker and employer would win redress.

The multiple ways that household workers organized illustrates the importance of location, denoting the presence of spatial politics that took institutional and geographic forms. As work that occurred in the home, domestic work actually was notoriously hard to organize. So, state institutions, community organizations, and public places became venues for organizing. In Britain, the Domestic Workers Union was part of the larger women's labor federation; the feminist press was crucial not only in raising the consciousness of domestic workers, but in spreading their message. In the United States, African American domestic workers in response to exclusionary federal policy turned to the resources of a community organization, the Urban League, transforming it into a worker organization and carving out a space for African American women in the predominantly white male labor movement. Puerto Rican workers received assistance from the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), as in Chicago, to create spaces of support to resist employer authority. In Australia, as Victoria Haskins and Anne Scrimgeour explain, the particular kind of organization of labor in the station centers enabled collective activism, as did the congregating facilitated by both segregated living arrangements in Aboriginal camps and, during the strike, expulsion of protesting workers from towns to strike camps. The development of a cooperative mining venture as an alternative place for labor allowed strikers to leave pastoral work and the direct control of white setter colonialists.

Gender is an overarching theme that runs through all of these essays. In most cases paid domestic work was devalued because it was closely associated with women's unpaid household labor. It was also performed largely by women, which led to its further devaluation. The question of the value of domestic work was hotly debated among feminists in Britain in the early twentieth century, as Schwartz argues. But the case of Tanganyika illustrates the historical contingency of domestic work as feminized labor. There, as Robyn Pariser documents, men predominantly performed work that initially required specialization and training and was thought of as highly skilled. The prestige of the job, enhanced through access to modern culture and objects, and high wages allowed a man to fulfill his masculine duties in the community as well as in the family. After World War Two, when the work became reorganized and deskilled, it then appeared as emasculating. Unionization thus functioned not only as a vehicle to advocate for enhanced wages and better working conditions, but also to protect male honor and communal authority. Men's protest occurred during a transitional moment, for only a few decades later women increasingly would populate an occupation characterized by low wages and lack of prestige. This essay powerfully illustrates how the value attached to work and the gender of workers can shift over time.

Household labor in these essays and now remains deeply intimate work, which often involves being present in someone's private space, gaining knowledge of their daily lives, and caring for and feeding them. Questions of affect often become important. In the case of Argentina at different historical moments, intimacy became a way to make a claim for compensation from employers. The ways in which intimacy and household labor mesh is also clear in the essay by Espada Lima, who explores the few available Brazilian legal cases in which the central question was whether long-term caregivers were servants or concubines. His essay illustrates the fine line separating paid and unpaid household labor and the difficulties of distinguishing the two. Indeed the very same work would be unpaid if performed under an umbrella of intimacy, involving agreed-upon sexual relations, but would be paid if performed outside the boundaries of affection. The women who sued rejected the intimate nature of their relationship and claimed a status of servants to demand compensation for work performed. Edwardian unionists found themselves in a similar double bind: They argued that household work was professional like any other but also maintained its distinctiveness in asserting the exploitation that occurred behind the home's closed doors.

Race, social status, and ethnicity are significant in nearly all the essays here. In Tanganyika male household workers struggled against their mostly European, Arab, and Asian employers, which fused their struggle to the anticolonial movement. In Australia, Aborigines served as the household workers for colonists. In the United States, African Americans, as Ervin illustrates, and Puerto Ricans, as Emma Amador shows, were both influenced by their racialized status and employers’ expectations for nonwhite labor. But Puerto Ricans’ outsider status also worked to their benefit: They were able to turn to the Puerto Rican government as a source of protection when they learned that labor rights in the United States did not apply to the occupation of household work. Ironically, their status as US citizens offered them little protection, but their position as colonial subjects seemed to offer a strategic avenue. Likewise in Australia, striking domestic workers, who labored for white colonizers, were tied to both the labor movement and Aboriginal rights’ activism. In Argentina, another settler society, employers constructed themselves as white Europeans and their workers, who were largely internal migrants, as black.

Finally, these articles together put to rest the complaint that historians lack sources to study household workers and their forms of resistance. To be sure, legal sources often reflect the language of lawyers rather than the voices of workers, or to put it more precisely, the form that argument takes represents a strategic decision of what will appeal to judges and juries and bring a favorable outcome. Yet these documents offer a window into aspirations and emotions as well as daily routines and exceptional actions, as both Espada Lima and Pérez and Canevaro explain. As deployed by Haskins and Scrimgeour, oral histories, another form of testimony, bring forth much hidden in written records, despite being the product of memory. Amador reuses ethnography for a similar purpose. Archival collections, organizational records, photographs, government documents, and newspapers—the usual sources for writing about the last two centuries—yield much about domestic workers and their worlds once historians ask the appropriate questions.

We conclude with two reports from the field that recount more recent labor struggles—Harmony Goldberg's overview of the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance in the United States and Jennifer Fish's piece on the organizing before and after the ILO convention on domestic labor. These two commentaries bring us up to date on the contemporary struggle for labor rights and the ways in which household workers have been able to build alliances across geographical spaces—a goal reflected in the cover image of the issue that was shared with us courtesy of the International Domestic Workers Federation.

The withdrawal of the labor of Aboriginal women during the Pilbara strike illuminated what today's domestic worker activists assert: Their labor makes everyday life happen and all other work possible. Connected to wider working-class, ethnic, and/or local communities, domestic workers then as now were only isolated in the limited vision of their employers and state agencies. They drew upon collective identities and shared spaces to display solidarity and gain support from other workers and allies who understood that exploitation had no place at home.