Between Labor, Love and Decent Work: Domestic Worker Organizing across National Contexts
Kritika Pandey, University of Southern California
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, Meeting Room F
This research examines standardization of labor rights under global capitalism through domestic worker narratives on organizing at the intersection of the public and private spheres. While demands for varying forms of care services are increasing worldwide, this labor sector continues to be characterized by heightening precarity. Previous studies have shown how collective action in commodified reproductive labor counters invisibilization at the hands of the State through producing a global worker identity rooted in legal recognition. I investigate collective action for domestic worker rights across two national contexts (India and the US), post the establishment of global guidelines in the form of the ILO convention 2011 (titled Decent Work for Domestic Workers). I focus on paid domestic work as a site where relationships between workers and employers involve both economic transactions and fraught intimacies to explore how this economy-intimacy binary engages with institutionalized social movement structures. Drawing on 38 months of fieldwork across Los Angeles (US) and Delhi (India), I engage a transnational feminist framework to show how organizing in paid domestic work involves dynamic interactions between global conversations on standardization of labor and everyday informality embedded in strenuous social relationships. This project centers relational exchanges between activists, workers and employers, to highlight the dialectical relationship of global discourse with specific localized contexts as well as possible limitations of collective action frameworks rooted in legal recognition and formalization. In doing so, I establish how complex interdependence, conflicting discourses of decent work and complex affective exchanges at the workplace complicate a seemingly standardized rights discourse.
Hosted by The Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
Sponsored by The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Next Systems Studies.
