Bringing Law Home - (Articulations: Studies in Race, Immigration, and Capitalism) by Katherine Eva Maich

About the Book

"The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace"--

Book Synopsis

The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

Review Quotes

"'Is there a law?' puzzled New York City employers asked West Indian domestic worker Carla, one of the subjects of Katherine Maich's revelatory book. Yes, there are laws nominally protecting household workers. But Maich shows how entrenched racial and gender hierarchies, legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the power ideological separation between 'home' and 'work' undermine those laws' effect. Full of important lessons about work, law, power, and inequality, the book also explores how we could achieve a more just future." --Chris Tilly, University of California, Los Angeles

"Given the place of the home as constitutive of the private sphere, how do we regulate it as a workplace? What does it mean to have 'labor rights at home' and what limits to labor legislation exist there? These questions allow Maich to turn the literature on its head and create space for new contributions. An exciting and compelling book!" --Carolina Bank Muñoz, University of Massachusetts Amherst

"That the law is 'all over' is a truism in socio-legal studies, but research that explores how the law operates in the most hidden places in our society is exceedingly rare. This book is bound to be a classic in law and society research and a critical empirical resource for those advocating for the expanding workforce of those laboring inside the home and beyond most employment based rights." --Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Katherine Eva Maich is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University.