In India, paid domestic work has expanded exponentially in India over last few decades. The growth in the sector is attributed to several factors such as the agrarian crisis, rural- urban migration, and the loss of industrial jobs. Rising urbanization alongside the expansion of the urban middle class in India has fueled the demand for paid domestic work. In fact, the prevalence of domestic help is understood to be so intrinsic to the Indian middle class life that some scholars identify it as a defining feature of this class.

Demand for domestic workers (i.e. workers engaged in care and general housekeeping activities) is on the rise in Europe. The demand is due to the interplay of various factors such as the ageing of the population, women’s participation in the labour market, inadequate public provision of care, as well as the unequal division of care […]

Video registration of the seminar “Paid domestic work: contemporary forms and past legacies,” organised by the Gender, Race & Sexuality Working Group at the European University Institute on 16 April 2014. Video and editing: Elena Borghi. Speakers: Swapna Banerjee, Vera Pavlou and Raffaella Sarti.

Women and men attach all kinds of values to the range of activities which they refer to as work. Such subjective evaluations of work are shaped by and exist in tension with cultural representations of work, and the value of work as defined in economic terms and academic and public debate. This workshop focuses on the tensions between individual and public valuations of work, and explores the ways in which the gendered construction of work sheds light on these tensions.

Although talk is always of their abolition, in this article I reflect on whether the dark triumvirate of trafficking, slavery and forced labour are actually necessary for the political and conceptual maintenance of liberal capitalism itself.

Slavery, trafficking and forced labour are crimes which sit at the far end of the labour exploitation spectrum. As Bridget Anderson observes, they are to “badness” what Apple Pie and Motherhood are to “goodness” – that is, just as we all know that apple pie and motherhood are “good”, so everybody knows that these three are “bad”. […]