In Search of the Ideal Worker

Abstract

This chapter discusses the image of the ideal domestic worker, looking at the point of view of potential employers and domestic employment agencies acting as intermediaries. The ideal worker and the ideal domestic employment arrangement, as communicated by the “help wanted” ads, illustrate all three of this book's main themes: social reproduction, informality, and class relations. Paid domestic work, like other forms of social reproduction, invokes stereotypes about gender roles and involves tasks and qualities that connote femininity. Gendered assumptions about social reproduction are thus embedded in the ads, which nearly always label the desired domestic worker as a woman. Work arrangements are usually informal and escape regulation by labor law. The class relations of contemporary domestic employment are also sometimes visible in the text of the help wanted ads. Some ads refer explicitly to the high status of the employers' family and some indicate status indirectly, for example, mentioning where the family resides—almost always in upper-class or middle-class neighborhoods of Guayaquil, including exclusive gated communities. The class relations of domestic employment, rooted in precapitalist and colonial socioeconomic structures, also appear in references to trato (treatment) of the worker by employers. When employers emphasize trato, personal treatment, rather than pay and benefits, they hearken back to patronage relationships based on personal connections rather than labor laws. Even today, emotion, care, respect, and honor loom large in domestic employment.