New Labor Rights and New Work Arrangements

Download or read book New Labor Rights and New Work Arrangements written by Caitlin M. Alcorn and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2013, after decades of organizing, domestic workers’ unions in Brazil won an historic achievement: the extension of labor rights to the country’s more than six million domestic workers. This dissertation picks up where that moment left off by interrogating how the enactment of labor rights by domestic workers plays out after the legislation moves from the houses of Congress to the millions of homes across the country where domestic workers labor. Far from the straightforward legal advancement it was framed to be, the law has instead set off a renegotiation of employment relations and working conditions within the domestic service sector. This renegotiation, as argued throughout this dissertation, is ultimately structured by and through conflicts over social reproduction. This dissertation draws largely on interviews with domestic workers, domestic employers, and union representatives in the city of São Paulo, as well as analyses of mainstream news media articles, domestic employment job postings, and government data sets. It seeks to untangle the unexpected ways the law is navigated by workers and employers and how the sector, so fundamental to Brazilian society and everyday life, shifts and adapts along the way. It takes up the theme of elite resistance along with literature on citizenship, relational class identity formation, and histories of racialized servitude to understand the causes and consequences of employers’ resistance to the changes brought about through the enactment of labor rights by domestic workers. This study then turns to the rise of day work arrangements in the sector and the growing class of domestic workers who remain excluded from the new labor protections. It explores workers’ motivations for entering into such labor arrangements and the ways that their continued legal exclusion serves to uphold the country’s broader regime of stratified reproduction and privatized care. Finally, this dissertation draws on theorizations of labor agency to uncover ways that workers make use of new state-granted rights while continuing to engage in longstanding informal strategies to control working conditions. In trying to reach beyond the individual versus collective binary, this dissertation emphasizes how such strategies are at once individually deployed and rooted in informal collective networks of workers.