Like Any Other Job?

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the challenges that organizers of domestic workers in Ecuador face. Its discussion of domestic worker organizing touches on the three major themes of this book: social reproduction, informal arrangements that render domestic work invisible, and class relations that degrade and dehumanize workers. Workers' engagement in long hours of paid and unpaid social reproduction makes them difficult to reach and organize. Informal arrangements, and lack of political will and political effectiveness to change these arrangements, combine to make the enforcement of existing laws difficult. Moreover, relationships with the left-leaning state, embedded in traditional assumptions about who constitutes the working class—assumptions that leave out women and informal workers—have been fraught. The chapter then shows how domestic workers and their advocates have been organizing, what strategies they have used to demand the rights of these workers, and what the implications of these strategies are for political action and change.