This article analyzes practices of collectivizing care work by popular sector women in a social organization in Berisso, Argentina. It focuses on their work in community soup kitchens, in which they collectively organize food and childcare, while simultaneously building the political fabric that sustains protest and the organizational structure. The soup kitchens are community spaces often located in neighborhoods inhabited by the popular sectors live, in which a group of people cook, usually daily or several times a week, to offer food to their neighbors. They are operated and managed differently depending on their origin, however, in almost all cases, those who attend do not have to pay for the food, making them into key spaces for neighborhood survival. The main users of the soup kitchens are children, young people, and the elderly. 

This text is an extract from the doctoral thesis “Mujer bonita es la que sale a luchar” (“A Beautiful Woman is the One Who Goes Out to Fight”) carried out as part of the Doctoral Program in Social Sciences of the Humanities and Education Sciences School of the National University of La Plata. The fieldwork focused on the experience of twenty women participants in the organization Frente Popular Darío Santillán Corriente Plurinacional (FPDSCP) [Popular Front Darío Santillán Plurinational Current] in the Villa Arguello neighborhood of Berisso, in the province of Buenos Aires. These women work daily in one of the three soup kitchens that the FPDSCP operates there.

Women’s Territory

In recent decades, the neighborhood territory has become an essential space for the construction of political and community fabrics for the popular sectors. For women, the main and most consistent protagonists in this process, the neighborhood is the privileged space for resolving personal and family needs, in other words, for sustaining life. Therefore, in many cases, it becomes an important space for their political education and learning. Integration in social, political, religious, neighborhood, and other organizations is part of a set of relationships of exchange, conflict, and cooperation that women engage in that shape the community. In the case of popular neighborhood organizations, women are the main participants (in numeric terms) and driving forces behind these organizations’ everyday activities.

The FPDSCP or the Frente, is an organization with a piquetero background. By that we are referring to the social organizations that emerged in popular territories in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of the struggle for jobs and food, characterized by their primary method of protest: the “piquete” or roadblock. Among its political and organizational definitions, the Frente identifies as anticapitalist and antipatriarchal, positions from which it proposes transforming oppressive social relations within the collective and in society as a whole. In terms of organization, the space for political deliberation is the assembly, which operates according to principles of “direct democracy.” Furthermore, the Frente raises the issue of the construction of spaces of “free and shared work” in opposition to work under a boss. Related to this, it characterizes its work with the idea of “prefiguration,” that is, creating experiences in the present based on the values that are desirable in a future that it seeks to construct.

This article analyzes women’s work in the Frente’s community soup kitchens. This work allows us to address the centrality of care work that sustains families and communities, and which is fundamentally carried out by women as part of a continuum of work in which different everyday tasks overlap.

The Community Soup Kitchen: Collectivization and Politicization of Care Work

In the construction of neighborhood organizations, women from the popular sectors, migrants, workers, Indigenous, unemployed, and peasant women make up the strongest component and are responsible for the everyday support work maintaining productive activities, collective care, administration, and community self-management. Despite this fact, they rarely represent organizations’ public face, either in the media or in events or meetings with governmental authorities. Behind the visible, women live their lives, traversed by political participation, but also by families, multiple jobs, neighborhood relations, desires, and projects, certainties and questions, in an everyday movement that makes it so that the collective element is experienced differently by each one.

In the neighborhood organizations, women’s work in the soup kitchens never ceases yet it is rarely analyzed in its social and political depth. It is often the space that women join as an entryway to organizations such as the Frente and, additionally, it is the activity that tends to initiate the organization’s neighborhood insertion into a new territory. In the everyday, despite the fact that a few men intermittently collaborate, the operation of the soup kitchens is guaranteed by feminine hands.

Entering the popular organization by the kitchen door and with ladle in hand is explained by the fact that women are called based on what they know how to do and what is expected of them according to the traditional gender division of labor, the so-called “reactionary ethics of care” that puts reproducing and sustaining life under the feminine and domestic orbit. As one interviewee affirmed, “for women, thinking that you have to do a soup kitchen based on your prior individual and collective experiences is natural. That idea is always around.” Cooking collectively is a practice that has precedents in every woman’s life, whether in the family or in other neighborhood, social, and/or religious organizations. These previously learned tools are rekindled with the integration into the new space, generating new relations and encounters.

The women express a wide range of motives to behind their decision to get involved in the soup kitchen of an organization like the Frente: “I joined to cook,” “I come so I don’t have to be alone with my problems,” “for my children,” “for necessity,” “to have something better for my life,” “because it makes me feel useful.” In the collective work in the soup kitchens, powerful social bonds are created, based on sharing family and relationship problems, political debates, stories of neighborhood episodes, sexual and reproductive concerns, and a constant organizational effort related to sustaining life in common.

Thus, women’s involvement does not tend to be solely defined by obtaining material resources. Besides resolving basic needs, relational, subjective, and affective elements are also put into play in the soup kitchen. These are key for explaining women’s participation. Sustaining life, therefore, is not reduced to the management of material goods, but rather to the construction of a network of social relations. Here the notion of “decessities” is relevant, which Amaia Pérez Orozco borrows from the field of popular education to resignify the notion of necessities, breaking down the division between needs and desires. The women who participate in the Frente spend many hours a day in the soup kitchen where they cook, care for children, arrange clothing donations, work in the garden, talk about their problems and those of other people, organize activities, coming and going between their houses, the soup kitchens, and other institutions several times a day.

The idea of care work, taken from feminist economics, is useful for thinking about this everyday political burden of the work carried out in the soup kitchen. For Cristina Carrasco, care work is that which addresses the physical needs of the reproduction of life, but also those emotional necessities that are satisfied through affects and recognition. From this perspective, its relational aspect stands out. In other words, it is an activity focused on the recognition of human vulnerability and interdependence, for which the defense of life is in the center. Care attempts to reach those places where the state does not provide guarantees and consumption does not reach, those spaces damaged by the logic of accumulation. This care work is largely carried out by women and sexual dissidents, and organized according to what Pérez Orozco calls a “reactionary ethics of care,” which is characterized by isolation, compartmentalization, and devalorization, as well as being confined to the household.

However, what happens when women escape the boundaries of their homes (the so-called “private sphere”) and place the reproduction of their lives and those of the people who depend on them in common? Or, going further, when their common labor allows for sustaining their neighbors? Drawing on feminist economics, we can respond that the soup kitchen is shaped as a space of of collective management that is organized to resolve not only physical needs, but also the whole set of aspects that are connecting to supporting life. But women cooking together in the context of an organization gives new meaning to care. Here, in contrast to the invisibility and isolation in which women guarantee that labor in private sphere, something different and essential occurs with care.

This collectivization generates a powerful ambivalence. On the one hand, it maintains the gender division of labor because this work continues falling on feminized bodies. But, on the other hand, this collectivized care work in the soup kitchen ceases to be individual and to reproduce feminine isolation in the household, which enables the production of new meanings. It is transformed into shared work and made visible as community and social support work. It creates the possibility of overturning the dichotomies that sustain capitalism and patriarchy: the public/private and the personal/political.

There is thus an ambivalent meaning to the commoning of care work in the soup kitchens. On the one hand, women continue being assigned those tasks related to care, but, at the same time, it produces a certain slippage of the “reactionary ethics.” First, because its collectivization transforms care into an issue of common deliberation and the foundation for the generation of collective agreements. On the other hand, because it produces the need for new organizational bodies that make care into a collective responsibility. For example, it leads to the creation of preschools, popular schools, or neighborhood day care centers that allow women to participate in meetings, mobilizations, and workshops. Logics of cooperation that contrast with the individualization of capitalism and the isolation promoted by the patriarchy can be seen in this new institutionality.

Care work in soup kitchens is only one part of the work carried out by these women. Different feminist studies have rendered visible the volume of work carried out by women, including paid and unpaid, reproductive and productive labor, using different names. This involves broadening the category of work, taking into account all the work carried out by women on a continuum, which fluctuates according to the context and also individual and collective practices. In this way, for women, the day is a long working day, in which different unpaid and paid jobs are intertwined, in different spaces, organized according to contingency and overworking their bodies. However, it is not all overwork, we also see women’s agency. In fact, the soup kitchen, as a way of collectivizing part of this work, is a tactic to reconcile times and tasks to resolve issues of care and take part in a community environment.

On the other hand, the neighborhood soup kitchen, far from being a routine and repetitive workplace, is the organizational space that serves as the foundation for the rest of the collective activities and structure. Here the nexus can be seen between the soup kitchen and the two spheres that the literature on the piquetero movement highlights as the spaces in which its politics is created: the roadblock and the assembly. These episodic instances, which are more visible to the academic world and the media, could not exist without that space rooted in the everyday activity of feeding people. It is in the soup kitchen where the proposals, demands, and debates are cooked up that will be established in the weekly members’ meeting. In turn, one of the main objectives of the mobilizations is to obtain resources for the soup kitchens. And without the food prepared by women in the soup kitchens, it would be impossible to sustain the mobilizations. In these relations we see how much more than food is prepared in this apparently routine activity: it also produces everyday political fabrics that guarantee, in an invisible way, popular organizations’ other activities.

Obligation and Knowledge: The Powerful Ambivalence of Care

Using the community soup kitchen as a jumping off point for our thinking, means centering the common practice that emerged, on the one hand, from the inability of much of the popular sector to achieve food security through the market. But, at the same time, it is not only explained based on a lack, but is also connected to a history of feminine communitarian knowledge related to care. In our case, the construction of soup kitchens is not experienced by the women only as a proposal to organize the territory. For them, starting a soup kitchen is a tactic to organize food and sustenance, as well as a way to generate networks and bonds with other women, in which desires for personal and social change are also channeled.

The collectivization or commoning of domestic work, along with the dispute around the gender division of labor, can become a way of questioning patriarchal relations and the idea of work as a whole. First, because it takes care out of the private sphere, it gives it a new visibility, and, then, because it creates possibilities for encounter and organization of women based on logics of cooperation in opposition to the individualization promoted by capital. From here, we ask up to what point this ambivalence can be resolved in pursuit of the generation of a “politics in feminine,” that is, a practice of organization and deliberation that questions the very nature of care work, its unequal division based on gender, and women’s confinement.

It was only ten years ago, in June 2011, that the International Labour Organization (ILO) passed Convention 189 on Domestic Work, after more than 60 years of debate. Two years later, Argentina passed the Special Employment Contract Regime for Private Household Staff (Law 26.844 from 2013). These two regulations represented advances for the sector, which came to be considered work, instead of the stigmatized (and stigmatizing) notion of service.

Consequently, expectations arose for improvements in working conditions for these workers and the valorization of their work. It was expected that the importance of this labour for life and well-being, as well as for the reproduction of the labour force and economy in general, would be recognized. In other words, it was expected that the historical devaluation to which this work has been subjected would give way to the recognition of, as Pascale Molinier puts it, the intelligence, professional awareness, attention, and psychological skills that it requires.

This text describes the working conditions of those workers during the first year of the pandemic (2020) based on statistics data and qualitative accounts. In turn, it analyses features of international (Convention 189) and national (Law 26844) regulations that can explain their weaknesses for protecting the sector in the current context. At the same time, it also discusses some of the collective initiatives that are being carried out to render visible the sector’s demands and push for better labour protections in international and national bodies.

This article especially draws on the authors’ knowledge and experience of militant-research in relation to the domestic labour sector in Argentina. Militant research is that which takes a stand on the social phenomenon that it analyses, understanding itself as one more social factor within the social orbit and seeking not only to inquire into a situation, but also to transform it. In that regard, Verónica Jaramillo has studied and accompanied migrant women in the struggle for the Private Households Labour Law in Buenos Aires since 2010, working with grassroots organizations to plan intervention activities and parliamentary lobbying. Additionally, she led training activities on Law 26.844 for migrant domestic workers after the law’s approval and accompanied those workers in filing complaints with judicial bodies. For her part, Carolina Rosas has also studied the sector, using both sociodemographic, as well as qualitative, methodological designs. In 2020, Carolina Rosas participated in diverse collective meetings in which academics, women workers, and movement leaders discussed the problems faced by the sector during the pandemic, as well as its organizing potential.

It is worth pointing out that, while the content of this text refers to domestic workers in general, we pay special attention to those from migrant backgrounds. In Argentina, the relationship between women’s immigration and care work was woven early on, before the so-called “global care circuits” would be recognized in countries of the Global North. In fact, there is a historical relation between migration and paid domestic work in Argentina: already in 1914, 30 percent of migrant women worked as “domestic employees” or “maids”, while only 17 percent of Argentine women worked in those types of jobs.

Among paid domestic workers, international migrants tend to face the most disadvantages due to their condition of foreigners. For some of them, domestic work serves as “refuge activity” that they participate in at the beginning of their migratory trajectory; for others, it is a structural form of labour insertion. Even so, unlike what occurs in the Global North, currently in Argentina we cannot speak of a “foreignization” of paid domestic work, since the majority of women who carry out activities in this sector were born in Argentina, many of them internal migrants.

Advances and Limitations of ILO Convention 189

Broad segments of the population, especially leaders in the sector, the academic community, and feminist organizations have recognized the notable advances for the labour paradigm introduced by Convention 189. In fact, in its first article, it defines the “domestic worker” as “any person engaged in domestic work within an employment relationship”. By locating domestic work within an “employment relation”, this article demonstrates an intention to consider this occupation as real work, thus motivating states to regulate it as such. Convention 189 was thus designed to restructure the conception of that labour, which previously regarded those women as “servants” and now includes them as workers in a dependent relation, classifying them in a way so that equal rights would be established for workers in that sector.

Convention 189 also established the need to regulate a minimal working day of eight hours like other workers, that the weekly rest period be at least 24 consecutive hours, the possibility to take vacations and paid sick leave, freedom of association and to unionize, effective recognition of the right to collectively bargain, the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour, the effective abolition of child labour, the elimination of discrimination regarding employment and occupation, and effective protection against all forms of abuse, harassment, and violence. Additionally, it established the requirement to create written labour contracts or contracts as part of a sectoral agreement and established a minimum wage without discrimination due to sex.

On the other hand, the Convention recognizes that migrant women are exposed to situations of particular violence and therefore specifies a few situations that, strictly speaking, do not help contain the labour exploitation of immigrants from poor countries. This is the case for the contracts made from the countries of origin. Such an article cannot always be considered a protective clause, as it excludes those who do not get jobs from the country of origin or because recruitment agencies for that workforce are scarcely monitoredand appropriate a portion of the workers’ earnings.

Argentina is a high contracting party in the sphere where this international convention was developed. In fact, it was established as an ILO member state in 1919, and since then has ratified 82 conventions and two protocols, of which 61 are still in effect. The ILO’s role in the world, besides promoting the codification of labour regulations, consists of recommending certain measures to states. Its agreements, made by a tripartite entity made up of workers, unions, and states, forms part of what is known as “soft law” that makes recommendations to states but does not impose coercive measures on them. This is a major difference in comparison, for example, to the contentious cases that occur in other human rights systems, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the UN Commission on Human Rights.

In other words, the ILO is largely unable to impose economic sanctions, by mode of indemnification for non-compliance with the regulations, as other systems for protecting human rights do. Therefore, the rights of workers in general, and female domestic workers in particular, can be ignored by states without major legal consequences.

Argentinean Regulations on Domestic Work and Migration

To understand the framework that protects migrant domestic workers in Argentina, it is necessary to think about at least two types of regulatory developments: one in the area of labour relations and the other in immigration law. On one hand, the Domestic Service Regime was issued in 1956 during Pedro Eugenio Aramburu’s dictatorship and was in effect until March 2013, when the current Special Employment Contract Regime for Private Household Staff (Law 26.844) was sanctioned. On the other hand, we should take into account that the second immigration law in Argentina’s history was sanctioned during Argentina’s last dictatorship and remained in effect until 2004 when the current Law on Immigration, no. 25.871, took effect.

Thus, the early years of the twenty-first century saw an end to the legislation sanctioned in Argentina during different dictatorships. However, the long period in which they were in effect left serious economic marks on the living conditions of those women since, under the previous laws-decrees, the labour rights of women domestic workers were systematically violated. When their migratory status is added to this, the violations are even more notable.

In comparison with earlier legislation, the main advances established by Law 26.844 have to do with establishing an eight-hour workday with breaks when one is a live-in employee, paid vacations, sick leave, maternity leave, and the definition as a labour relation as of the first hour of work, among others.

However, we must remember that this legislation was fixed outside of the Labour Contracting Law that regulates Argentina’s workers as a whole. As seen in its name (Special Regime), it referred to the idea of “specialness” (of that labour, of the worker and the person employing her, as well as the sphere in which that work takes place) to not give those women equal rights as the rest of the country’s workers. Thus, they were excluded from the possibility of obtaining a legal minimum wage like other workers, from being able to rely on unemployment benefits or labour justice that would give them equal guarantees, since this continued with an independent jurisdiction to resolve conflicts. In this way, it institutionalized an inequality, which in the context of the pandemic has had a crucial and unfortunate importance, as will be shown in the following section.

This national law incorporated many of the standards established by ILO Convention 189, but not all of them. While Convention 189 recommended giving domestic workers equal rights as all other workers, the Argentinian law sanctions their differentiation and inequality by classifying them as special. More specifically, equalizing the maximum work hours with the rest of workers is one of its most important advances, and in this both regulations are the same. But as was stated previously, in Argentina the sector continues having a special minimum wage that is the lowest in the labour market and it does not have access to unemployment benefits. Nor is there legislation about household inspections to regulate abuse, and the employment agencies that contract workers for private households are still unregulated. Furthermore, this legislation did not recognize migrant workers in the sector, or include any mention of them, as the international convention does.

On the other hand, in terms of the immigration law, since 2004 Argentina has a framework that guarantees rights and consecrates that “the right to migration is essential and inalienable to the person and the Republic of Argentina guarantees it based on principles of equality and universality”. This law recognizes migration as a human right and goes above the standards of protection established by international instruments. Even so, in practice, there is still notorious discrimination and obstacles to migratory regularization.

Despite the major advances registered in both legal plexuses, the possibility of materializing those rights depends on broader social change and the political will to promote it, given that many government and societal entities continue repeating discriminatory practices and limiting full access to rights. A good example of an active public policy that helped spread the idea of these women as workers, while also encouraging their registration, was carried out in the first years following the approval of the Private Households Labour Law. However, it ceased to be carried out and the issue gradually disappeared from the public agenda. In short, favourable legislation regarding work in private households and migration is a great first step, but is not enough to guarantee the materialization of the rights enshrined in those laws.

Domestic Workers during the Pandemic

Natsumi Shokida indicates that in the year prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 900,000 people were employed in the domestic work sector in large Argentinian cities, 98 percent of which were women, according to data from the second trimester of 2019 from the Permanent Household Survey. These workers represented 17 percent of the total female workforce, meaning one in every six women employed in Argentina participated in that economic sector. Of them, 74 percent did not receive a retirement discount, 69 percent did not have paid vacations, 68 percent did not receive bonuses, 72 percent did not receive pay in the case of illness, and 73 percent did not have health insurance. It is also worth pointing out that almost 20 percent were internal migrants, and about 10 percent were migrants from countries bordering Argentina. This means that international migrants were overrepresented in that economic sector since migrant persons only account for approximately 5 percent of the country’s total population.

Despite the fact that high rates of informality were recorded in 2019, those numbers had been even higher in previous years. Fernando Groisman and María Eugenia Sconfienza highlight the fact that informality in the sector reached 93 percent in 2004. However, by 2012 it had fallen to 81.5 percent. That decrease was largely due to tax benefits that were implemented to encourage employees to register their employees. Later, with the passing of Law 26844/2013, informality continued decreasing slightly until it reached about 75 percent. In short, up until 2019, the formalization of the sector was slowly increasing, although approximately three out of every four domestic workers were still unregistered.

In 2019, the Argentinian economy was in a critical situation, as president Mauricio Macri’s Cambiemos alliance had imposed a neoliberal conception of the relation between the state, the market, and society. The policies implemented by the government led to inflation rising faster than wages, as well as an increase in unemployment, underemployment, labour informality, and precarization of the wage relation. The economic crisis intensified in 2020 due to the pandemic and the subsequent measure of “social, preventive, and obligatory isolation” which had a profound impact on the Argentine labour market. According to data published by the National Statistics Bureau INDEC, the rates of employment and unemployment reached their worst levels in the second trimester of 2020: employment declined to 33.4 percent and unemployment rose to 13 percent. A slight recovery was seen in those indexes in the fourth quarter of 2020, but they still did not reach the levels seen prior to the pandemic. Workers who were not engaged in essential work and those with less legal and union protections were those most affected by layoffs and precarization in their labour conditions. This occurred despite a rigid prohibition on layoffs imposed by the government.

Regarding domestic workers, comparing the fourth quarter of 2019 and 2020 shows that their weight among the employed population decreased from 7.6 percent to 6.3 percent of the total number of employed people. In turn, their weight among the unemployed population increased, from 12.8 percent to 16.9 percent of the total unemployed population. That means that their importance within the employed population decreased 17 percent and increased 32 percent among the unemployed population.

These alarming statistics were reflected in different virtual forums, in which representatives of unions and social organizations exposed the difficulties facing the sector. In those spaces, participants shared stories of workers who had been fired or whose wages had been compulsorily decreased. Those who suffered the most were the live-out part time (“by the hour”) employees, who make up the most precarious group within the sector. The lack of income and savings have placed all these workers and their families in a very delicate situation, especially in a context in which the prices of basic goods have increased considerably. Specifically, during 2020, the consumer price index increased by 36.1 percent.

Other workers found themselves obligated to continue going to their workplaces despite the health risks and rules prohibiting it, because their employers threatened to fire them if they did not. In other cases, they were required to stay at their workplaces indefinitely. Other employers misrepresented national regulations in their favour; for example, they told their workers that state subsidies would replace wages, that the quarantine should be considered a vacation period, or modified their employee’s category to enable her to travel in public transportation (which was restricted to certain categories of workers).

Those international migrant workers who were forced to violate the isolation decree risked administrative sanctions. Due to this, they also risked being deported, since during 2020 Decree 70/2017 was in effect, which established a summary expulsion process without the right to a legitimate defence. Another issue that has affected both internal and international migrants was the suspension of remittance payments, whether because they stopped receiving wages or because they could not find a way to send payments, leaving their families without that income.

Aid policies, and the way in which these were contemplated for domestic workers, were also a matter of debate. Argentina was the only country in South America that included registered and unregistered domestic workers in the exceptional non-contributory monetary benefit, called the Family Emergency Income (IFE). While this is positive, there were failures in its implementation since many of these women workers did not have the technological knowledge or internet access needed to sign up, or they could not communicate by telephone to learn what they needed to know. In the case of migrant workers, those who had arrived to Argentina within the last two years, or those who had arrived earlier but had not managed to regularize their migratory status, were excluded from the IFE.

Both the statistics shared at the beginning of this section as well as the experiences recounted are nothing more than the consequence of long term economic, sociocultural, and legal inequalities. Despite the fact that there had been a slight decrease in informality in the sector in the years prior to the pandemic, it was not enough. The enormous majority of domestic workers were unprotected and were forced to confront the pandemic situation without unemployment security or indemnification, without coverage for work accidents, without sick leave or health insurance.

This also suggests that in the years preceding the pandemic, there had been little progress in transforming the social representations that burden this sector. In other words, neither the state nor employers had started to understand them as workers in the full sense of the term, nor to recognize this as a labour relation that had to be formalized.

As the “special character” of Law 26844 conditions access to rights, it is worth asking: what would have changed if workers in private households had been included in the Labour Contract Law, like the rest of workers? One of the aspects that would undoubtedly have been different is access to the justice system under the same conditions as other workers and the access to unemployment benefits, which would have been immensely useful in an emergency situation such as that of COVID-19. However, those women were left to the mercy of the “good will” of their employers, who did not risk any legal sanctions for not fulfilling their duties given that they had not registered the employment relation. Additionally, the special character granted to this work by the legislation has also had effects at the level of wages, as its legal minimum has always been lower than that of other workers.

Workers’ Collective Action: A Silver Lining

We are going through a historical moment with considerable uncertainty at the global level, yet it is certain that inequality and exclusion are deepening, as is the social control by state security forces. At the same time, setbacks are being seen in terms of social, economic, and cultural rights. It is not difficult to see that women, gender dissidents, and migrant persons, especially the racialized and poor, are those most severely harmed. In several forums, it has been recognized that the struggle to defend rights that have been acquired will be increasingly necessary.

Faced with the limitations of the national law on domestic work and ILO Convention 189, we could predict that the associative fabric would play a fundamental role as a channel of mobilization and demand for recognition of rights for workers in the sector. While recognizing their limitations in terms of political and legal resources, Carolina Rosas documented that paid domestic workers are “ready to fight”. It is a struggle that crosses borders, that is concerned with the present and also projects toward the future in the region. It is, perhaps, in workers’ collective action where we can find a silver lining of optimism in the context of the current panorama.

In fact, despite major labour difficulties indicated in the previous section, over the course of 2020 diverse spaces continued to be very active. Among these, the party and feminist spaces of the Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores-Unidad [Workers’ Left Front-Unity] stand out, many of which also participate in the Ni Una Menos [Not One Woman Less] campaign. Women workers directly participated in these spaces, taking a leading role in activities. For example, there were demonstrations led by groups of workers on public roads, particularly in streets near the slums and informal settlements where many of them live in precarious conditions.

On the other hand, the importance of organizations of migrant women has also been documented, especially the Asociación de Mujeres Unidas, Migrantes y Refugiadas en Argentina [Association of United Women, Migrants, and Refugees in Argentina] that maintains strong ties with unions and civil society collectives in the region, as well as with national and international organizations.

Other activism in favour of the workers in private households has been carried out by the Unión Personal Auxiliar de Casas Particulares [Union of Auxiliary Personnel in Private Households]. In this case, it is the delegates who have represented the workers in different virtual meetings, in some cases with national authorities and ILO representatives present, where the main claims were focused on the need to enforce international regulations and Convention 189, and especially to increase the rate of registration of these workers.

Additionally, we can confirm a growing presence of domestic workers on social media, often building on feminist or leftist organizations, taking advantage of WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram to communicate, learn, make complaints, and organize their demands. In many of these forums, participants emphasize that their labour situation is not only associated with the class dimension, but also profoundly rooted in ethno-racial and gender constructions, as Louisa Acciari has expressed, those workers face a combination of multiple vectors of oppression and exploitation. While it is not possible to dig deeper into the role of social media in social movements, it is important to point out that, while many of those virtual spaces were created to denounce those women’s labour situations, they also started sharing other interests connected to gender-based violence, the law for voluntary interruption of pregnancy, police abuses against trans people and sex workers, among others. In other words, during the first year of the pandemic, social media was used to disseminate information about the historical foundations of the labour exploitation that traverses these workers, while also enabling them to address other sensitive topics and learn about new and old forms of resistance.

In short, while virtuality imposed limits on activism during the first year of the pandemic, it also enabled people, groups, and movements marked by different dimensions of oppression to connect from around the world. For example, an Instagram page called trabajadoras indomésticas [undomestic workers] started to question media discourses and, after obtaining visibility on social media, began to participate in international meetings about feminisms, labour, and migration. A network called planeta ella [her planet] was also created in which migrant women built an online transnational movement denouncing their working conditions. This has a power to question and bring people together that should be a topic of future analysis.

As the intersectional dimension of exclusion cannot be separated from the intersectional dimension of antagonisms and resistance, it is worth asking, to what extent domestic workers in Argentina will be able to strategically use their multiple social identities to construct alliances with feminist, migrant, and unemployed peoples’ movements, among others.  

References

Acciari, Louisa, “Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity.” Latin American Research Review, 56(1) (2021), 67–81.

Bruno, Sebastián, “Migrantes paraguayas y el servicio doméstico en Buenos Aires. Diferencias y desigualdades”, XI Jornadas Argentinas de Estudios de Población. Asociación de Estudios de Población de la Argentina, Neuquén, 2019, https://www.aacademica.org/000-091/53.pdf.

Jaramillo Fonnegra, Verónica, “Acceso a la justicia: trabajadoras domésticas migrantes en la ciudad de Buenos Aires”, Estado & comunes, revista de políticas y problemas públicos, no. 8, vol. 1 (2019), 131-159.

Jaramillo Fonnegra, Verónica, Gil-Araujo, Sandra, and Rosas, Carolina, “Control migratorio y producción de irregularidad. Normas, prácticas y discursos sobre la migración en Argentina (2016-2019)”, Revista Forum, no. 18 (2020), 64-90.

Mallimaci, Ana Inés and Magliano, María José, “Mujeres migrantes sudamericanas y trabajo de cuidado en dos ciudades argentinas”, ODISEA. Revista de Estudios Migratorios, vol. 5 (2018), 108-134.

 Rosas, Carolina, Jaramillo Fonnegra, Verónica, and Vergara, Albano Blas, “Trabajo doméstico y migraciones latinoamericanas. Desde Argentina, hallazgos y reflexiones frente a los destinos extraregionales”, Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos, vol. 30, no. 2(89) (2015): 253-290, http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0186-72102015000200253.

This article is part of the Dossier Beyond Convention 189 which is available at https://www.rosalux.de/en/beyond-c189