Between hostile worlds and connected lives : Navigating contentions in domestic worker organizing

Scholarship on labour organizing in paid domestic work has shown that activists foster collective action by challenging the invisibility of domestic workers in labour policy and by centring legal recognition as a key strategy for mobilizations. Drawing from 20 months of ethnographic research in Los Angeles, I engage with this long-term goal of worker organizations to establish domestic work as a ‘service sector’ by juxtaposing it with worker narratives of their relationships and negotiations at the workplace. Bridging scholarship on devaluation and movement building in commodified domestic work with discussions on intimacy-economy nexus, this paper argues that contrary to a singular organizational narrative of distance and formalization, domestic worker organizing tackles increasing commodification and devaluation through two, often contradictory, fields of activism – first, organizational advocacy targeting formalization as well as legal recognition and second, organizational and worker narratives rooted in morality, loyalty and empathy to negotiate everyday work conditions. This paper draws on Viviana Zelizer’s discussion on hostile worlds versus connected lives in economic exchanges to highlight how the embeddedness of social relations in intimate labours like domestic work complicates collective action strategies and challenges global templates on labour standards, making the goal of professionalizing a contentious enterprise.