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Domestic work is a very special sector of employment today that is dominated by migrant (both EU and non EU) workers and which may include severe cases of exploitation. The issue is particularly challenging because the sector is usually considered as one that can be neither regulated nor made transparent like other areas of the labour market. This is due to the private nature of the workplace – the home – and the intimate character of the job undertaken: looking after a young child or elderly parent, or fulfilling house chores that concern one’s everyday private life. In addition, the privatisation of care and welfare that has been taking place across Europe in the last couple of decades and the concomitant increase of migrant flows has encouraged a proliferation of paid domestic work: it is no longer only the affluent families that hire domestic and care workers – an increasingly large sector of the middle and lower middle classes do that too.
When doing research on the different moral and emotional tensions that employers face, one realises that employers rarely conceive of themselves as such. They are not like big firms that employ workers to manufacture goods nor are they like land owners or agricultural entrepreneurs interested in securing a seasonal labour force. They are involved in a sector that does not produce any product nor any profit – they pay for the service, for as long as the service is needed. They are often not familiar with either the legal or the managerial aspects of hiring and overseeing someone. This, of course, can have the positive effects of being grateful to the care worker or of treating her/him as ‘one of the family’, but it may also have the negative effects of not respecting the labour rights of the worker or of truly exploiting her/him.
