Are rights enough? Paid care work, embodied inequalities and domestic workers' fight for justice in Brazil and India

Abstract

Domestic workers, a labour sector overwhelmingly constituted by women from racially and caste-minoritized groups, sustain middle- and upper-class households yet remain among the least protected workers. Comparing Brazil and India, this article explains why legal recognition alone fails to transform their labour conditions. Brazil has ratified ILO Convention 189 and extended near-parity labour rights; India’s protections remain fragmented. Despite these differences, we show that in both settings relationships within private households reproduce embodied hierarchies that mark domestic tasks as ‘dirty work’ and position workers’ bodies as naturally available and surveyable. Drawing on an analysis of legal and policy texts and a critical review of ethnographic and historical studies, we argue that domestic workers’ rights gains are filtered through the household’s normative order, that is an intimate, status-based regime that routinely displaces contract – the ‘law of household workplace’. We develop a three-part critique of the limits of rights: a translation gap (household opacity and ‘like-family’ tropes undercut enforcement), a scalar mismatch (statutes govern dyads while valuation regimes are societal), and a value lock-in (dirty-work coding depresses workers’ wages and voice regardless of formal parity). Rights matter for recognition, mobilization, and baseline protections, but they do not, on their own, revalue domestic work. We conclude by outlining a programme that couples rights with institutional ‘non-reformist reforms’ that revalue domestic work, resite care beyond private live-in dependency, and revoice workers through institutions capable of reaching inside or bypassing the household.