Paid Domestic Work

INTRODUCTION

Paid domestic work’s global scope and the necessity to improve its generally harsh working conditions, invisibility and undervaluation worldwide have been in 2011 recognized by the adoption of the international labour standards contained within the ILO Convention (No. 189) and the Recommendation (No. 201) concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Given its isolation from the public gaze and its gendered nature, by which I mean that it rests on “the daily operations of both masculinity and femininity in relationship to each other and to the workings of power” (Enloe 2007, 244), domestic work tends to be systematically rendered invisible and undervalued, including within the sphere of public policy. In many countries, domestic

The present international regulatory framework, thus, aims to address the long-standing policy gaps and to encourage efforts to professionalize, formalize and recognize the value of paid domestic work, which is associated with and overwhelmingly performed by women marginalized along class, race/ethnic or

On the other, however, the measures to regulate domestic service sector are being promoted by the European Commission, as well as transnational and national lobby groups, in order to create jobs for low-skilled, long-term unemployed, to reduce informal economy, and support reconciliation of work and family (Morel 2015). Thus, even though both of the strands of efforts for policy change somewhat converge in solution, they decisively differ in the representation of the policy problem, including that of gender inequality and social injustice; as well as how domestic workers as subjects are constituted within them. Scrutinizing how these problem representations have been grounded in the policy texts on regulation of paid domestic work in the Czech Republic, I argue that the policy processes silence normative assumptions on gender inequality and social injustice pertinent to the domestic work sector, rather than privilege