Paid to Care: Domestic Workers in Contemporary Latin American Culture, Rachel Randall, 2023, University of Texas Press
In Marxist analysis of class struggle, one historically vast category of workers was traditionally either purposefully overlooked or dismissed as irrelevant.
That is despite the fact that domestic servants were, at the time Marx was writing in the mid-19th century, the largest group of all waged workers. Indeed, paid domestic service comprised the main category of women’s labour in northern Europe until the middle of the 20th century.
Yet to Marx—himself a patron with his own German housekeeper, Helene Demuth, who upon her employer’s death promptly went to work for his lifelong friend, Friedrich Engels—domestic servitude could only be explained by what it was not.
And servants were not members of the working class, because their labour power did not produce surplus value and could not be quantified in terms of a wage in the same way as a producer of commodities.
To Marx and Engels, paid domestics merely served bourgeois demands for luxurious lifestyles. A worker’s wage, they argued, covers the labour time necessary to sustain that worker so that he (or she) would return to a job every day—but also covers the need for reproduction of the workforce, that is, for workers to maintain families and hence replicate the working class.
While this has been challenged by feminist analysis, for example by thinkers such as Silvia Federici who is a prominent advocateof wages for housewives, many Marxists continue to state the theoretical mantra that so-called “reproductive labour” is by definition already paid for in the wage earned by the worker as the return on labour power.
Rachel Randall’s book about cultural representations of paid domestic workers in Latin America can be seen as a valuable contribution to this complex debate, by drawing attention to an equally uncomfortable theme for materialist analysis—human emotion.
The author introduces an extra factor to the cost–benefit breakdown by which Marxists might estimate the true value of a maid’s labour in the otherwise harsh calculus by which they have traditionally dismissed this form of work.
She examines the (incalculable) price paid by a domestic worker locked into relationships of intimacy and indebtedness in terms of their own emotions and ability to create their own families.
She does so through an examination of the emotional dimension of Latin American paid domestics explored in literature and on screen, a genre we are all familiar with and perhaps given a profile like none other in recent years by films such as Roma.
This lauded 2018 Mexican movie by director Alfonso Cuarón about a Mixtec live-in maid in a posh household vied for critical attention with Parasite, a Korean hit that ultimately became the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020.
If we are to subscribe to Gramscian analysis, this sudden fascination for the emotional travails of domestic staff reflected in such movies might be considered to echo the dynamics of cultural hegemony in an era of growing inequality.
Nonetheless, as Randall notes, the domestic servant has long exerted a fascination in the culture of capitalism and hence paid domestic workers in Latin America abound in cultural products such as television, film, and literature.
Yet despite extensive artistic representations of paid domestic workers in Latin American cultural production, this resource has been somewhat neglected as a focus of study. At the same time, ethnographic studies of paid domestic labour have burgeoned.
Paid domestics, nevertheless, are a very valuable focus, because their condition is often structurally similar wherever they are, lending itself naturally to the study of class and inequality in capitalist societies.
And a key aspect of their production is immaterial, as we have noted, confounding sociological efforts to position this large sector in mainstream analysis. What Randall terms “affective” or emotional labour makes paid domestic and care relationships particularly difficult to regulate and account for in economic terms.
The author writes: “On the one hand, close, personal ties between employer-families and domestic workers underlie the senses of intimacy and indebtedness that have motivated the moving filmic portrayals produced by so many of the directors whose works are analysed here.
“On the other hand, the works discussed also painfully attest to the negative impacts that these labour relationships have had on so many domestic workers’ own personal lives by circumscribing their freedom in ways that have limited their ability to form autonomous romantic relationships or families of their own.”
Many of the works she examines evoke this emotional paradox through their portrayals of the relationships between domestics and, in particular, their employers’ children. Randall argues that “the difficulty of accounting for the affective (or immaterial) products of paid domestic work culminates in depictions of spectral or ghostly paid domestic employees”.
She writes: “They evoke the ways in which domestic work (and reproductive labour, more broadly) haunts the capitalist economic models that have never properly accounted for it while also alluding to the ways in which paid domestic labour relationships in Latin America are shaped by the legacy of colonialism and slavery.”
In doing so, however, she provides a valuable context by which Marxists might reconsider how they position paid domestics in the productive landscape.
While noting that care work within both classical and Marxist economic theory is viewed as “non-productive”—it has “use-value” but not “exchange-value”, and its product is not destined to be sold as a commodity on the market—in reality, Randall argues that this is unrealistic.
Both paid and unpaid domestic work undoubtedly produce surplus value and save society costs in the reproduction of both the current and future workforce, she argues.
The remittances sent home by migrant domestic workers help to sustain entire societies, adding value through investments in housing and education.
And the labour of paid domestic and childcare workers enables the entry of other women into the workforce by freeing them of tasks that would otherwise maintain their exclusion.
One consequence of this failure to position domestics in the landscape of wage slavery by which the left and trade unions have always understood the composition of the working class has been the difficulty such workers have faced in winning the legal protections that others enjoy.
Randall’s book—while offering the reader a comprehensive overview of how maids are considered in cultural production—also provides readers with a useful introduction to the labour rights that domestics have only in recent years begun to enjoy across Latin America.
The author surveys the progress—often limited—they have gained over time in securing legal protections, but also the remarkable experiences of domestic workers involved in processes of unionisation—not something traditional (male) Marxists might be inclined to celebrate.
It is critically important to recognise the positive role played in this story by cultural production—but also cultural producers themselves—by changing the narrative.
Cuarón, for example, mobilised interest generated by Roma to champion the cause of paid domestic workers in Mexico and in 2019, not long after the film’s release, the country’s Social Security Institute (IMSS) launched a programme to incorporate them into the social security system, giving them among other things access to healthcare.
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Categories: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, North America, South America