Double Time-Bind in Paid Domestic Work: (Migrant) Workers and Their Employers in Italy and Poland

Abstract

This paper puts forward a two-sided approach to late capitalist time regimes in paid household work by comparing the experience of time of domestic workers and domestic employers. Their time-related strategies are confronted with the aim of revealing common underlying patterns as well as possible divergences. First, migrant domestic workers’ strategies to cope with the (time) particularities of domestic work (e.g. asynchronies, free time deficit, long working hours, boredom) are analysed. Second, the experience of time of professionally active domestic employers, who in turn are pressured in their professional lives and employ domestic workers to meet these demands, is examined. The authors argue that domestic employers’ and workers’ time regimes interact and reinforce one another, creating a double time-bind. The data are drawn from Cojocaru’s research project on migrant domestic workers in Italy and Rosińska’s research on employers as well as local and migrant workers in Poland.

Conflicting temporalities and the unsustainability of the Italian model of migrant personal care assistant

“…Although paid home care work is regulated by contractual rules based on the clock time logic, it assumes typical characteristics of unpaid care activities which are based on the process time logic, that is on a plurality of intertwined times. Thus, paid home care work is characterized by having to be always available and consequently having little possibility of controlling time, by the alternation between moments of acceleration and moments of deceleration and by multiple parallel activities (Altomonte, 2016; Cojocaru & Rosińska, 2018).…”