To imagine what the room in which a live-in domestic worker lives is like, you have to think of a room generally without windows, a six-foot or six-foot bed, a small TV and almost no space to store clothes and personal items. And that's if the room exists.
Explains Edith Espínola, a former domestic worker who now leads the Empowerment Center for Domestic and Care Workers (CETIC), in which they provide legal, psychological advice and other tools to domestic workers, it is very common for caregivers to Dependent elderly people are asked to sleep in an extra bed next to the person in their care, in case the person falls or needs a diaper change during the night. “There is no rest. “Domestic work is the only one in which the working conditions are still from the 15th century,” she denounces Espínola.
During the six years in which this Business Administration graduate worked as an intern, after emigrating from Paraguay, she encountered different situations. She took care of an elderly woman who did not allow her to use hot water to shower (she “said that cold water was good for your health”); She also lived in a huge four-story villa in La Finca, the famous urbanization where Cristiano Ronaldo, Iker Casillas, Marc Márquez and Cristina Pedroche have had homes. But she occupied a small windowless chamber in the basement, next to the ironing room and the pantry. She did not have her own bathroom and was told to use the guest bathroom. “I felt like just another household appliance, and I always thought that if there was a fire or something like that, the first one to die was going to be me.”
As an extern, she worked in a house in Madrid near the Santiago Bernabéu that had a service elevator and its own door, directly to the kitchen. As a counselor at CETIC she has heard worse stories. Just this week, that of a woman employed as a caregiver who suffered a situation of humiliation and abuse with food. “They told him that whatever was left over from the family, they would grind it into a porridge and that would be his dinner and her lunch. He spent 15 days like this,” she explains.
These degrading housing solutions are inseparable from the violation of labor rights, explains Espínola. On the one hand, it is almost impossible to establish a standard schedule, since there is no place to go when work is done. And in reality the work is never finished. The days often begin at six or seven in the morning with breakfast and can end later than eleven at night, if the kitchen has to be cleaned up after dinner.
On the other hand, many employers do not register workers who live at home, so they must allocate part of their salary to pay for a room in a much more affordable neighborhood, generally very far from the one where they work, to store their belongings. things and being able to access, for example, health care. When Espínola worked at La Finca, for example, which is in Pozuelo de Alarcón, north of Madrid, she rented a room in Colonia Jardín, about 40 minutes away by public transport. To go to the doctor, she had to request a permit of about two or three hours, including travel, lines and assistance, which she then had to return.
“In the end, you avoid getting sick, you take any pills to avoid going to the doctor. It has been shown that those who use health services the least are migrants, who make up 80% of domestic work,” she explains. Mental health is also highly compromised, something that became even more evident during the pandemic and confinement, when domestic workers were effectively locked in their workplaces.
According to a 2021 Oxfam report, there are about 40,000 live-in employees in Spain, a number that SEDOAC (Active Domestic Service) activists find very low, since it does not take into account the large number of women who work as cleaners or caregivers in the underground economy. “According to data from the EPA, there are some 558,000 domestic workers in Spain, and we estimate that 54% of these workers are in the intern regime,” says Espínola.
The prevalence of domestic work and the internal regime in Spain has always marked a kind of anomaly within Europe. According to ILO studies, Spain is the Western country that has the highest percentage of the active population dedicated to domestic work, followed by Portugal, France, Greece and Italy.
The figure of the live-in worker, very common during all the stages of Franco's regime in bourgeois houses, declined in the seventies, when the hourly maid model emerged, but it rebounded in the nineties with the arrival of immigration, explains David García-Asenjo Llana, architect and co-author, together with José María Echarte, of the conference Doll's House (incomplete). The housing of domestic service workers in Spanish bourgeois housing (1950-1970), which they gave at a conference dedicated to architecture and gender held last year in Valencia.
“The profile of the interim employee was that of a young woman, around 35 years old, an internal emigrant, single and, in most cases, outside the social protection systems of the Franco regime,” they explain in the document. . The 35-year-old thing is not a coincidence. Right up until that age was when the Montepío of the Domestic Service granted a “dowry” of 3,000 euros to live-in employees if they got married. “It was understood that the member became a wife and therefore became subject to the authority of her husband,” she explains.
In those apartments, not even houses, of “the technocratic urban bourgeoisie” the “imprecise figure” of the employee with whom they lived was incorporated and who was generally located in a service area with two beds, attached to the ironing room. and the pantries, like an interior appendage to the kitchen. In many of these houses there was an office, which served as a space for exchange, “free from the odors that are produced in the kitchen.” The service was confined to that space, explains García-Llana, “which was increasingly smaller. The less means the family had, the worse the working conditions were. You could not have money, but it was unthinkable not to have service, it was an aspirational element.
The service used their space and went out to the main area to work and care. The bathroom was their own, they ate in the kitchen and barely left there to go shopping and one afternoon or one morning one day a week.” Even in a not too large apartment, about 100 square meters, the head of the family, that is, the man, could never set foot in that area of his house, “because of the idea that care is not work and so as not to mix with issues specific to the female gender. The service was invisible, it acted behind the life of the family, almost like a piece of furniture. This is perfectly seen in the film La madriguera, by Carlos Saura.”
Although “there are fantastic employers who want to do things right,” according to Espínola, things haven't really changed that much since then. The well-being of these workers continues to depend on that, on the will of the employer, and it is a sector generally outside the surveillance of inspections. The agreement stipulates about 40 hours of work, plus 20 hours of presence, and that at least 36 consecutive hours of rest must be granted, but in practice this is a rarity that hardly occurs among inmates.
Espínola, who now lives in Segovia (because of the rental prices) and travels to Madrid every day to advise domestic workers and families who want to employ them, is categorical: “If all the hours that a worker actually works were quoted, there would not be this demand. And if the state complied with public policies, it would not leave the care of people on the shoulders of women with broken bodies.”
