ILPC 2026

The private domestic work and the cleanliness work are undervalued in the salary and culturally in the region, as well as being highly precarious and feminized. These because both of them have traditionally been associated with the natural abilities of women (Federici, 2012), or have been learned by them from a very early age in their homes.

This work is characterized by a high proportion of women participating in these activities (according to CASEN, in Chile, 98% and 73.4% of the workers in these occupations are women respectively) and the material/concrete characteristics they assume, which are basically the same in these two occupations: cleanliness and care. The workers of both occupations, in the course of their lives, often switch between these two occupations, reproducing many times the trajectories of their mothers, and having to take care of the domestic work of their own homes as well.

Despite these material and sociodemographic similarities of the workers, the ways, logic and reasons for the control of the work process in both occupations seem to be quite different. Although the labor force in both occupations goes through the commodity form before entering the workplace, in private work this commodity is consumed "unproductively", while in cleanliness work in companies it is consumed "productively". That is, in the last one, the commodity is consumed in order to obtain a profit and accumulate by a capital (Tronti, 2001).

This qualitative paper, It plans to describe and compare the mechanisms of control existing in the two mentioned occupations, where one seems to establish the classic industrial relation (worker and capital), while the other seems to go "beyond the factory" (De la Garza, 2011). For this investigation, more than 15 workers from both occupations were interviewed, in order to know the various actors who are involved and that control their work, as well as to know the many methods and technologies used for this purpose. In the first occupation, the outsourcing is widely diffused, control is exercised via intermediate supervisors who are also workers, there is a routine/standardization of work and an institutional-material commitment to the subcontracting companies. In the second occupation affections play a key role in control. That is, feminine emotions and roles are used for the exploitation of women.