Our societies see the development of direct service jobs to people at high speed, which we suspect of hiding a return of domesticity. How to ensure that those who exercise these professions escape the pathologies of dependence and paternalism ? The example of Brazil offers lighting on these questions.
Democratic societies seem to be able to get rid of the shadow of domesticity. Jobs in the home help sector actually experience a notable development, participate in social protection and are the subject of a desire for professionalization. But no matter how much we agree on the usefulness of personal services in family help and the care of dependence, nothing helps: these jobs never manage to depart from an servile dimension. They are also precarious, poorly paid and made, for the most part, by women who belong to the poorest groups. For these reasons, among other things, those who execute them do not identify with a profession and, when they nevertheless manage to organize themselves, their organizations occupy a position dominated in the field of unionism.
In current debates on personal services, the case of Brazil is interesting in more than one title. Long conceived as a private affair from person to person, domestic employment has recently entered the public sphere. Promulgated in the aftermath of the military regime (1964-1985), the 1988 Federal Constitution granted new social rights to domestic workers and enabled them to organize unions. These can now claim a relatively high level of protection, especially if it is compared to the rest of Latin America. And this is all the more reaffirmed their integration into social provident, obtained in 1972, which opened the right to retirement and health insurance. Although less than 40% of domestic workers are now declared by their employers, their formalization rate has increased in a context dominated until the increase in informal employment, and these women can now, under certain conditions, assign a former boss before labor justice.
Dropping unions
Professional associations of domestic workers created since the 1960s are transformed into unions, after the 1988 Constitution abolished the requirement of a minimum representativeness and the approval of the Ministry of Labor. Their activists are invested in prerogatives, including representing the interests of the “ Professional category »Domestic workers before the judicial authorities, negotiate collective agreements and proceed to the rescision of employment contracts.
This change placed these unions in an ambivalent position. They are no longer just organizations claiming to improve working conditions. They also become legal systems inserted in the general functioning of labor justice and therefore play a role of public service.
The possibility of organizing unions and obtaining new rights began the start of a new phase of the militancy of Brazilian servants, since they must be organized to support all those aimed at unions to enforce these new rights. But if domestic workers have been legally recognized as a professional category, militant commitment has not experienced a real boom with the transformation of the association into a union. By making these unions legal actors, the 1988 Constitution also made places of services without giving them the means to ensure them properly. These organizations are therefore overwhelmed by the management of applicants and only very difficult to carry out information campaigns, to set up professional training programs and to collaborate with the various actors of social intervention.
The Syndicat de Rio de Janeiro has for example a dozen active activists, former retired or domestic servants working part -time, who perceive compensation for the permanence they ensure. The union’s resources are essentially based on the contribution requested to consult his social workers and his lawyers, as well as on a percentage deducted from the amount of the rescision of employment contracts and that of the compensation obtained before the legal justice.
If a union of domestic workers is not a public service, most of those who request it treat it as such. This results in a specific type of voltage. While the trade unionists consider it as a demanding organization and aim for the professionalization of domestic employment, the applicants hold it for an administration and do not identify with the professional category of domestic workers, an occupation experienced as a stigma that they hope to abandon in the first opportunity.
The formation of a new sense of the just
However, despite a small number of activists and the almost absence of members, the unions of domestic workers play an important role in the dissemination of a conscience of the law and the formation of a new sense of just in women earning their lives in domestic employment. They are first of all at the origin of judicial cases which see the magistrates of labor oblige an employer who did not respect the social right to sign a conciliation agreement with his former good or to order him to pay him the compensation. These unions also contribute to a better knowledge of the law of women from popular circles which, in addition to the discovery of social law, also often teach social workers how to prove paternity, obtain the payment of alimony, initiate a trial for domestic violence and access social assistance.
The relationships that domestic workers have with those for whom they work therefore obey less and less to an over -the -counter negotiation on the forms of work. The implementation of a new legal framework has indeed produced new cognitive frameworks built from social law standards. A “ good boss It is no longer only, according to an increasing number of domestic workers, the one who treats her employee with consideration, is polished, avoids overloading her, gives her gifts and helps her financially when she is in need. He is also the one who, to use the expression commonly used in the matter, “ gives the rights », That is to say who declares her and pays her share of social contributions, grants her at least one day of rest per week, lets her take all of his vacation and does not dismiss her without giving her a month of notice.
The jurisdiction and the growing judicialization of the relations of domestic workers and those who employ them in Brazil shed light on the debates on personal services in a society like French society. So, as we know, that the promoters of these activities see it as “ job deposits Others speak of a reappearance of domesticity. A more nuanced position has however been formulated: it shows that home help professions are not intrinsically unworthy and underlines the need for a legal framework which protects from dependence those who exercise them.
The transformations of domestic employment in Brazil show on this subject how much the establishment of a legal framework makes it possible to significantly identify these relationships of a paternalistic logic. Legal recognition and access to the law have in short time allowed domestic workers to think of themselves in a different day and to consider working relationships differently.
The professionalization of home help jobs, if it allows you to improve the working conditions of those who exercise them, is not a panacea. And if the implementation of a legal framework allows an unmistakable improvement, it is, in our view, the thought of care which provides to this day the deepest responses to the question of the realization of domestic work in societies which claim to be democracy, stressing that these activities must be socially valued and fairly shared between the sexes, so as not to be systematically delegated to the most deprived women.