No Care Economies Without Domestic Workers!

Co-created by AWID and contributors from domestic-worker, labor and feminist movements, this manifesto begins with a direct proposition: there can be no just care economy without domestic workers. It rejects the view that care matters chiefly because it sustains the “productive” economy. If governments or financial institutions recognize care as economically useful but ignore the rights, dignity and decision-making power of the people who perform it, care has simply been repackaged as a cheap input. The manifesto asks a more basic question: whose lives should the economy serve, and who gets to decide how care is organized?

One of its important moves is to define care broadly as life-sustaining work, whether it happens inside or outside the home, for public or private employers, directly or indirectly. That formulation challenges the hierarchy between formal production and private domestic labor, as well as the idea that labor rights stop at the household door. Domestic work is often excluded from ordinary ideas of skilled labor not because it requires no skill, but because it has been feminized, racialized and associated with low pay and dependency. Naming it as work matters; it matters just as much that workers can organize, refuse unjust conditions and help make the rules.

The manifesto does not present domestic workers as a single, interchangeable group. It traces how colonial, racial and caste histories persist through different institutions: Black domestic workers in Latin America and South Africa encounter legacies of slavery and segregation; migrant workers may have residence and employment tied to an employer; and caste-oppressed workers in South Asia can be confined to low-paid cleaning work and subjected to humiliation or violence. These examples are not a single map that fits every country. They show how the same kind of labor is made differently risky by identity, law and location. The household’s designation as private does not detach it from state policy or global labor markets.

The manifesto also places sexual and reproductive health, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence among domestic workers’ rights. This makes a care economy about more than wages and service provision: workers themselves need care, childcare, healthcare and rest. If low-paid women continue to provide all care inside households, reform may merely transfer unpaid burdens to another, more marginalized group of women. The text therefore calls for care to be redistributed, for supportive public infrastructure, and for domestic-worker movements’ knowledge and leadership to shape policy.

This is an advocacy manifesto, not a comparative evaluation of policy outcomes. Its examples show how institutions intersect, but it does not provide a dataset capable of measuring implementation, and it cannot replace worker organizations’ current accounts of local law and workplace conditions. Read it as a map of political questions, then pair it with Nicole Constable’s situated ethnography of migrant domestic labor in Hong Kong, Maid to Order in Hong Kong, or Katherine Ronderos’s essay on activist care and security. AWID provides the full manifesto and its contributor acknowledgments.