Crossing Boundaries. Rethinking labour history through the lens of paid domestic work

Abstract

The author of this paper investigates the developments in labour history and emphasizes the significance of global labour history in rethinking the fundamental concepts of social and labour history, as well as the working class, beyond free wage work and male and white factory workers in the global north. She emphasizes the relatively recent intersection of labour history and domestic work studies, and her main contribution to the topic is the deconstruction of boundaries between public and private spaces, as well as the linking of studies on labour coercion and im/mobilities through the lens of migrant paid domestic work.
According to that, in the second section of the paper, she provides some fresh research horizons, beginning with her case study on the experiences of capeverdean, eritrean, ethiopian and filipino domestic workers in Rome between 1970 and 1989. Furthermore, this analysis puts into doubt the notion that Italy suddenly changed from an emigration to an immigration country in the late 1980’s.