Paid Domestic Labor and the Struggle for Recognition

Paid domestic laborers make up some of the most socially marginalized, vulnerable, and exploited workers in the United States today. Understanding their precarious social position requires an appreciation of the intersection of race, gender, class, and nation, together with the historically low social status attached to domestic labor. For this reason, studying the work experiences and political activism of domestic laborers is not only valuable in helping understand their struggle; it can also offer a unique window onto the operation of social injustice in contemporary capitalist societies and point to possible remedies. The objectives of this paper are therefore twofold: 1) to explore the working conditions and experiences of paid domestic laborers in the United States, their relationships with employers, and their political activism in response to exploitation, abuse and the societal undervaluation of their occupation; and 2) to consider the extent to which Axel Honneth's theory of recognition offers theoretical resources that assist in this endeavor. I argue that while Honneth's ‘moral grammar of social conflict' and recognition-theoretic account of justice provide an invaluable conceptual framework for analyzing and critiquing the work experiences of paid domestic laborers, the theory proves insufficiently sensitive to the issues of racialized oppression and powerlessness, and to paid domestic labor's characteristic disruption of the public/private binary. The disclosure of these shortcomings thus in turn supplies a productive corrective to Honneth's theory that refines it for the contemporary US context