Workers Like All the Rest of Them

She traces its origins to a challenge from an esteemed mentor, Alicia Frohmann, who has worked on gender and development at the CEPAL in Santiago for many years. In Hutchison’s classic work on women’s labor, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex, Frohmann observed that there was very little analysis of domestic workers. Yet this has been perhaps the most common way in which most Chilean women have worked. By taking up this challenge, Hutchison’s new book must be understood as a sort of companion piece to, or a necessary extension of, Hutchison’s very important and widely cited previous study. The title of the book, Workers Like All the Rest of Them, echoes how many women domestic workers throughout the 20th Century talked about themselves and their political struggles as part of the working-class, in contraposition to a State that saw them as different. As Hutchison states, “the Chilean state continued to treat domestic and rural labor as distinct categories of work, ones regulated more by aspirational paternalism than state intervention” (18). Whether through the Sociedad el Porvenir de Empleados de Casas Particulares (1920s) or the Sindicato Autónomo de Empleados de Casas Particulares de Ambos Sexos (1926-1945) or the Sindicato de Empleadas de Casa Particular No. 2 (SINTRACAP) (1920s-present), the Sindicato Profesional de Empleados de Casas Particulares (1930s), and later the Catholic Church-backed JOC de las Empleadas (1940s and 1950s) and Asociación Nacional de Empleadas de Casa Particular (ANECAP, 1962-present), one of the main ideas presented by the text is that women domestic workers have been organizing and participating in labor and union disputes since the early 20th Century.

Intervention (counseling) · Paternalism · Picketing · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Gender Studies · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Psychology