Historical Perspectives on Domestic Worker Organizing

Conversation featuring Elizabeth Quay Hutchison and Premilla Nadasen. Moderated by Nara Milanich.

The history of domestic worker organizing illustrates how domestic workers have mobilized to transform their working lives and, in the process, have built a movement with a distinctive approach to labor organizing. In this conversation, historians Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (University of New Mexico) and Premilla Nadasen (Barnard College) explore the contours of this history in the United States and Chile, analyzing the changing labor relations of domestic service over the course of the 20th century and linking questions about domestic workers’ employment, migration, family life, and political activity 
to broader class, political, and ethnic relations.