Everyday Transgressions: Domestic Workers’ Transnational Challenge to International Labor Law by Adelle Blackett

Adelle Blackett’s Everyday Transgressions has its origins in the 2010 publication of a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) titled “Decent Work for Domestic Workers,” which she was invited to author as a law professor with expertise in international labor law. The ILO is a UN agency, and in 2011 ILO delegates representing workers, employers, and member state officials passed Convention 189, which for the first time spelled out specific standards applying to domestic work. The ILO also passed Recommendation 201, which gave further guidelines for how the convention’s articles might be enforced in practice. The new standards went into force in September 2013, a year after the convention received two ratifications. As of October 2019, a total of 29 ILO members have ratified the convention.Everyday Transgressions follows the publication of Jennifer Fish’s Domestic Workers of the World Unite! in 2017, which focused—also from an insider’s perspective—on how domestic worker organizers navigated ILO politics. (I reviewed Fish’s book in the March 2019 issue of Labor.) Whereas Fish emphasized how domestic workers from around the world coalesced into a social movement and made sure their voices were heard by an institution resistant to direct democracy, Blackett’s analysis is rooted in legal theory. This is not to suggest, however, that she ignores domestic workers’ agency.Blackett posits that domestic work has consistently been a conundrum for scholars of labor law. This stems from the fact that domestic work has been characterized, on one hand, as “work like any other,” with scholars arguing that household laborers deserve access to protections that should be universal to all workers. On the other hand, scholars have convincingly demonstrated how domestic work is “work like no other,” owing to where it takes place (the home), its strong ties to indenture and enslavement, and its intersections with migration law, family law, and master- servant law (19). Blackett argues that effective standards directed at domestic work must accept both these propositions. The goal should be both to remove domestic work from the list of occupations excluded from international and national labor law protections and to craft standards that sufficiently address domestic work’s unique features.Blackett identifies a “law of the household workplace” that, for most of history, was neither enshrined in statute nor established by court rulings (11). Of course, governments have legislated everything from vagrancy codes to the laws supporting slavery to abet employers’ efforts to control domestic workers. Blackett’s point, however, is that the law of the household workplace also possesses its own logic, with employers governing domestic workers’ compensation, work hours, conditions for dismissal, and freedom of mobility, without immediate state involvement. The everyday transgressions that Blackett’s title alludes to references domestic workers’ pursuit of social justice and rights in employment relations where official legal remedies have not been available.The formalization of domestic work as an occupation, and the desire to see household employment governed by contracts and the routinization of labor relations, has been the primary aim of reformers since at least the late nineteenth century. In this context, Blackett poses a crucial question: “What if the problem is that—in a landscape in which informality and the employment relationship overlap—the label of informality from a legal perspective tells us very little about the appropriateness and adaptability of mechanisms meant to bring social justice to the world of work?” (42). Put another way, domestic workers benefit most when it is ensured that their labors, whether characterized as belonging to the formal or informal economy, receive robust social welfare protections that specifically acknowledge how the work of caring, cleaning, and serving others is gendered and racialized, and likely to be performed by migrants without citizenship. Many domestic workers would rather have their children be guaranteed educational opportunities and correlating job prospects, Blackett observes, than have them compelled into an occupation due to their race, gender, or legal status—even if the work itself happened to be better regulated.Blackett’s methodology is integral to her argument that the law of the household workplace is absent from sources that legal historians and scholars typically mine. For example, she canvasses seven ethnographic studies of domestic work—covering Canada, Italy, Malaysia, South Africa, and the United States—to explore how issues such as whether housing and gifts should be counted as wages, or whether employers bear responsibility for the provision of long- term social security, recur as struggles between household employers and laborers. She also provides a legal- literary analysis of historic cookbooks, showing how these texts doubled as managerial manuals laying out the rules of employment. The story of Malinda Russell, a black cook born into slavery in the United States, is especially fascinating. After gaining her freedom, Russell published her own cookbook in 1866, which allowed her to receive credit and compensation for her creations and defy employers who regularly appropriated their cooks’ intellectual property.Blackett concludes that the enforcement of new ILO standards must address structural conditions present within the global economy, namely, the inequalities that compel women of color from the global South to migrate for work. The employment of migrant laborers means that “care, rather than being reincorporated in the framing of what we all do as humans, is externalized” (171). Among the most contentious issues that the ILO grappled with was the question of domestic workers’ right to live outside their employers’ homes. While laborers’ representatives argued that this standard was essential, immigration laws often dictate that migrants working in household labor must live in their sponsors’ (employers’) home. In the end, article 9 of the convention instructs member states to ensure that domestic workers “are free to reach agreement with their employer or potential employer on whether to reside in the household” (188). Yet for this to be effective in practice, immigration laws would have to be liberalized as well.An important book for legal and policy historians concerned with labor, Blackett’s volume encourages her readers to think about why standards for decent work must be transnational, responsive to workers’ experiences, and inspired by a desire to see substantive justice rather than formal law implemented.

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