Recently, a renewed history of foreign immigration in Italy, focusing on the very first migration flows after the Second World War, has offered a more appropriate periodisation of the phenomenon. Women have been at the forefront of these flows, which were initially determined by the new postcolonial setting of the former Italian colonies (Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia). Subsequently, the immigrants came from various other countries (Spain, Cape Verde, Portugal, El Salvador, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ceylon, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan). At the same time, the majority of them were employed in a specific sector of the labour market: domestic work. This article focuses on female immigrants who were employed as domestic workers, their presence in public discourse in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, and government policies in this area. Drawing on statistical data and surveys, press and audiovisual materials, and feminist theory and practices, it aims to analyse the construction of paradigms – visibility, invisibility, subalternity, rights and racialisation – associated with female immigration and domestic work as a specific sector of employment.

A broad gap exists between “God’s eye” transit maps from above that experts draw and how domestic workers map their commutes in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, through a street-level approach. Based on fieldwork conducted in both cities between 2017 and 2018, including interviews, participant observation, and social cartography, this translational article brings domestic workers’ understanding of the city they traverse daily vis-à-vis how experts conceive modern and rational public transportation systems. Delving into the literature on cartography, the Right to the City (RtC), and feminist geography, the study analyzes this gap and finds how it limits an effective RtC for this massive group of female commuters. It further provides public policy recommendations to address the gap and ensure RtC for all.

This article builds on previous studies concerning the question of street-level bureaucracy, an expression coined by Lipsky (1980) – Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russel Sage Foundation) – to highlight the importance of the discretionary power that professionals in public agencies exercise during the implementation of laws, standards and guidelines. Discretion may depend on the need to compromise between the limited resources available and the claims of citizens, or between administrative policy directives and assessments, on the one hand, and their interpretation by “street-level” bureaucrats, on the other. This article focuses on the dilemmas that labour inspectors face when dealing with employment irregularities involving domestic workers. Based on nine months of observations in a local office of the Italian Labour Inspectorate, it aims to understand how labour inspectors make use of their discretionary power when the workplace is the home. This article connects studies of street-level bureaucracy with the new institutional organisational analysis, focusing on the isomorphic pressures from the institutional field in which the labour inspectors operate, together with the manner in which such pressures shape labour inspectors’ discretion. Through this connection, the article aims to extend the scope of both theories.

The analysis proposed here defends the necessity to operate a shift in the terms that seem to dominate, at present, the thinking on new forms of slavery or servitude, in order to fully integrate gender relations as production and exploitation social relationships. In this regard, based on two field studies performed with domestic and agricultural workers subjected to the Canadian immigration programs, we must try to see how the work relations amalgamated under the concepts of “modern slavery” and “unfree labour” give rise not only to a working class that is excluded from the canonical wage-earning class, but also and simultaneously to a racialized, intrinsically sexual workforce: “non-nationals” who are also male workers and female workers whose bodies are put to work, exploited and branded differently.

Policy makers and researchers are alarmed by the pervasive substandard working conditions and mistreatment in domestic work worldwide. Using an original dataset from a sample of domestic workers in Portugal (n = 684), our study explores types of abuse and harassment and tries to unveil the potential factors affecting the likelihood of having been a victim. Empirical evidence pointed to three segments of domestic workers: victims of labour abuses related to contract and wages, victims of multiple abuses including mistreatment and also psychological and sexual harassment, and a segment with no occurrence of abuse. Informal workers are more often victims of labour abuses, while migrants, especially Brazilian women, are more likely to report all types of abuse and harassment. On the other hand, carers of the elderly often suffered multiple abuses. The results suggest that despite the prevalence of labour abuses in Portugal, the most severe abuses are uncommon.

The growing demand for domestic workers has been linked to several global developments, such as an ageing population, income inequality, the growth of women entering labour markets, migration and changes in the provision of care. However, empirical quantitative evidence for these associations is still scarce. This study examines how macro-level factors related to care needs (female employment rates and proportion of aged population), labour markets (proportion of migrants and vulnerable employment) and economic characteristics (gross domestic product, income inequality and level of urbanisation) are associated with the prevalence of paid domestic labour across seventy-four countries. Data are derived from the statistics compiled by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Results show that a higher prevalence of paid domestic workers is particularly associated with greater income inequality, but also with a higher proportion of migrants. The association with income inequality remained unchanged after controlling for six other variables related to the demand and supply of domestic services. These findings suggest that income inequality is a crucial factor in determining the proportion of domestic workers in the labour force.

In South Africa, the house is a haunted place. Apartheid’s separate publics also required separate private lives and separate leisures in which to practice ways of living apartheid’s ideological partitions into reality. This essay analyzes the compulsive interest in black domesticity that has characterized South Africa since the colonial period and shows that domestic labor in white homes has historically shaped the entry of black women into public space in South Africa. In fact, so strong is the latter association that the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles reveals that in South African English the word maid denotes both “black woman” and “servant.” This conflation has generated fraught relations of domesticity, race, and subjectivity in South Africa. Contemporary art about domestic labor by Zanele Muholi and Mary Sibande engages with this history. In their art, the house is a place of silences, ghosts, and secrets. Precursors to these recent works can be found in fiction, including Sindiwe Magona’s short stories about domestic workers in her collection Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night (1994) and Zoë Wicomb’s novel Playing in the Light (2006), in which a woman passing for white allows her mother into her house only under the pretense that she is a family servant. Muholi and Sibande have engaged the legacy of black women in white households by revisiting the ghosts of the house through performance, sculpture, and photography. Both were inspired by the intimate reality of their mothers’ experiences as domestic servants, and in both cases the artist’s body is central to the pieces, through installations based on body casts, performance, embodied memories, and the themes of haunted absences, abandonment, and longing.