Les aides à domicile. Un autre monde populaire by Christelle Avril (review)

Drawing on a several-year field survey of home help workers in the greater Paris region, Christelle Avril sets out to “explore a world generally left in shadow” in sociology of the working class in France. It may seem questionable to draw a parallel between “service jobs” and manual labour, and it is precisely the relevance of this parallel that the book as a whole works to demonstrate. Avril delivers an ethnographic overview of home help workers – the vast majority of whom are women – that opens avenues for understanding female working-class experience in a new light, analysing service jobs as the new “face” of the working class and their world.

In the first section, the author shows how from 1960 to 2000 home help gradually became professionalized. This development is reflected in labour agreements that defined the work as “performing material, social and health-related tasks” for older persons, and in the creation of a job qualification (though certification is not compulsory for practice). These changes brought about a shift in representations in France regarding this set of service jobs: they went from being “housework support services” to “home support services.” However, in the 2000s a turnabout occurred: home help personnel became “multivalent workers” who could be hired by “all types of users.” In this new definition of the work, the social and healthcare-related mission linked to population ageing has been dropped, and this in turn threatens the jobs of home help workers because state financial aid to dependent persons can now be used to pay a family member or friend for assisting the person in question. For Avril, this means that the “professionalising approach” of the 1980s has been superseded by a “familialist” approach, and one of its effects is to blur the occupational image these women have of themselves. At the end of this first section, the sociologist presents a three-category personal trajectory typology of the home help workers she met with: the “indigenous socially declassed”, the “mobile declassed” and those for whom the work represents “promotion.” Though all these women “belong to a heavily dominated social group [and are] similar in this respect to unskilled workers,” no “collective ‘we’” is clearly identifiable.

The second section of the work focuses on the first group, “indigenous ‘declassed’ persons”, whom the author initially defines as women close to the stable working class who possess a degree of local social capital thanks to their parents and/or life partner. Overall, these women feel distant from their work and refuse – or at least say they refuse – to do tasks involving bodily care and relational or emotion work; they stress the physical aspect of the job and their ability to stand up to their hierarchical superiors – characteristics of the (male) working-class world. While they do not value their work, they have no plans of quitting because as they explain it, they have always worked. In contrast to the “mobile declassed” and “the promoted,” they are careful to have relatively regular working hours, thereby ensuring they still have the necessary strength and energy to do their own household chores. While Avril speaks of “a female version of virility,” these women are concerned to appear “feminine” at work. This means that the physical strength implied by their job (and that they stress in the interviews) is invisible outside the homes of the older persons they work in. This in turn enables them to maintain contact with small employers or heads-of-business and therefore to maintain the social status they had before taking a job in home help. In fact, these women originally had fairly close ties to small employers or heads-of-business, and they now find themselves caught up in a process of “repeat socialization” where their frame of reference proves to be the social milieu they used to belong to. These women are often “white”, have low educational qualifications often unrelated to home help...