"La familia del emigrante", Elentir/Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
In the last three decades, the number of women migrating to Spain for work in the domestic care sector has increased. Migrant women involved in this sector attend to the pressing reproductive and care necessities of Spanish families within the framework of a dying welfare state. Many of us entered Spanish households as undocumented workers and, in most cases, as live-in employees (or internas in Spanish). The working conditions for domestic workers, and especially for internas, are often exploitative and include:
- • A lack of a formal labour contract and an absence of employer contributions to social security;
- • The inclusion of the in-kind income (comprising food and lodging) within the monetary wage, resulting in drastic and arbitrary salaries;
- • Wages ranging from €400 to €800 a month with extensive working hours, characterised by a demand for the almost total availability of the worker and endorsed under the ambiguous legal figure of "time of presence" , which has institutionalised live-in work. Time of presence is the time in which the worker is present in the employer’s household, outside working hours and without performing effective work, but available on demand. According to the legislation, time of presence must be agreed between the employee and the employer and must be paid in money or in kind, but results in arbitrariness;
- • A lack of social protections;
- • Arbitrary payment of dismissal settlements.
While workers in Spain should theoretically be protected from the labour abuses listed above under the Workers’ Statute, this is not always the case in reality.
