Regulating the Unregulated?: Domestic Workers' Social Networks

Drawing upon participant-observation and in-depth interviews, this article examines the responses of Mexican undocumented immigrant women to the organization of paid domestic labor as job work, where a domestic worker cleans house for many different employers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Job work exacer-bates the privatized nature of both the work itself and the negotiation of the employer-employee relationship, and it also confronts domestic workers with having to secure multiple employers. The women in this study dealt with these challenges by informally collectivizing and sharing information through social networks. What appears to be an extremely atomized labor relation for the domestic workers is in fact mitigated by a work culture transmitted through many social interactions. These network resources are both enabling and constraining. A front page article in the Los Angeles Times recently carried a subheading claiming that an influx of immigrants has inflated the pool of domestic servants (Wilkinson 1992), while another Los Angeles area newspaper described the travails of Latina domestics in Dickensian terms (Schmidt 1991). These media reports reflect the fact that during the 1980s particular areas of the United States, such as California, New York and urban centers with concentrated immigrant populations, witnessed a dramatic resurgence of paid domestic work. Census and