Conference Agenda

The last three years of living through the covid-19 pandemic recalled how essential care work is for sustaining livelihoods and underlined care as a public policy concern. While care is now recognised as “essential,” domestic workers that are the backbone of the care economy are too often excluded in policymaking and rendered invisible in mainstream discourses. They remain severely underpaid as their labour is systematically devalued and informalised.

Their experiences require that we pay attention to the ways multiple systems of power collude to disenfranchise workers in the care economy. For example, a 2022 study by Egna Legna Besidet shows migrant domestic workers in Lebanon face heightened threats of violence with little to no recourse to access justice; and domestic workers are excluded from the labour law and their migrant status is tied to their employer under a restrictive visa regime called the Kafala system.

The mostly informal nature of domestic work also limits access to social and legal protections. These exclusions not only heighten economic precarity but also limit the ability to unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions.

Domestic worker movements play a vital role in demonstrating the importance of care work and the need for the public provisioning of care to ensure we are building feminist economies. In this tradition, this roundtable discussion will bring together domestic workers, activists, and scholars to offer alternative feminist worker-centred visions of care economies.

This multigenerational dialogue is a collaboration between the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) and aims to bridge connections across theory, policy and lived experiences to expand narratives on care and position domestic worker voices more prominently in the discourse. The conversation will unpack how the interconnected structural inequalities of race and class are embedded in global care chains and speakers will discuss cross regional experiences and the missing pieces across migration, labour and care policies.