Recognition and Social Justice: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Paid Domestic Laborers in the United States

Abstract

Working in private homes, often isolated from the community and denied the legal rights and protections that most other workers enjoy, paid domestic laborers make up some of the most socially marginalized, vulnerable, and exploited workers in the United States today. This article explores the theoretical possibilities for an account of justice, based on the concept of recognition, to critique their work experiences, legal exclusion, and social status. To do so, it draws on the contrasting accounts of recognition advanced by Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, which focus on the psychological and the socio-structural dimensions of recognition respectively. While both theories generate compelling critiques of the conditions of domestic laborers, it is shown that neither one alone can capture the full range of injustices experienced, and that each can in fact complement the other. The article thus sketches an account of justice based on both the psychological and socio-structural dimensions of recognition.

Notes

¹ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” (2006), June 13, 2012, p. 21, < http://www.datacenter.org/reports/homeiswheretheworkis.pdf>.

² How to conceptualize justice in the first place is, of course, contentious. For example, Nancy Fraser suggests that we come to “an idea of justice” having had experiences of injustice. See Nancy Fraser, “On Justice: Lessons from Plato, Rawls, and Ishiguro,” New Left Review 74 (March–April 2012), p. 43. Yet this approach risks circularity, for how do we know that a person experienced injustice in the absence of a prior conception of justice? The problem can be mitigated by placing conceptual analysis and empirical critique into continuous dialogue with one another. This approach is similar to Rawls' “reflective equilibrium,” but in what follows I present more detailed empirical evidence than Rawls and I focus on recognition based accounts of justice. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 18.

³ Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 40.

⁴ Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), p. 6; see also Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 14.

⁵ Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, p. 7. In particular, many of these women are responding to the need to increase family incomes that have declined as a result of structural adjustment policies. See J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 81.

⁶ Rhacel Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 62. Moreover, as migrant laborers leave families behind in their country of origin, this often necessitates paying poorer women remaining in those countries to perform domestic labor, thus constructing what she calls the “international transfer of caretaking.”

⁷ Mary Zimmerman, Jacquelyn S. Litt, and Christine E. Bose (eds), Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework (Stanford, CA: Stanford Social Sciences, 2006), p. 39.

⁸ Quoted in Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), p. 55.

⁹ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 1.

¹⁰ “Tania,” quoted in ibid., 12.

¹¹ Katha Pollitt, “Wage Theft: A Crime Without Punishment?” The Nation, June 18, 2012.

¹² Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 17. In Parreñas' study of migrant Filipina domestic workers in Los Angeles, most were live-in workers because, compared with part-time work, this allowed them to save more of their wages and send more money back to the Philippines. Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 160.

¹³ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, p. 194.

¹⁴ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 27.

¹⁵ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, pp. 194, 198.

¹⁶ Zimmerman et al., Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework, p. 108.

¹⁷ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 165.

¹⁸ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 19.

¹⁹ Ibid., 27.

²⁰ As we will see below, “feeling uncomfortable” could constitute one of the negative emotions, which, according to Honneth's recognition theory, has the potential to spark political struggle.

²¹ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 2.

²² Ibid., 21.

²³ Ibid., 28.

²⁴ Gabrielle Meagher, “A Struggle for Recognition: Work Life Reform in the Domestic Services Industry,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 21:1 (2000), p. 14. Since domestic labor is also undervalued in the United States, I take this observation to be equally applicable there.

²⁵ Albor Ruiz, “Giving Rights to Caregivers Without a Voice,” New York Daily News, April 6, 2009.

²⁶ Chang, Disposable Domestics, p. 57.

²⁷ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 2. Under New York state law (12 NYCRR 142-2.2), overtime pay is a legal entitlement for live-out domestic workers who work more than 40 h per week for one employer, and for live-in workers who work for more than 44 h per week.

²⁸ See Meagher, “Struggle for Recognition,” p. 14.

²⁹ To be clear, focusing on recognition is not intended to sideline or diminish the importance of economic matters. As noted above, cultural meanings play a key role in shaping the distribution of material rewards such that careful analysis of them can provide important insights into questions of economic justice.

³⁰ Evelyn Nakano Glenn, for example, refers to the societal expectation that women perform the bulk of domestic and care work as a “status obligation” in the sense that a woman's identity is bound up with fulfilling this role. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 88.

³¹ These two different understandings of recognition also correspond to divergent research agendas: whereas Honneth aims to develop a theory that can explain social change as originating in people's disappointed expectations with respect to recognition, Fraser is interested in using recognition to help map the contours of social divisions (race, gender, and class, for example) and to delineate the logic of demands made by different social movements and struggles. See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), p. 2, and Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London, UK; New York: Verso, 2003), p. 176.

³² Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, Chapter 5.

³³ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, pp. 181–182.

³⁴ Ibid., 163–164. This claim resonates with the importance that feminist standpoint theorists place on collective struggle, and in particular echoes bell hooks' claim that “one can only say no, speak the voice of resistance, because there exists a counter-language,” quoted in Sandra Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 157. It is important to point out that the actual organization of paid domestic labor places a significant obstacle in the path of developing such a shared semantics: many domestic laborers work alone, and, as noted above, suffer social isolation and live in unfamiliar communities. This last condition, of course, is particularly pronounced among immigrant workers. For this reason, the work of consciousness-raising by domestic workers' organizations is both difficult and essential in galvanizing a political movement around justice for domestic workers.

³⁵ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 225.

³⁶ Ibid., 36 and 231–232.

³⁷ Ibid., 29.

³⁸ Ibid., 188; Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, pp. 118–119.

³⁹ Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, p. 107.

⁴⁰ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 139.

⁴¹ Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, p. 132. That Honneth draws so extensively on object relations theory suggests that he views this psychological foundation as being laid in early childhood, particularly through interactions the child has with her primary carer. So understood, any attempt to use his account of justice to critique the work experiences of paid domestic laborers would be of limited value. From the examples of rape and torture, however, we have already seen that he does not intend to restrict his theory to childhood development. Further, his broad definition of “love” includes “friendships, parent-child relationships, as well as erotic relationships between lovers,” which justifies understanding this dimension of recognition as continuing throughout the subject's life, and thus makes his theory potentially applicable to adult workers and their interactions with employers (see p. 95).

⁴² Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 188.

⁴³ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 182.

⁴⁴ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, p. 202.

⁴⁵ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 182.

⁴⁶ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 232.

⁴⁷ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, p. 172.

⁴⁸ Whereas personalism involves a “bilateral relationship” between employer and employee, maternalism is characterized by the employer taking a unilateral position in relation to the employee, and acting as a “benefactor who receives personal thanks, recognition, and validation of self from the domestic worker.” Ibid.

⁴⁹ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 48.

⁵⁰ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, p. 13. This analysis meshes with Kitty Calavita's study of immigrant workers in Spain and Italy, in which she shows that by treating immigrants exclusively as workers, these governments make immigrants' legal status contingent on work permits, which in turn thwarts immigrants' social participation and enjoyment of basic rights pertaining to health care and housing. Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 73, 100.

⁵¹ Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, p. 145. In this context it is also important to note the U visa, which grants immigrants who are victims of certain crimes, including involuntary servitude, domestic violence, and sexual assault, temporary legal status and work eligibility for up to four years. See < http://www.usimmigrationsupport.org/visa-u.html>. The House of Representatives bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, passed in May 2012, would make it more difficult for immigrants to qualify for the U visa, whereas the Senate bill included a measure to increase the number of temporary visas for victims of domestic violence. See < http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/politics/house-passes-domestic-violence-bill.html>. At the time of writing no new law had yet been passed.

⁵² Meagher, “Struggle for Recognition,” p. 30.

⁵³ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 8. Ira Katznelson argues that agricultural and domestic laborers, as “the most widespread black categories of employment,” were excluded from protections that New Deal labor legislation such as the NLRA and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) offered other workers due to the need for support by southern members of Congress, the latter opposing any threats to Jim Crow that granting rights to such workers might represent. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues that domestic labor's location in the home, as well as the “supposed family nature of relations in that setting,” are key to understanding why domestic work has remained outside the scope of both the NLRA and the FLSA. Glenn, Forced to Care, p. 137.

⁵⁴ Parreñas found that Filipina domestic workers in Los Angeles are largely dependent on the sensitivity of employers to limit their working hours, which means that they are “put in the position of having to find accommodating employers in order to secure fair standards of employment.” As a result, many “consider the attitude of employers to be a measure of working conditions.” Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 164.

⁵⁵ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 8.

⁵⁶ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 8.

⁵⁷ Domestic Workers United and Datacenter, “Home is Where the Work Is,” p. 36.

⁵⁸ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 30.

⁵⁹ Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, pp. 117–119. On this point Honneth echoes the sentiments of Patricia Williams who argues that “[fo]r the historically disempowered, the conferring of rights is symbolic of all the denied aspects of their humanity: rights imply a respect that places one in the referential range of self and others, that elevates one's status from human body to social being.” Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 153.

⁶⁰ Understanding how to meet this requirement in practice would clearly require a more thorough analysis of immigration and citizenship policies than I can undertake here.

⁶¹ Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, p. 122.

⁶² Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 148.

⁶³ Ibid., 141.

⁶⁴ Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. xix.

⁶⁵ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 141.

⁶⁶ Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 21.

⁶⁷ Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, p. 13.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 18–19.

⁷⁰ Zimmerman et al., Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework, p. 108.

⁷¹ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 165.

⁷² Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 62.

⁷³ Zimmerman et al., Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework, p. 108.

⁷⁴ Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, pp. 23–24.

⁷⁵ Zimmerman et al., Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework, p. 44.

⁷⁶ Quotations are taken from the company's website: < http://www.merrymaids.com/services/cleaning/php>.

⁷⁷ Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, pp. 179–180.

⁷⁸ Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, p. 68.

⁷⁹ In fact, to the extent that professionalism connotes emotional distance, some (but certainly not all) employers might actively resist this characteristic.

⁸⁰ Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. 139, 140.

⁸¹ Ibid., 140 and 57.

⁸² As Parreñas describes, this is a particular challenge for the Filipina migrant workers she studied who had to struggle “to resolve the discrepancy between the social status of their current job and actual training.” Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, p. 150.

⁸³ Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, p. 36.