Latin Labor Revolt : These Days, Maids Aren’t So Domestic

RIO DE JANEIRO — During the seven years that Nadir Soares worked as a maid in the home of a large family, she started every day before dawn and often ended after 9 p.m. “The next day, get up again, the same thing,” Soares, 42, recalled recently.

She made about $45 a month, less than Brazil’s minimum monthly wage of $57. One Saturday each month was her only day off. At the end of March, Soares fell ill with high blood pressure and anemia and, after missing several weeks of work, she was fired.

Soares, a thin woman with an air of patient resignation, told her story as she waited to talk with a lawyer about what she could claim as compensation from her former employer. Other women, all maids, also waited.

No Vacation Time

Zilda da Silva, 36, wanted to ask the lawyer if she could demand pay for vacation time she never received during the six years she worked for a family. Maria Cecilia Teixeira, 37, wanted the extra pay she said she was promised for working from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. without a day off for three months.

The lawyer, Rosane Lima Franco, said about 60 maids come to her each week with questions about their legal rights. She said she helps file an average of 40 official demands a week.

“Domestic employees are unprotected, unfairly treated and alienated by the whole society,” Franco said.

That is true not only in Brazil but also in most other Latin American countries, where “domestic employees,” or maids, are a huge female underclass, numbering in the tens of millions. In some countries, most are Indians or blacks--victims of discrimination not only because of their social class and sex but also because of their race.

Miserable Wages

But Latin American domestics are increasingly less willing to accept exploitation and miserable wages with docile resignation. Around the region, there are stirrings of discontent in the quarters behind the kitchen as more domestic employees organize to defend their rights and demand their due.

More than just a campaign for labor rights, this growing movement also tackles the injustices of a class structure that has been part of Latin American social fabric for centuries.

Lawyer Franco works with Rio’s Professional Assn. of Domestic Workers, an organization that has been struggling since 1960 to improve conditions for maids and other household employees. By most accounts, the struggle made little headway until the national Congress began drafting a new Brazilian constitution in 1987.

The Rio association and similar groups from other cities began a lobbying effort that captured congressional attention. Five times between March, 1987, and September, 1988, maids gathered at the modernistic congressional building in Brasilia to demand that the constitution include basic labor rights for domestic employees.

When the new constitution was promulgated in October, it included such guarantees for maids as monthly pay of at least the legal minimum salary, 30 days’ paid vacation a year, a full day off each week, at least 30 days’ notice before dismissal, four months’ paid maternity leave and the right to organize unions.

The success has put wind in the sails of a maids’ movement that, for the first time in Brazil, is organizing on a national level. In January, a convention of nearly 40 local organizations formed a National Council of Domestic Workers.

One of the main goals of the council is to help organize unions that will defend maids’ rights and become active in the national labor movement. So far, a dozen domestic workers’ unions have been formed.

The maids’ movement continues to lobby the Congress for other laws that will give domestic employees such gains as an eight-hour workday and premium pay for overtime. The movement’s main ally in Congress is Benedita da Silva, a member of the Chamber of Deputies who once was a maid herself.

Da Silva gives the Brazilian maids’ movement full credit for its “conquests” in the new constitution.

“They fought, they struggled for that,” she said. “They conquered those rights because they are women who are organizing and are working.”

As a result of their unprecedented momentum, maids have become news. At the headquarters of the Rio association, a large bulletin board is filled with clippings of newspaper articles about the movement.

“When was the press ever interested in domestic employees? That is new,” said Odette Azevedo Soares, a social worker and long-time adviser to the association. She said publicity has helped raise awareness among the workers themselves.

“They are starting to become aware that they have rights,” she declared. “It is an arousing, an awakening to a new reality.”

In less than a year, the number of domestics who come to the Rio association for legal advice has increased from 10 or 12 a week to an average of 60. Associations in other Brazilian cities have experienced similar surges. The maids’ association in Recife, in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, has increased the office hours of its legal adviser from four to 15 a week since October.

Nila Cordeiro dos Santos, president of the Recife association and chairman of the national council, said the new constitutional guarantees have pumped life into the movement.

“Since October, after the new constitution, it began to grow a lot because the employees began to believe that change is possible,” Dos Santos said. “Before, they didn’t believe anything.”

Still, the movement’s membership includes only a small fraction of the more than 3 million Brazilians who are registered as domestic employees. And leaders of the movement say the number of unregistered maids may be nearly twice as large.

In Brazil, as in the rest of Latin America, more women are employed as domestics than in any other occupation. A study by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America estimated that at least 20% of the region’s paid female workers are domestic employees.

In most countries, a maid’s pay is no more than $30 to $50 a month, according to the 1988 book “Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Muchachas means “girls” in Spanish, a patronizing term for maids.

“Domestic workers are searching for unity and are communicating among themselves; they are attempting to integrate their struggle with other sectors of the working class while retaining their relative autonomy,” wrote the book’s editors, Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro.

In a sign of new unity, leaders of maids’ organizations from 11 countries met last year in Bogota, Colombia, and founded the Confederation of Household Workers of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Aida Moreno, a Chilean who is the confederation’s secretary general, said the organization’s main work so far has been to establish contact among maids’ groups in different countries and encourage them to organize. She said groups in some countries, including Paraguay and Guatemala, have begun to form only recently as authoritarian governments have given way to more democratic administrations.

In many countries, Moreno said, existing domestics’ groups are church-sponsored and oriented toward spiritual reflection--but such groups are becoming more militant.

“Today they are taking another line, making demands,” Moreno said. “The people are seeking to better their condition.”

The domestic servant has been at the bottom of Latin America’s socioeconomic scale since colonial times, when slaves and Indians did household work for the Spanish and Portuguese ruling class. What had been a respectable, temporary occupation for young people in much of Europe became a dead-end job for exploited Latin American women.

Just as colonial rulers once relied on Indian labor and slavery in the household, the region’s post-colonial middle classes rely on the institution of the domestic employee.

“It has its origins in slavery,” said Celma Vieira, a Brazilian historian and social researcher.

Middle-class apartments in Rio and other Latin cities have tiny maids’ quarters beside the utility area behind the kitchen.

“They don’t have a window, they don’t have breathing space,” Vieira said. “The living conditions are degrading.”

Because of their long working day, beginning before breakfast and ending after dinner, maids have little opportunity for study or courtship. Sometimes, Vieira said, the domestic employee is sexually exploited by male members of the household where she works.

Some feminists have taken up the cause of the maid, but in many cases “liberated” Latin American women depend on low-paid domestics for their own freedom.

“For the woman to be liberated, to be a career woman, she has to oppress another woman who stays at home and does that work,” Vieira said.

Many maids must neglect their own children to care for those of their employers, said Nair Jane de Castro Lima, president of the Rio association.

“That is why there are so many children on the street,” Lima said. “The majority are the children of domestic employees.”

Lima and other critics of Latin American social conditions blame the plight of maids on class structures that keep a majority of the people poor. She said the “bosses” of society must come to understand that only by raising the majority’s standard of living will a country like Brazil progress.

But that would mean giving up cheap household help, she noted, adding: “The laws are made by the bosses, and they are not going to want to give up that perquisite.”

Some Brazilian “bosses” have started a movement to oppose the maids. In January, lawyer Margareth Galvao Carbinato founded the Union of Domestic Employers in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

In a telephone interview, Carbinato said that since the inclusion of new rights in the constitution, homemakers have been “driven to desperation” by an “excess of demands” from domestics.

Carbinato, 35, said the new employers’ union has begun a blacklist of “bad domestic employees” accused of stealing or making “abusive” demands. It also has prepared documents useful to employers, including standard labor contracts, work rules and warning slips “to show how far the rights of employees go and where the rights of employers begin.”