Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers ed. by Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger (review)

Many of the stories and statistics about the working conditions faced by domestic and caregiving workers around the world are shocking. For example, in April 2017 a video that circulated online showed an Ethiopian maid in Kuwait clinging to a window sill and yelling for help before falling several stories while her employer not only stood by but filmed the incident. Fortunately, the worker survived. According to Human Rights Watch, however, it is not the first time that a domestic worker has fallen from a building in Kuwait. In response to abusive and exploitative working conditions, workers, some of whom have been locked inside their places of employment, attempt to escape by whatever means necessary, risking deportation, physical harm, and even death. Much of the discussion about how to improve the lives and working conditions of domestic and caregiving workers focuses on contemporary issues – how current social, political, and economic factors shape domestic labour. Yet as the contributors to Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers show, this type of work has a long history around the world, and many of the contemporary issues facing domestic workers have deep historical roots. Addressing problems pertaining to caregiving and domestic work thus requires a solid historical understanding of its development and practice in particular contexts. This edited collection aims to address this need.

The book emerged from the annual International Conference of Labour History and Social Movements in Linz, Austria that brought together over 50 scholars of domestic work in September 2013. The resulting edited collection features the work of more than twenty scholars from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, including history, sociology, anthropology, political science, gender studies, and migration studies. They examine the dynamics shaping domestic and caregiving work over four centuries and in a number of countries. As editors Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger explain in the first chapter, the collection "aims to contribute to a global history of work, in which the history of domestic work and domestic workers are not discarded as 'unproductive' and therefore insignificant to labor history." (4) The central argument of the book is "that domestic work has not only been an important social and cultural factor throughout space and time, but that its economic ('productive') value has for long been underestimated, misunderstood, or negated." (4–5)

Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers is comprised of 25 chapters grouped into three parts. An introductory essay by the editors provides an overview of the collection and issues related to terminology (domestic worker, servant, household worker, etc.) and theory (domestic work as "productive" or "unproductive" work) and outlines the volume's contribution to global labour history. Using a "broad and inclusive definition," the editors define domestic work as "work in the households of others [that] includes all tasks concerning household work … as well as care work. (2) The next two chapters, by Raffaella Sarti and Hoerder respectively, offer valuable reviews of existing scholarship and the historical development of domestic work around the world. By summarizing and analyzing the theoretical debates, historiographical developments, and changes and continuities in domestic work from a global perspective, these three chapters advance our understanding of the history of domestic work and the research on it.

The remaining chapters are divided into three parts. Part One examines workers' strategies, agency, and self-assertion. As Hoerder explains, although much of the scholarship on domestic work focuses on either exploitation or agency, in reality these competing frames intertwine: domestic work can be a source of oppression and liberation depending on the specific historical circumstances. The chapters in this section look at how this dynamic shapes the lives of workers in a variety of national and transnational contexts, from older Czech women's experiences caring for the children of Vietnamese immigrants, to Indian workers' efforts to organize, strike, and secure improvements in their working condition...