Domestic work as “labour niches” for Latin American immigrant women in Spain

Abstract

The following article examines the reasons why the majority of domestic workers are mainly Latin-American immigrant women. The purpose of this research is to make visible the direct connection between Spanish immigration laws, a master-servant colonial heritage, and the feminization of precarious employment in the domestic and care work sector. With a family-based State model, as it is the Spanish one, and the unequal relation between the global north and south, the immigrants from the south continue performing the tasks that the native/local population rejects. And, in the particular case of immigrant women, they find themselves forced to occupy the most impoverished and least valued fields, transferring the work from one group of women (native/local) to other (immigrants).