ILPC 2026

 Domestic workers’ struggles for labor rights—both historically and currently—draw attention to the private sphere of the home as an unregulated site of gendered and racialized labor that has often been overlooked across historical moments and economic configurations. The privacy of the home often masks the social relations of intimacy, power, love, and exploitation that take place inside of it, where domestic work remains socially necessary work within the global economy.

Through a global North/South comparison set in New York City and Lima, Peru, two large urban centers of migration with recent legislation for domestic workers, I focus on the home and show that in order to consider the home as a site of work, we must also understand it as a site of law.

I ask, given the place of the home as constitutive of the private sphere, how do we regulate it as a workplace? How do we bring legislated labor protections into the home? And, once there, how do they shape the lives of the very domestic workers they were designed to protect?

Drawing from 10 months of ethnography in Lima and 8 months in New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, legislative transcripts, and demographic survey data, I show how progressive labor laws for domestic workers are stifled by historically-entrenched patterns of racialization and labor informality. I find that the Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations, codifying preexisting inequalities and shaping a labor regime of colonial domesticity around body, space, and time inside Lima’s contemporary homes.  In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration, thus establishing a labor regime of immigrant domesticity instead of improving working conditions. These implications hold importance for our understanding of regulating informality in relationship to (new) sites of re/production.