Workers Like All the Rest of Them

In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, under-regulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism have both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality

Luchar contra la exclusión. Los trabajadores domésticos y sus aliados demandan una legislación laboral, 1923-1945

Traducción “En efecto…elevamos a la consideración del Honrable Congreso de 1924…un memorial en el que, haciendo muchas y justificadas consideraciones, solicitábamos se nos concediera o reconociera derecho a sufragio: pero los congresales de aquel entonces no se preocuparon de la petición que hacíamos los mismos quien en sus hogares manteníamos la higiene, cuidábamos de sus intereses y a veces arriesgábamos la vida en su defensa. Hubo necesidad del salvador movimiento revolucionario para que, ..

La historia detrás de las cifras: la evolución del censo chileno y la representación del trabajo femenino, 1895-1930

<abstract language="eng">Historians have regularly assumed the transparency of census statistics on women’s employment in Chile, which suggest a steady decline in female employment -particulary in industry- from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Arguing that quantitative sources are like other historical documents social constructions, this article first explores the limitations of the Chilean census as an accurate measure of female economic activity. The article hen shows how, because the progressive "modernization" of the census implied substantive changes in the collection and interpretation of census data, women’s economic activity became increasingly invisible as the century progressed. This critical reading of census materials allows us both to question contemporary assumptions about women’s economic participation and to examine the changing notions of labor that were integral to the formation of state labor and welfare policies in early twentieth-century Chil

Identidades y Alianzas: El movimiento chileno de las Trabajadoras de Casa Particular durante la Guerra Fria

Social movements went through radical swings in Cold War Chile, taking up reformist and revolutionary politics and seeking responses to their movements’ demands from the State. Organized in small unions and Catholic associations over the course of the twentieth century, women employed in domestic service – known as empleadas or “household workers” – also sought out new allies in this period, strengthening ties with political parties and with the women’s movement that had grown more powerful under dictatorship. This investigation analyzes the emergence these alliances and their results: it examines debates over new laws, the regional expansion of empleadas’ associations, as well as women’s occupational and gender identity within the household workers’ movement. Drawing on archival sources, as well as oral histories with the movement’s leaders, this article deepens our understanding of household workers from the perspective of labor and gender history