Pedagogies of awareness and subterfuge: The interpretive labor of domestic worker organizing in Buenos Aires

Abstract

In 2013, Argentina passed Law 26844, transforming domestic workers' status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. Since then, domestic workers' legal equality has stood against the intersectional inequalities they still endure vis-à-vis their employers and that challenge advancement to their labor rights. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Buenos Aires between 2016 and 2018 with domestic workers' rights advocates, this article investigates how they contend with these challenges. It examines the interpretive labor they engage in as they encourage workers to undertake situated strategies to advance their labor rights. These strategies consist of increasing workers' knowledge of their rights while, simultaneously, encouraging them to execute dissembling practices to claim and access them. These dissembling practices allow workers to perform the appropriate behaviors according to intersecting master categories of social differentiation in a context of systemic intersectional inequality. Concurrently, they enable workers to avoid direct confrontation with their employers, thus helping them to enforce their rights without jeopardizing their means of subsistence. Through these pedagogies of awareness and subterfuge, advocates create a space in which the law can be effected, promoting workers' agency without compromising their livelihoods.