Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The Spanish regulation of domestic work is torn between the peaceful and calm acceptance of some aspects and the political-legislative inaction against others that are more conflictive for different reasons. Having recently approved Convention 189, back in June 2011, it was generalized not to doubt either the timeliness of the norm and its necessity and justice, or the success of its ratification. However, today Spain has not ratified Convention 189 despite having taken the first steps to adapt its internal regulations as soon as it was approved and before it entered into force. It gives the sensation of being an agreement that has fallen into oblivion and that, except for the recurrent insistence of the still incipient associative movement, has been imbued with a laziness that precludes the necessary political action. That Spain could have ratified Convention 189 from the day after its approval and have carried out the precise modifications/adaptations of regulations without continuity solution, nobody doubts it. But this possibility has not been chosen and, in these moments of impasse, it is important to insist that the ratification of Convention 189, besides being a matter of social justice, is also important in terms of economic and social security.

Social and demographic changes lead to the need to reconfigure the usual functioning of care: while care demands increase and diversify, the actual capacity of their coverage by families decreases. The response from the State to this imbalance is clearly insufficient, typical of a welfare state that shifts the responsibility of care to the family and that is mainly assumed by women. Given this situation, families resort to the outsourcing of care. As a private strategy, the use of domestic service, which is no longer associated with social position, is particularly highlighted. Although the hiring of people for care implies a way of economically recognizing tasks that have never been considered productive, the regulation of the sector is insufficient and reflects a clear legal and political disinterest. So, we are at a crossroads where neither familiar or state care solutions are sufficient. First, the family cannot cover the care need. Secondly, the State does not provide adequate and sufficient public care alternatives. Overall, lack of regulation for domestic workers clearly differentiates these workers from others from a legal standpoint, causing a double vulnerability in workers and in the receptors of care.

The present work constitutes the first part of a double legal-economic study about domestic employment in Spain. Specifically, this part analyzes in detail the personal (age, sex, nationality, training, etc.) and legal-labor (temporality, bias, seniority, effective working day, etc.) characteristics of the different types of domestic employment. This has been done through a detailed exploitation of microdata from the Labour Force Survey.

 This work is the complementary part of the double legal-economic study on domestic employment in Spain which has been made for this special issue. It is now address, once the legal-labor regime and the personal conditions of domestic workers have been analyzed, what is the translation of those circumstances -characterized by instability, precariousness, low wages, physical overwork, etc., - to the socio-economic situation of these workers and, especially, of their homes. For this, the analysis addresses a multitude of indicators such as the situation or not of social exclusion, of material deprivation, as well as the rest that the Life Conditions Survey contributes not directly integrated in the previous two.

Nowadays, reconciliation of family and working life constitutes an essential element of social analysis, as social transformations of the last decades have positioned this issue as a key part of the social structure. In Spain, as well as in other countries, domestic work has emerged as a solution to fulfil the needs of the native population. Consequently, a relegation of a deep reflection towards gender relations and social organization has taken place. The role of domestic workers as facilitators of everyday life questions the possibilities of these women to exercise their own work-life balance. This article, therefore, has the double aim of analysing the process of reconciliation acquired through domestic work as well as the strategies developed by the workers inside the sector.  

This article shows a panoramic view of the household tasks in the Roman age within a social, economic and legal context of the general Work in Antiquity. Finally, it will also be described the way in what the Sources refer to a typical case of the female household tasks: the case of nutrices or wet nurses.

During 2018, the Permanent Seminar on Domestic Work has been activated within the framework of a project subsidized by the Institute for Women. Much of the results have been written down in the articles compiled in the first part of this issue. It has been shown that domestic service work is such a multifaceted reality, as it needs diverse wholistic legal approaches, unavoidable in a demographic and economic context with the current one.

Domestic workers experience the most severe forms of exploitation and this has its roots in the history of slavery, colonialism and other forms of servitude. In practice, it can be very difficult to determine whether domestic work constitutes forced labor, servitude or domestic slavery. However, it is necessary to differentiate the cases of servitude, forced labor and trafficking in human beings from the imposition of illegal work conditions.

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Domestic and care work is an essential component for the welfare and sustainability of society. Paradoxically, employment in the family home is perpetuated as a task for women who, regrettably, work in most cases in conditions of modern servitude; The reason is that, as it continues to be a work that lies exclusively in the private sphere of households, the public authorities have not designed adequate policies, nor earmarked sufficient resources, nor valued a service that has traditionally been Provided free of charge by women, in their homes or, in precarious conditions, in the house of others.   The objective of this work is to analyse the impact of public policies in the field of stewardship and reconciliation of family and labor interests from the perspective of the domestic worker. This isdone in response to a double vision, which structures the study in two parts: on the one hand, the position of the home employee as a key element, in the absence of public alternatives, to achieve the reconciliation of domestic and labor interests of the families and, on the other, as a beneficiary of the conciliation measures envisaged. The analysis of the positions maintained by the courts of justice, through the study of recent sentences, on a topic of vital importance as the maternity of the worker completes the analysis.