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Bringing Law Home

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The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominan...
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  • 05 August 2025
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The personal nature of domestic labor, and its location in the privacy of the employer's home, means that domestic workers have long struggled for equitable and consistent labor rights. The dominant discourse regards the home as separate from work, so envisioning what its legal regulation would look like is remarkably challenging. In Bringing Law Home, Katherine Eva Maich offers a uniquely comparative and historical study of labor struggles for domestic workers in New York City and Lima, Peru. She argues that if the home is to be a place of work then it must also be captured in the legal infrastructures that regulate work. Yet, even progressive labor laws for domestic workers in each city are stifled by historically entrenched patterns of gendered racialization and labor informality. Peruvian law extends to household workers only half of the labor protections afforded to other occupations. In New York City, the law grants negligible protections and deliberately eschews language around immigration. Maich finds that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.

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Price: $26.00
Pages: 234
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Series: Articulations: Studies in Race, Immigration, and Capitalism
Publication Date: 05 August 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781503643239
Format: Paperback
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"'Is there a law?' puzzled New York City employers asked West Indian domestic worker Carla, one of the subjects of Katherine Maich's revelatory book. Yes, there are laws nominally protecting household workers. But Maich shows how entrenched racial and gender hierarchies, legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the power ideological separation between 'home' and 'work' undermine those laws' effect. Full of important lessons about work, law, power, and inequality, the book also explores how we could achieve a more just future." —Chris Tilly, University of California, Los Angeles
Katherine Eva Maich is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University.
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
1. Conceptualizing the Home as a Site of Work, as a Site of Law
2. Architecture of Access: Race, Space, the City, and the Peruvian Colonial Imaginary
3. Colonial Domesticity: Constructing Insider Vulnerability in Lima's Homes
4. From Slavery to Service: Continuing Struggles to Regulate Domestic Worker Rights in the United States
5. Immigrant Domesticity: Producing Outsider Vulnerability in New York City
6. Toward New Sites of Labor, Toward New Labor Rights Methodological Appendix
Comparative Law Appendix
Notes
References
Index