Domestic Work in 21st Century Brazil — A Slavery Legacy
Whenever I return to Rio de Janeiro for summer vacation, someone hosts a family lunch or dinner. Uncles, aunts, and cousins gather in the living room, snacking on peanuts and chips until the main course is served. In the summer of 2015, I had just graduated high school and was going to stay for two months in the city until I left for university abroad, in late August. At the dinner table, I sat next to my then seven-year-old cousin, who had tons of questions concerning my school. After she quickly gulped down her food, I handed her my phone so that she could browse through the photos I had taken over the past year. She went through them fast but stopped to examine closer the pictures I had taken at prom. That’s my roommate, Jenn, I mentioned as she got to the picture of me hugging a blue-eyed, strawberry blonde hair girl. You look pretty, my cousin tells me. She swipes onto the next picture, which also got her attention. It was of me with another friend, Samia, in the same style: my hand was around her waist and we held each other tight, laughing at the faces I remember our friends made behind the camera. But this picture elicited something different: curiosity. My cousin asked me, is this your nanny?
Her mother, who sat next to her, and who had been glancing at the pictures between bites, laughed at her daughter’s question. No, I replied in the sweetest way I could at that moment. This is my friend, too. An uncle at the opposite end of the table began asking if we were ready to move on to dessert, and as my cousin’s attention quickly turned to this more interesting subject matter, she gave me my phone and put it back into my pocket. As people began standing up, collecting the dirty dishes and replacing them with bowls for ice cream, I sat back to digest what had happened. Samia was Nigerien — a beautiful, black girl with braided hair falling past her shoulder. That night, she wore a beautifully beaded, long, white dress. Why was the first thought that came to a seven-year old’s head be that she was my nanny?
Unfortunately, I could understand her logic right away. It made complete sense once I stopped to think about it, really. My cousin was born into a middle-class family, living in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Rio and attending its most prestigious school. In a reality like that, there are very few spaces for black people. The black people were few, background characters.
I stood up and went to the kitchen, taking my empty plate and cutlery along to place them on the counter. Liz, their domestic worker, was there, barely a third through the pile of dirty dishes crowding the sink. I asked if I could help her at all, and she thanked me, insisting that she was fine and that I should go sit with everybody to have ice cream. Liz surely enough the one black person my cousin is close to, I thought then. To an outsider, this deduction might seem nonsensical considering a country that’s predominantly black. Unfortunately, my family is almost a perfect caricature of the reality of most middle-to-upper class, white Brazilians.
Despite having one of the ten biggest economies in the world today, Brazil undeniably still operates on the same institutional structures — economic, social and political — built by slavery. The country’s consistent preservation of its inequalities, segregation and marginalization of its most vulnerable makes it impossible for us to evolve out of this racist framework (and yes, necessarily racist).
After all, slavery was only abolished 131 years ago. It successfully structured and dominated every facet of Brazil for the three and a half centuries before that. And the black woman, who was the biggest victim of this intersectional oppression, shows how heartbreakingly strong this structure still holds in the field of domestic work.
Before even discussing domestic work itself, the discrepancies between black and white realities in Brazil speak for themselves. The 2010 national census points that the chances of a black person being illiterate was almost five times higher than that of their white counterpart. Twenty-one percent of those in extreme poverty were black. For every three murders in the country, two of the victims are black. Although 50.7% identified as black in the national census, they are extremely underrepresented in politics: only 125 out of the 513 representatives (24.4%) elected in 2018 to the federal lower house were black. I could go on with statistics but the bottom line remains — Brazil is a racist society, with the majority population facing severe disadvantages in every facet in relation to other Brazilians.
It is an objective reality that black women are overrepresented in precarious fields of labor — with almost 40% of black women in such fields, compared to only 20.6% of white men in 2016. It makes sense, unfortunately: young women from low-income areas face limited work opportunities due to a mix of low levels of education, limited work qualifications, ‘proper’ social etiquette, etc. Domestic work, a line of work historically marked by humiliation and even aggression is a perfect fit for their profile. Although many domestic workers see their occupation as ‘transitory’ and as a safehold until something better comes along, opportunities for black women within the labor market are limited. Consequently, so are their chances of any upward social mobility.
The precarity of the field of domestic work is a product of history: of a culture built on and around free slave labor, and a collective undervaluing of domestic, manual, ‘female’ chores. The Golden Law of 1888 that legally abolished slavery did exactly and only that. No efforts were made by the Crown nor the newly-formed Republic (declared one year after) to integrate this significant portion of the population into society. The country’s collective consciousness was not able to simply discard the social order of 1888 and construct a new, racially equal one; the precarity and injustices faced by slaves were simply tweaked to fit the newly established conception of ‘acceptable’ and so they lived on. Black women and their male counterparts saw no other option other than continuing to fulfill the same functions they had under the former socioeconomic system. Although the pay for a domestic worker was and continues to be ridiculously low, it was one of the most direct ways that black women could insert themselves into the labor market. Even today, despite new and evolving conceptions that are formulated either legally, socially or politically, the country has not yet been able to outgrow this traditional racist framework.
So domestic work continues to be an informal and irregular line of work. Brazil’s legal system has historically excluded domestic workers when addressing workers’ rights — reflecting and reinforcing Brazilian society's values. The system provided limited protection and guaranteed few rights to these workers; only in 2013 and 2015 did we see constitutional amendments that gave them the same legal standing as any other worker. So historically, domestic workers have historically worked without official work papers and negotiated terms directly with their employers. Although some may argue that this flexibility brought domestic workers certain benefits such as somewhat flexible hours, they are typically outweighed by the cons. Undocumented workers usually receive less than minimum wage, often work overtime, often end up doing jobs that they hadn't agreed upon(such as taking care of the family's children), don’t get the legally stipulated breaks, don’t receive a thirteenth salary, and may even getting fired without any forewarning. Although the legislature has made significant strides towards equal worker rights for this contingent of women workers, Brazilian society continues to lag behind: the white portion of the population that has always relied on this cheap source of labor was against these amendments. The sitting president himself, who was a federal congressman the time this amendment was addressed in the House, opposed it. The equal standing it provided for these workers was incompatible with the wealthier, white population’s collective conception of what this labor force is and should be: inferior. To make matters even more indigestible, these rights directly implied that their labor services became more expensive. Domestic workers are now finding it harder to get jobs.
The emotional ties often created in this line of work don’t make it easier for these women to get their deserved respect as professionals. Many workers have admitted to accepting a lower salary because of her attachment to the children of the family; saying they keep pictures of the children they work with over the years in personal photo albums. This intimacy is often what makes the informality and irregularity of the job so okay — because the relationship is more personal than professional. Employers think — I gave her my old mattress as a present last week, she will understand I can’t pay her today, right? She’ll understand that I was extremely busy today to pay her. Intimacy becomes a weapon: the employee is no longer an employee but an intimate friend. The affection between them is an effective tool for the employee to sidestep the most basic of worker rights.
Having my grandmother’s domestic worker refuse to sit at the dining room table with me "just because", hearing stories of employers who are months behind on payments and seeing white children walking to and from school hand-in-hand with their black nanny — these things are no anomalies. In the homes and streets of elite neighborhoods like Ipanema or Leblon, you can’t miss it. And there are so many more aspects to this dynamic that make up the bigger picture: the segregation in the family home, the segregation in buildings, the unofficial uniforms designated for this group of women, the typical accounts of humiliation, intimidation and the frequent explicit racism.
Although this is a black women's struggle, it implicates the wealthiest white minority more than anyone else. Families like my own continue to benefit from this oppressive social order and thus adhere to it, convincing themselves it is all done in the best, purest of intentions. The conditions of these workers will not improve as they need to unless those who benefit from this order begin treating them as professionals and their services as a transaction. This means respecting their rights and abiding by our legal and moral responsibilities as employers. Only when we truly and fully do right by these professionals can we begin to talk about love and affection.
