Decolonising demand for paid domestic work and childcare: Beyond dyadic relationships and Western models

Abstract

Research on the demand for paid domestic workers tends to be based on data from the United States and Western Europe, and to explain that demand in the countries of the Global South is a result of the migration of paid domestic workers to the Global North. This article argues that we need to decolonise our explanations of the demands for paid domestic workers, and to expand them by taking into consideration the unequal division of domestic labour between men and women, and investigating the possibility of other dynamics of demand than those driven by global care chains. Decolonising the demand for paid domestic work also requires a methodological shift. We need to acknowledge that care is not necessarily situated within a nuclear family or a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman. Empirically, I draw on interviews with employers of paid domestic workers in Slovakia. In Slovakia, while negotiations around outsourcing household cleaning are embedded in relationships within the nuclear family, decisions around outsourcing childcare are embedded in relationships beyond the nuclear family, namely, those between mothers and grandmothers. While nannies and babysitters do the work previously done by the mother, in reality they serve as replacements for the grandmothers.