Olga Cojocaru, Anna Rosińska.
2018.
Double time-bind in paid domestic work: migrant workers and their employers in Italy and Poland.
Kultura i Społeczeństwo Culture and Society, nr. 4 special issue „Dinamics of work and Life changes”
Abstract
This paper puts forward a two-sided approach to late capitalist time regimes in
paid household work by comparing the experience of time of domestic workers and domestic
employers. Their time-related strategies are confronted with the aim of revealing
common underlying patterns as well as possible divergences. First, migrant domestic
workers’ strategies to cope with the (time) particularities of domestic work (e.g. asynchronies,
free time deficit, long working hours, boredom) are analysed. Second, the
experience of time of professionally active domestic employers, who in turn are pressured
in their professional lives and employ domestic workers to meet these demands,
is examined. The authors argue that domestic employers’ and workers’ time regimes
interact and reinforce one another, creating a double time-bind. The data are drawn
from Cojocaru’s research project on migrant domestic workers in Italy and Rosińska’s
research on employers as well as local and migrant workers in Poland.
Keywords
domestic work, care work, workers, employers, time
