Protecting paid domestic workers under lockdown: Latin American strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Most domestic workers in Latin America earn low wages and have no formal contract. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the position of these workers became even more precarious as working time was reduced for many, and as a result, incomes declined. Many other workers suffered suspensions without pay or redundancy without severance. Governments across the region thus sought to develop new strategies to guarantee domestic workers’ income. Taking a comparative perspective, the paper aims to understand a variety of government responses to the domestic work issue during the COVID-19 pandemic in four Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay). An analysis of all regulations enacted during the first nine months of the pandemic leads into a discussion of the primary dilemma states faced: determining whether domestic workers could be protected as workers or as a segment of the working poor.

KEYWORDS:

• Paid domestic work
• Latin America
• legal protections
• COVID-19 pandemic
• welfare policies

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the guest editor Mihajla Gavin and the peer reviewers for their thoughtful comments and remarks. Through the different versions of the article, we engaged in a very interesting dialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation [ARG1215407GF-E]; FONCYT (Argentina) [PICT2020-03905].

Notes on contributors

Lorena Poblete

Lorena Poblete is a researcher at CONICET (Argentina’s National Research Council) and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France). She was a visiting scholar at the Université de Lille 1 and Université de Nantes (France), Frei Universität Berlin and Europa-Universität Viadrina (Germany), Princeton University (USA), and McGill University (Canada). She is a 2022-24 fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her research is broadly focused on labor regulations, social security regimes and labor institutions. Currently, her research focus on the regulation of paid domestic work in Latin America.