Read The Blackwell Companion to Sociology Online
Authors: Judith R Blau
product might shape policies that may ultimately benefit people like themselves.
As I read a formatted statement to research participants, I placed little conviction in those words, and I believe that the study participants interpreted those words as empty promises as well. People engaged in the research less in expectation that by doing so they would help to formulate more just immigration policies but
more, I believe, in the expectation that their research relationship with me could be a non-threatening and even a personally beneficial, advantageous one. Rarely
did subjects or others in the community inquire about the potential benefits that they might derive from the finished research product.
Research Findings
In various social settings ± at picnics, at baby showers, at parish legalization clinic, and in people's homes ± I observed immigrant women engaged in lively
conversation about paid domestic work. Women traded cleaning tips; tactics
about how best to negotiate pay, how to geographically arrange jobs so as to
minimize daily travel, how to interact (or more often avoid interaction) with
clients, and how to leave undesirable jobs; remedies for physical ailments caused by the work; and cleaning strategies to lessen these ailments. The women were
quick to voice disapproval of one another's strategies and to eagerly recommend
alternatives.
The ongoing activities and interactions among the undocumented Mexican
immigrant women led me to develop the organizing concept of ``domestics'
networks,'' immigrant women's social ties among family, friends, and acquaint-
ances that intersect with housecleaning employment. These social networks
are based on kinship, friendship, ethnicity, place of origin, and current residential locale, and they function on the basis of reciprocity, as there is an implicit obligation to repay favors of advice, information, and job contacts. In some
cases these exchanges are monetized, as when women sell ``jobs'' (i.e. leads for customers or clients) for a fee. Information shared and transmitted through
the informal social networks was critical to domestic workers' abilities to
improve their jobs. These informational resources transformed the occupation
from one single employee dealing with a single employer to one in which
employees were informed by the collective experience of other domestic
workers.
The Job Search and Contracting
Although the domestics' networks played an important role in informally regu-
lating the occupation, jobs were most often located through employers' informal
networks. Employers typically recommended a particular housecleaner among
friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Although immigrant women helped one
another to sustain domestic employment, they were not always forthcoming
with job referrals precisely because of the scarcity of well paid domestic jobs.
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Competition for a scarce number of jobs prevented the women from sharing job
leads among themselves, but often male kin who worked as gardeners or as horse
stable hands provided initial connections. Many undocumented immigrant
women were constantly searching for more housecleaning jobs and for jobs
with better working conditions and pay.
Since securing that first job is difficult, many newly arrived immigrant women
first find themselves subcontracting their services to other more experienced and well established immigrant women who have steady customers. This provides an
important apprenticeship and a potential springboard to independent contract-
ing (Romero, 1987). Subcontracting arrangements can be beneficial to both
parties, but the relationship is not characterized by altruism or harmony of
interests. In this study, immigrant women domestics who took on a helper did
so in order to lighten their own workload and sometimes to accommodate newly
arrived kin.
For the new apprentice, the arrangement minimizes the difficulty of finding
employment and securing transportation, facilitates learning expected tasks and
cleansers, and serves as an important training ground for interaction with
employers. Employee strategies were learned in the new social context.
Women sometimes offered protective advice, such as not to work too fast or
be overly concerned with all crevices and hidden corners when first taking on a
new job.
A subcontracted arrangement is informative and convenient for an immigrant
woman who lacks her own transportation or possesses minimal English-lan-
guage skills, but it also has the potential to be a very oppressive labor relationship. The pay is much lower than what a woman might earn on her own. In some
instances, the subcontracted domestics may not be paid at all. These asymmet-
rical partnerships between domestic workers continue for relatively long periods of time. Although subcontracting arrangements may help domestics to secure
employment with multiple employers, the relationship established between the
experienced, senior domestic and the newcomer apprentice is often a very
exploitable one for the apprentice.
The Pay
Undocumented immigrant women in this study averaged $35±50 for a full day of
domestic work performed on a job basis, although some earned less and others
double that amount. What determines the pay scale for housecleaning work?
There are no government regulations, corporate guidelines, management policy,
or union to set wages. Instead, the pay for housecleaning work is generally
informally negotiated between two women, the domestic and the employer.
The pay scale that domestics attempt to negotiate for is influenced by the
information that they share among one another and by their ability to sustain
a sufficient number of jobs, which is in turn also shaped by their English-
language skills, legal status, and access to private transportation. Although the pay scale remains unregulated by state mechanisms, social interactions among
the domestics themselves serve to informally regulate pay standards.
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Immigrant Women and Paid Domestic Work
Unlike employees in middle-class professions, most of the domestic workers
that I observed talked quite openly with one another about their level of pay. At informal gatherings, such as a child's birthday party or community event, the
women revealed what they earned with particular employers and how they had
achieved or been relegated to that particular level of pay. Working for low-level pay was typically met with murmurs of disapproval or pity, but no stronger
sanctions were applied. Conversely, those women who earned at the high end
were admired.
As live-out, day workers, these immigrant women were paid on either an
hourly or à`job work'' basis, and most women preferred the latter. Being paid
por trabajo, or by the job, allowed the women greater flexibility in caring for
their own families' needs. And with regard to income, being paid by the job
instead of an hourly rate increased the potential for higher earnings. Women
who were able to work relatively fast could substantially increase their average earnings by receiving a set fee for cleaning a particular house. If they could
schedule two houses a day in the same neighborhood, or if they had their own
car, they could clean two and sometimes even three houses in one day.
Using Ethnographic
Ethnographic Findings
Findings for Advocacy
In every major US city with a large immigrant population, large umbrella
coalitions that include community, church, legal, and labor groups are now
working to establish and defend civil rights and workplace rights for immigrants and refugees. Two key features distinguish these efforts. First, the claims are
typically made outside the traditional and exclusive category of US citizenship.
Second, until recently many of these efforts were aimed only at male immigrants.
For various reasons, among them thèìnvisibility'' of immigrant women's
employment, immigrant rights advocates have been slower to defend immigrant
women's labor rights. But this is changing.
A year and a half after completing the research, I began meeting with a group
of lawyers and community activists associated with the Coalition for Humane
Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles to plan an information and outreach program
for paid domestic workers, the majority of whom in Los Angeles are Latina
immigrant women. It was in this context that I utilized some of the research
findings on immigrant women and domestic employment.
The newly formed committee met for one year before launching an innovative
informational outreach program. The planning stage was long because of the
obstacles that this occupation poses for organizing strategies and because the
group was not working from an existing blueprint. How to organize paid
domestic workers who work in isolated, private households is neither easy nor
obvious. There are no factory gates through which all employees pass, and
instead of confronting only one employer, one finds that the employers are
nearly as numerous as the employees. Traditional organizing strategies with
paid domestic workers encompass both trade unions and job cooperatives (see
Chaney and Castro, 1989; Salzinger, 1991), but both models necessarily build in
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431
Figure 29.1 Domestic workers: if you have just arrived be careful with strangers who promise to introduce you to supposed employers.
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Immigrant Women and Paid Domestic Work
Figure 29.2 Keep these three things in mind.
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433
numerical limitations. Our group decided that reaching workers isolated within
multiple residential workplaces could best be accomplished through mass media
and distribution of materials at places where paid domestic workers are likely to congregate, such as on city buses and in public parks. The key materials in our
program were novelas.
Novelas are booklets with captioned photographs that tell a story, and they
are typically aimed at working-class men and women. In recent years immigra-
tion rights advocates in California have successfully disseminated information
regarding legalization application procedures, legal services, and basic civil
rights to Latino immigrants using this method, and in southern California,
even the Red Cross has developed a novela on AIDS awareness. Our group
developed the text for several didactic novelas, and in lieu of photographs, we
hired an artist to draw the corresponding caricatures. One novela centers on
hour and wage claims, and another was designed as an emergency measure to
alert domestic workers that a rapist was getting women into his car by offering
domestic work jobs to women waiting at bus stops. Based on the research with
paid domestic workers, I prepared a two-sided novela sheet that cautions women
about the abuses in informal subcontracting relations, underlines that payment
by thè`job'' or house yields higher earnings than hourly arrangements, and
recommends that domestic workers share cleaning strategies and employment
negotiation strategies with their friends. The text also reminds women of their
entitlement to receive minimum wage ($4.25).
With a small grant, the advocacy group hired four Latina immigrant outreach
workers, two Salvadoran women and two Mexican women, to distribute these
materials to Latina immigrant domestic workers. Posters were printed up and
placed on over 400 municipal buses that run along east±west routes. In large black print written across a red background the text reads (in Spanish): ``Domestic