From Servitude to Service Work

Does moving domestic work into the market remove its inequalities? Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s 1992 article uses historical comparison to analyze the racial and gender organization of paid reproductive labor in the United States. It rejects two disadvantages simply added together, asking instead how women’s different positions are produced within connected relationships.

Three histories, not one female experience

The comparison concerns Black women in the South, Mexican-origin women in the Southwest and Japanese women in California and Hawaii. Different legal classifications, employment restrictions and ideas about suitability for service shaped access to other work. Images of supposedly submissive or dependent workers enabled employers to portray extracting labor as benevolence.

Differences between women are consequently more than parallel experiences. One household’s comfort is connected to another woman’s low pay and limited time. Workers also negotiate, refuse and maintain their own kin relationships; the history does not make them passive occupants of an assigned place.

Institutions reorganize rather than erase hierarchy

As reproductive labor moves into hospitals and other service institutions, authority, job descriptions and spatial or temporal segregation can replace face-to-face household domination. Occupational ranks and racial divisions in nursing can redirect conflict toward nurses and aides rather than the administrators and professionals controlling broader conditions. Marketization and professionalization may change the form of inequality without removing it.

This US historical analysis is not a description of every domestic labor market or present-day labor law. Continuity also does not mean that nothing changes. Servants of Globalization extends the reading into migration and transnational households. ILO Convention No. 189 supplies concrete questions about labor protections. Their shared issue is whose independent life still depends on somebody else’s service remaining difficult to see and adequately value.