From Servants to Workers: A Social History of Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Chile

FAIN: FT-60990-13

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Regents of the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001)

During the grant period, I will complete my book manuscript, the bulk of which I am drafting during my 2012-2013 sabbatical. In "From Servants to Workers: A Social History of Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Chile," I show how household workers in Chile have addressed their social and economic exploitation by demanding – and over time increasingly securing – rights enjoyed by other workers. My study also advances current scholarship by placing household workers at the center of Chilean labor history, employing that occupation as a lens for understanding how forms of inequality (ethnic, gender, and economic) have been both perpetuated and transformed through domestic service relations. Through this book and articles already published, I examine how and why domestic service has remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s twentieth-century economy.

Associated Products

Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile (Book)
Title: Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile
Author: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Abstract: In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, under-regulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism have both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/51208
Access Model: Open Access. Paper to be released by DUP in February, 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780822355205
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Regulando el servicio doméstico: patrones, trabajadores, y la legislación laboral en Chile y Argentina (1931-1956) (Book Section)
Title: Regulando el servicio doméstico: patrones, trabajadores, y la legislación laboral en Chile y Argentina (1931-1956)
Author: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Author: Ines Perez
Editor: Ricardo Cicerchia
Abstract: The regulation of labor relations and social rights substantially changed workers’ lives over the course of the 20th century. Domestic service, however, was only poorly and belatedly protected under labor law, and its incorporation proceeded in a slow, ambiguous, and nonlinear manner. The specific ways in which domestic service regulation emerged in Chile and Argentina, respectively, offer insight into this process and also present some important contrasts, despite the nations’ geographic proximity. In Chile, although the rights recognized for household workers were limited, the Labor Code of 1931 included an article on domestic service. In Argentina, the first comprehensive regulation for this sector was a special statute sanctioned by decree in 1956. In both cases, the “special” nature of such regulation was attributed to the place of domestic service in family life. As domestic labor was reconceptualized through legislative reform in each country, household workers gradually came to enjoy some, but not all, of the rights guaranteed to other workers.
Year: 2017
Publisher: PEI-Sur and Prohistoria Ediciones
Book Title: Región y naciones: Instituciones, ciudadanía, y performances sociales, Chile y Argentina (Siglos XIX-XXI)
ISBN: 9789873864711

Domestic Service and Labor Laws in Chile and Argentina, 1931–1956 (Book Section)
Title: Domestic Service and Labor Laws in Chile and Argentina, 1931–1956
Author: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Author: Ines Perez
Editor: Jessica Stites Mor
Editor: Brenda Elsey
Abstract: The regulation of labor relations and social rights substantially changed workers’ lives over the course of the 20th century. Domestic service, however, was only poorly and belatedly protected under labor law, and its incorporation proceeded in a slow, ambiguous, and nonlinear manner. The specific ways in which domestic service regulation emerged in Chile and Argentina, respectively, offer insight into this process and also present some important contrasts, despite the nations’ geographic proximity. In Chile, although the rights recognized for household workers were limited, the Labor Code of 1931 included an article on domestic service. In Argentina, the first comprehensive regulation for this sector was a special statute sanctioned by decree in 1956. In both cases, the “special” nature of such regulation was attributed to the place of domestic service in family life. As domestic labor was reconceptualized through legislative reform in each country, household workers gradually came to enjoy some, but not all, of the rights guaranteed to other workers.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.107
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History

“The Problem of Domestic Service in Chile, 1924-1952" (Book Section)
Title: “The Problem of Domestic Service in Chile, 1924-1952"
Author: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Editor: Dirk Hoerder
Editor: Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
Editor: Silke Neunsinger
Abstract: In Chile’s sweeping labour code of 1931, domestic servants were (among other workers) explic-itly excluded from a number of provisions, leaving them to rely on the state’s social welfare office for medical care and minimal oversight of their labor relations. In the years following that exclusion – and throughout the popular fronts, 1938-1952 – female domestic workers regularly petitioned the Labour Office, demanding payment of salaries and severance, as well as an end to employer abuses. Based on these interactions and servant use of CSO clinics, numerous le-gal, social work, and religious professionals went on to write lengthy treatises describing the negative effects of household workers’ exclusion from social legislation, advocating greater state protection. This paper draws on servant petitions, legal and social work studies, as well as newspaper, la-bour, and union records, to examine how female domestics and others understood their labour and their “rights”: as workers, citizens, and mothers. The years of Chile’s Popular Front re-gimes were critical years for the redefinition of “empleada” as a category in labour law and popular culture, which in turn contributed to the construction of myths of mestizaje and “raza chilena” that were so central to the chileanization project of Chile’s populist regimes.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: https://brill.com/view/title/26659
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers
ISBN: 978-90-04-2801

“Identidades y Alianzas: El movimiento de las Trabajadoras de Casa Particular en la Guerra Fría" (Article)
Title: “Identidades y Alianzas: El movimiento de las Trabajadoras de Casa Particular en la Guerra Fría"
Author: Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
Abstract: En el primer artículo del dossier, Elizabeth Hutchison analiza la conformación del sindicato de trabajadoras domésticas en Chile, en el contexto de las décadas centrales del siglo XX. Si bien existían organizaciones de empleadas domésticas previamente, en este período dichas trabajadoras buscaron nuevas alianzas acercándose tanto al movimiento de mujeres como a distintos partidos políticos. Al observar sus alianzas, Hutchison reconstruye modos cambiantes de concebir al servicio doméstico y a las trabajadoras que lo realizan, plasmadas en distintas denominaciones del sindicato de trabajadoras de casas particulares. Las formas fluctuantes en que las trabajadoras nombraron a sus agrupaciones a lo largo del tiempo muestran distintos posicionamientos en la esfera pública que se tradujeron en diferentes posibilidades de garantizar derechos y lograr reivindicaciones plasmados en diversos proyectos de ley que buscaron regular este trabajo. La reconstrucción de los modos de definir el servicio doméstico constituye un aspecto hasta ahora relativamente descuidado por las Ciencias Sociales para el que el abordaje histórico resulta imprescindible.
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://nuevomundo.revues.org/65303
Primary URL Description: ISBN 1626-0252
Secondary URL: https://historiapolitica.com/datos/biblioteca/124_hutchison.pdf
Secondary URL Description: Reprinted in Dossier “Trabajo, género y política en América Latina, siglos XIX y XX,” Programa Interuniversitario de Historia Política (online) 124 (May 2021)
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Nuevo mundo, mundos nuevos
Publisher: Mondes Américains

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