“From pity – nothing; from dignity – everything”: How domestic and care workers changed Spanish labor law
- Written by Mayra Alejandra Margffoy Tuay
- Illustration by Nikita Deshpande
- Edited by Ruby Russell
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Key strategy: Union Organizing
When workers join together to form a legally recognized union, they gain the right to collectively bargain over wages, benefits, safety, and working conditions. Union organizing is the process of educating other workers about their rights, explaining the benefits of collective bargaining, and offering support in the process of forming a union.
Key strategy: Intersectional organizing
A movement-building tactic that acknowledges the interconnectedness of different struggles, for instance, immigrant rights and workers rights. Takes the theory of “intersectionality” developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and centers members of communities facing compounded oppression.
Key tactic: Strategic litigation
Strategic litigation (or impact litigation) refers to legal actions used to bring about broader social change. A lawsuit targets a policy or practice, forcing courts to rule on whether it is lawful, and so setting precedent for all those affected by the policy/practice.
Key tactic: Tactical theater
Using elements of theater production, such as costumes, role play, or props, can help add drama, humor and fun to protests and attract public attention or participation.
“Without us, the world stops. If we stop doing our jobs for just one day, this will blow up."
On June 9, 2022, a group of women stood public galleries of the Spanish Congress and raised their arms in triumph. An emotional celebration resonated through the streets in front of the building. Women holding signs that read “Ratify C189 now!” embraced one another; the Spanish Congress had done just that – finally recognizing their rights as equal to those of workers in any other sector.
In fact, the lawmakers had little choice. Earlier that year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had issued a judgement against the Spanish state for indirect gender discrimination against domestic and care workers.
That their case made it all the way to the European Court was thanks to a campaign thousands of women and more than 60 migrant-led activist groups had been fighting since 2011, when the Domestic Workers Convention, known as C189, became the focus of a global movement.
Within just four months of Congress ratifying the convention, laws would come into force granting domestic and care workers in Spain – an estimated 70 percent of whom are immigrants – full social security coverage, including pensions and unemployment benefits, as well as protection against unfair dismissal and guarantees of occupational health and safety. They could demand mandatory written contracts and minimum wage, and protocols against workplace abuse, harassment and exploitation.
Yet some of the movement’s most committed campaigners knew they wouldn’t benefit from these reforms. Those with irregular residency in Spain, who mostly work off the books, would have no legal recourse to claim their rights. And the 2022 reforms come too late for women whose previous social security contributions don’t count toward unemployment benefits, and who lacked full access to pension schemes for most their working lives – women like 64-year-old Rafaela Pimentel.
Though Pimentel was among those celebrating in the gallery that historic summer day, she still counts herself among those “whose work hasn’t been recognized or valued.”
Yet she is strikingly sanguine about being denied the rights she has fought so hard to see granted to others. “This represents a lifeline for many compañeras,” she says of the post-C189 legislation.
For women like Pimentel, the 2022 victory was a milestone on a much longer journey, that began decades before C189 was drawn up and is still ongoing today. And it is a struggle for more than legal rights and financial security. It’s about agency, dignity, and proper recognition of the essential work that keeps the entire economy ticking over.
“Without us, the world stops. If we stop doing our jobs for just one day, this will blow up,” Pimentel says.
‘We’ve reinvigorated a dormant struggle’
“There has been a total devaluation of domestic and care work, because historically it’s been framed as “help” — and that devaluation has stuck around."
The precarity of women employed in private homes is entwined with histories of gender roles and of migration – dating back at least as far as the early 20th century, when domestic workers were thought of as servants. During the ultraconservative, nationalist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, they were often women who moved from rural Spain to its cities in search of employment.
By the latter decades of the 20th century, ever more workers in the sector had migrated not from other parts of Spain but further afield – and particularly Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Though people no longer talked of having “servants,” there remained high demand for live-in domestic help – particularly as more and more Spanish women went out to work.
Taking waged jobs gave women greater economic independence and social standing – but it also deepened a “care crisis” in Spanish homes. In a trend referred to as the “feminization of migration,” the vital work that used to be done by wives and mothers – cooking, cleaning and caring for children, the elderly and the infirm – was passed on to Global Majority immigrants. And, just as unpaid wives and mothers had no labor rights, so the “help” wasn’t dignified with the status of proper workers.
In the late 1960s, the dictatorship introduced a special domestic service labor regime that granted minimal social security rights — such as limited access to medical care and partial sick and maternity leave — but contributions were based on a fixed monthly rate, regardless of hours worked, and had to be paid by the workers themselves out of what were often exploitatively low wages. Many women simply ended up working off the books.
It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that “domestic employees” in Spain began organizing for their rights alongside the rise of broader workers’ movements as Spain transitioned to democracy. They demanded fair wages, vacation, written contracts and properly defined job descriptions to establish boundaries around what employers could ask them to do. Yet post-Franco tweaks to the special regime in 1985 addressed none of these demands.
By the turn of the millennium, domestic and care workers were still employed under what were largely Franco-era regulations. “There has been a total devaluation of domestic and care work, because historically it’s been framed as “help” — and that devaluation has stuck around,” says Edith Espínola, a spokesperson for Servicio Doméstico Activo (SEDOAC) and the Regularización Ya! migrant rights group.
Yet the movement was gaining momentum – and, increasingly, it was a cause intimately connected with the struggle for immigrant rights. “As migrant women, we feel we’ve reignited what had become a dormant fight for rights that were long denied,” Espínola says.
‘From pity – nothing; from dignity – everything’
When Rafaela Pimentel arrived in Spain in 1992 from the Dominican Republic, she was already a seasoned activist, having fought for women’s rights and against racism, and organized with other women to demand basic services like access to water and electricity.
By the early 2000s, she was employed as a live-in domestic and home care worker in Madrid. Talking with other migrant women in the sector, the same question came up again and again: “Why, if we are doing a job, are we not allowed to enjoy the right to take vacations? Why can’t we have a written contract or fair wages, or get permission to go to a doctor’s appointment or access sick leave?”
The labor laws that governed most people’s jobs didn’t apply to domestic and care workers, nine out of 10 of whom are women. Employers could fire them without notice, justification or compensation. Vacation often felt like a favor. In 2021, Oxfam reported that half of domestic workers in Spain were denied even a full week’s leave.
For migrant women like Pimentel domestic and care work was often the only option. “Domestic and care work have always been framed as something pejorative – like something you have to hide,” Pimentel says. “People say, “domestic and care workers, oh poor them!’ But this is something we’ve been fighting against fiercely … we have said loudly: ‘From pity nothing; from dignity everything!’”
With her background in community activism, Pimentel knew that claiming equal rights would mean listening to people’s experiences, building collective solidarity – and doing so in a spirit of pride and celebration.
‘Hello, are you a domestic worker? This is for you’
"Going out into the streets was an important step to overcome fear and bring a sense of security to colleagues who were in an irregular situation."
SEDOAC, one of the first domestic workers’ organizations to gain legal status in Spain, was founded in 2005 during a meeting at América España Solidaridad y Cooperación (AESCO), an NGO where migrant women from Latin American countries came together to weave networks for mutual support.
Building on that momentum, Pimentel co-founded Territorio Doméstico the following year at the Eskalera Karakola, a collectively run Latina women’s space in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, with the aim of “reframing the domestic in a political way,” Pimentel says. But that meant more than pickets and protests: first and foremost, it meant bringing together women whose working lives meant often left them starkly isolated.
Territorio Doméstico provided a space “that felt like home,” Pimentel says, where domestic and care workers talked about “how crucial our work is,” and shared experiences of “global care networks – where we care for others while our grandmothers and women relatives take care of our children back in our countries.”
“When our colleagues finished work, they went straight to Eskalera Karakola with its red door and windows open to welcome them,” she recalls. They used theater to express, process and reframe their experiences. Music and dance helped them heal, celebrate and connect with one another – bridging language gaps between women from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe.
Graciela Gallego, who worked as a live-in domestic and care worker for 18 years after arriving in Madrid from Colombia in 2001 and would later become president of SEDOAC, says it was about “being empathetic, coming together through shared vulnerability as we lived through similar life experiences.”
Together, Gallego and Pimentel worked to raise care and domestic workers’ sense of their own worth and power. “It took us years to build awareness about how important it is to make social security contributions, and not to accept higher pay in exchange for giving up our rights,” Gallego says.
With little time off work, they spread their message in the only spaces offering moments of release from isolation of their jobs. “Hello, are you a domestic and care worker? This is for you, it’s information to help you understand your rights better,” Gallego recalls telling women they met in metro station, shops, or in the street running errands: “We were out there sharing information, raising awareness, setting up booths where women would come by.”
Sometimes, taking elderly clients out for walks in the park, Gallego herself learned from the women they met. “That’s where a community is built, not just by the elderly, but by their carers too,” she says. “Some colleagues were even better informed. One of them asked me what plans I have for an upcoming day off, and I wasn’t aware I had the right to enjoy a day off.”
They also visited live-in domestic workers who rarely left the homes they worked in – directly addressing the isolation that contributes to domestic workers’ vulnerability to abuse and exploitation.
“These first steps were crucial to make visible our rights and duties as domestic and care workers,” Gallego says. The next step was to bring conversations about the work done in private homes to the wider public – transforming the shame and pity attached to cleaning, caring and housekeeping into pride.
On March 28, 2010, Territorio Doméstico and SEDOAC joined with other activist groups and collectives in their first public protest – a march from Eskalera Karakola to Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. “It was beautiful! Going out into the streets was an important step to overcome fear and bring a sense of security to colleagues who were in an irregular situation,” Gallego recalls.
Creating a sense of safety wasn’t always easy. Many compañeras feared being recognized at the protest – and that if their employers saw them, they might lose their jobs. So, they made concealing identities a celebration. “We decided to turn it into a kind of catwalk, wearing colorful wigs, sunglasses and aprons decorated with our key demands,” Pimentel says.
Since then, domestic and care workers have held demonstrations every March 8 for International Women’s Day, on March 30 for the International Day of Domestic Workers, as well as at public strikes and protests demanding fair access to housing. These public actions aren’t just about demanding equal rights, Pimentel says, they are also demanding “recognition of domestic workers as women with political agency, who speak in first person.”
‘Strange things that don’t belong’
"Immigration law discriminates against us and dumps us in the care sector with any kind of recognition of the work we do taking care of minors, families, elderly and dependents. On top of that, racism is used as a weapon to make us feel like strange things that don’t belong in the European community."
While all this was happening in Madrid, the movement was also building in Barcelona. Like Pimentel and Gallego, Norma Falconi came to Spain with a background in political activism, having campaigned for human rights and been involved in trade union organizing in Ecuador.
Soon after arriving in 1996, she threw herself into work with several self-organized, migrant-led groups – advocating for domestic and care worker rights with Puertas Obertas, and for the rights of undocumented migrants with Papeles para todos y todas, who tactics included staging sit-ins and hunger strikes.
It was at the intersections of these two movements that Falconi began “to understand the pressure points that impede us from being recognized as persons by the Spanish state.”
“We never imagined the many limitations and the lack of recognition we’d face because of our Latin American background,” she explains. “Immigration law discriminates against us and dumps us in the care sector with any kind of recognition of the work we do taking care of minors, families, elderly and dependents. On top of that, racism is used as a weapon to make us feel like strange things that don’t belong in the European community.”
For many of workers in the care sector, regularizing their residency status, securing housing and family reunification to bring their children from their territories of origin, were the most urgent priorities – and forging alliances with movements whose causes overlap has been central to Falconi’s work.
Yet solidarity from the male-dominated trade unions wasn’t forthcoming. “Our agency wasn’t recognized at all,” Falconi says. Instead, she and her compañeras joined forces with other domestic and care worker organizations to claim that agency, realizing that to negotiate collectively for better working conditions and legal reform, they needed a union of their own. “We said: ‘Enough! We must fight together, as it is the only way to succeed!’” Falconi recalls.
Falconi co-founded Sindillar/Sindihogar, Catalonia’s first independent, women-led domestic and care workers’ union in 2011. Organized around anti-racist values and feminist economic principles of horizontal decision-making, it provides legal support, professional training – and, vitally, a space in which domestic and care workers can realize their own power and support one another through collective self-care.
Sindillar/Sindihogar celebrates the value of both its members’ work and their influence as migrant activists. “Beyond showing up to projects and building relationships with feminist organizations around us, we proudly demonstrate that we have knowledge and flavors to share — that we bring cultural heritage shaped by our own experiences and countries of origin,” Falconi says.
Skills honed in community activism around the world – and particularly Latin America – go beyond traditional political organizing. Sindillar/Sindihogar’s work has encompassed storytelling, sharing cuisine as a political act, interventions such as a textile activism project that celebrates migrant resistance through weaving, and theater – including the award-winning play Madremanya.
And creativity has gone hand-in-hand with resistance movement in Madrid, too. “We love singing and dancing during our assemblies and demonstrations!” says Pimentel. Territorio Doméstico released an album of versions of popular songs titled Porque sin nosotras no se mueve el mundo (Without us, the world stops), and has even produced as a radio soap opera.
“It’s important for us to collect this historical debt to women, to turn it into a form of reparation for those who are no longer with us, those stuck in limbo without proper pensions, without family support, without anyone to care for them.”
Rafaela Pimentel
‘We don’t want laws with beautiful speeches’
Pimentel and Gallego would cofound the sector’s first national union, Sindicato de Trabajadoras del Hogar y los Cuidados (SINTRAHOCU), in 2020. But only after the movement faced both an aggravating setback and a turning point that both expanded their solidarity beyond national borders and sharpened their focus on a clear strategic goal.
In 2011 and 2012, the Spanish government finally made moves to bring domestic and care work regulations into line with the 1978 constitution and subsequent equality legislation. Written contracts and time off work were made mandatory. Yet these new rights were still part of a separate framework that treated domestic and care workers differently from workers in any other sector – and continued to exclude them from the national security scheme.
Far from appeasing the movement, these halfway concessions strengthened activists’ resolve. “We don’t want incomplete laws, we don’t want laws with beautiful speeches that fail to point at which tools we can use to defend ourselves,” Falconi says.
It was in 2011 that the International Labor Organization (ILO) launched just such a tool – the C189 Domestic Workers Convention, which was signed by 12 countries by the end of 2012. The following year, the ILO invited Spanish collectives, political associations and local unions to Italy, to learn more about C189.
The meeting in Turin was transformative. “We didn’t know that we were covered by international conventions, we didn’t know them at all,” recalls Gallego – who couldn’t get time off work to attend the conference herself, but became a leading figure in Grupo Turín, an alliance of migrant-led associations that came together in the wake of the conference with a clear common goal: for Spain to ratify C189.
‘Our power was deeply emotional’
In 2016, Grupo Turín hosted the First Congress of Domestic and Care Work, where more than 400 attendees came together to align their strategy. Marcela Bahamón, a live-in domestic worker in Valencia, heard about the congress from an interview Gallego gave to an Latinx radio, inviting all domestic and care workers to attend. Bahamón took her up on the invitation.
“It was so impressive to hear all these women speak with their own voice, from a sense of belonging, with such clarity about the rights and recognition we were demanding,” Bahamón recalls. “I felt there was so much strength and energy when you work alone in a house and then come together in one space with others.”
Bahamón was still travelling home to Valencia when she and fellow domestic workers decided to set up the Asociación Intercultural de Profesionales del Hogar y los Cuidados, one of many new groups that emerged in the wake of the congress. “Organizations started forming in every corner of Spain,” Gallego says. “Our power was deeply emotional. When we think collectively, we get better results.”
On a political level, Grupo Turín also built alliances with feminist organizations and NGOs, networked with policymakers, and secured funding for CETHYC (Centro de Empoderamiento de Trabajadoras del Hogar y los cuidados) a SEDOAC-run space in Madrid that combined legal support with physical and mental health provision and programs of mutual support to help workers in the sector realize not just their rights, but also their skills and the essential value of their work.
“When domestic and care workers gain more tools to claim their rights they begin their own process of political influence, with first steps such as demanding a professional minimum wage from their employers,” says Carolina Elías, a former president of SEDOAC whose own journey has led from grassroots activism to becoming Madrid’s first councilor with Salvadoran roots and a background in domestic and care work.
“It’s important not just to make politicians hear our voices, but to have a say within the institutions where decisions are made, to be in a position to speak up and have a vote in public policies,” Elías says.
‘Let’s meet with these controversial women’
“Is Spain breaching European law on non-discrimination by denying domestic and care workers access to unemployment rights? This was the core of the discussion and how we convinced the judge at the Administrative Court of Vigo."
Labor rights lawyer Javier de Cominges says it was the momentum from associations across the country demanding ratification of C189 that made his own intervention in the struggle possible.
In 2020, Mariana, a domestic care worker in Galicia, came to de Cominges, “afraid of the future: not just of being denied a pension, but of facing overall vulnerability and social helplessness,” he says. He recognized Mariana’s case against the social security system for denying her right to make contributions as the test case he’d been looking for.
Since having a national judge request clarification on European law is the most common way to bring a case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), de Cominges first lodged Mariana’s complaint at Galicia’s County Court.
“Is Spain breaching European law on non-discrimination by denying domestic and care workers access to unemployment rights? This was the core of the discussion and how we convinced the judge at the Administrative Court of Vigo,” he explains.
The judge decided that Mariana’s case was strong enough to be referred to the CJEU to decide whether, because the sector almost exclusively employs women, denying domestic and care workers equal access to state social security amounted to sex-based discrimination and was therefore in breach of European law. On February 24, 2022, the CJEU found that it did, setting a binding precedent for domestic and care workers across the EU.
Mariana herself has opted to stay out of the media spotlight, but de Cominges says she was, “truly happy and proud of the outcome. She saw it as a success that restored justice and ensured access to more labor protections, not just for her, but for all domestic and care workers.”
De Cominges also stresses that the CJEU ruling wasn’t just a victory for the community, but one delivered by the community. “Domestic and care workers’ collectives had been organizing for years,” he says. “Their collective fight brought all of this to light, putting an issue on the table that barely existed in the public conversation. How can we, as a society, understand that there is a debt owed to a precarized group if we don’t even recognize their situation? It’s just not possible”
Espínola, who has been a leading figure at SEDOAC since the Grupo Turín congress, believes it was the combination of the European ruling and persistent demands of grassroots movements that ultimately forced the government to act. “When the pressure came from above and from the ground, Spain found itself in the middle,” she says. “That’s when policymakers finally decided, ‘Let’s meet with these controversial women,’ right?”
Twenty-first century slaves
Six out 10 domestic and care workers employed by families in the EU work in Spain or Italy, according to 2021 data from Oxfam – with Spain representing 28% of the EU figure. Both countries have a family-based welfare model – i.e. underinvestment in state welfare and public services leaves families responsible for childcare and care for elderly and infirm.
As a result, Oxfam says, these countries have a high demand for domestic workers to help shoulder the burden. Italy, however, has had a collective agreements between domestic and care worker unions and employers’ organizations – the Contratto Collettivo Nazionale del Lavoro Domestico (CCNL) – since 1974. Spain still lacks such an agreement to this day.
In Spain, 70% of domestic and care workers are immigrants, and 90% workers are women –accounting for 5% of the country’s female labor force. By comparison, just 0.9% of women employed across the EU are in the domestic and care sector.
In October 2022, new legislation finally granted full unemployment rights and social security benefits to more than half a million domestic and care workers. Espínola says women in the sector “feel better protected by the law.” Yet, as important a step as this was, it fell well short of the full justice the movement demands.
Spain now caps working hours for domestic and care workers, and mandates minimum daily and weekly time off – but these limits don’t apply to live-in workers, who are precisely those most at risk of being called on to work round the clock. “Ask a live-in worker how many extra hours they get paid for each week – they’ll probably say none. How many days off do they get? Sometimes not even a Saturday or Sunday,” Bahamón says.
Oxfam estimates that more than 38,000 immigrants, most from outside the EU, are employed as live-in domestic and care workers in Spain, with shifts that can legally reach up to 60 hours per week. “We’re the 21st-century ‘slaves,’ because none of the laws guarantee that a live-in worker can have an honest contract with at least minimum wage protections,” Falconi says.
Nor do the 2022 reforms help the many women doing domestic and care work who have irregular immigration status and therefore work off the books; Oxfam estimates that around a third of domestic and care workers are not registered or contributing to social security.
Ironically, those who are not only most at risk, but the driving force behind the movement – the migrant women who have turned isolation into community and supported one another when the state abandoned them – are least likely to benefit from its first major victory.
When women aren’t alone in caring
“We cannot build an equal and just society if we maintain a regime that abuses, breaks and exploits women’s bodies."
The movement has always been about intersecting issues – not just labor rights, but housing, the rights of immigrants and the struggle for “women’s work” to be recognized as at least as important as the jobs many women can now do alongside men. C189 – like most policy initiatives aimed at social justice – addresses just one of these in isolation. But the grassroots struggle for domestic and care worker rights continues to draw power from being part of a bigger movement of activists fighting racism, gender discrimination and exploitation.
Its current focus is an initiative by Regularización Ya! movement, which is calling for the extraordinary regularization of around 500,000 migrants – more than 60 percent of whom are women, including an estimated 70,000 domestic and care workers. Activists have gathered the signatures of almost 700,000 citizens in support of the proposal, which is now being discussed among parliamentary groups.
“If we demand equal conditions for everyone, then first we all need to have our residency papers in order,” spokesperson Espínola says. “If a country claims to be just and fair in the fight for equality, it can’t be acceptable that we still have women working under in-live regimes, and others trapped in irregular administrative situations — completely excluded from any state support or protection.”
At the same time, the movement is considering court action to make social security rights retroactive. “If domestic and care workers want recognition of their working time before 2022, “they’ll probably win the case, but they need to walk a long road through the courts first,” de Cominges says.
And they continue campaign for safe and human working conditions, demanding protections against workplace harassment and sexual abuse, measures to address the mental health impacts of isolation, and recognition of work-related illnesses to cover sick leave, disability and early retirement.
“We cannot build an equal and just society if we maintain a regime that abuses, breaks and exploits women’s bodies,” Espínola says.
In November last year, after more than two years on sick leave due to what she says are the health impacts of 30 years of labor as a live-in domestic worker, Pimentel was forced to permanently give up her job. Yet because there is still no legal recognition of the occupational health impacts of domestic and care work, she has been denied long-term incapacity benefits. And having been largely excluded from the social security system throughout her working life, the state pension she would be eligible for when she turns 67 is unlikely to be enough to live on.
For Pimentel, retroactive social security rights would allow her to retire with dignity. But recognizing the work of many thousands of women over many decades is also a matter of principle. “It’s important for us to collect this historical debt to women, to turn it into a form of reparation for those who are no longer with us, those stuck in limbo without proper pensions, without family support, without anyone to care for them,” she says.
Thankfully, Pimentel herself has not been left without anyone to care for her. Where the state has failed her, her community have stepped in. “I’ve managed to get through with the support of my compañeras and friends,” she says, adding that her former employer also went above and beyond legal requirements to support her after she stopped working. Now, she is part of Senda de Cuidados, a care-focused association that pays her minimum wage for administrative work, allowing her to increase her pension entitlement by 2028.
And this represents both one of the movement’s most important strategies, and one of its most important achievements: the collective care of the activist community itself. “All the self-care tools we’ve built over time are still crucial. We’ve nurtured a care unit where retired colleagues, or those who have more time, support each other.”
Pimentel has seen politicizing care become much more than a strategy to claim labor rights. Now she would like to see the way she and her compañeras value and practice care serve as a model for society as a whole: “We realized we also wanted to demand real social reorganization beyond our community, where women – especially migrant women – aren’t alone in providing care, and have the right to decent care when we need it.”
About the Author
Mayra Alejandra Margffoy Tuay is an interdisciplinary migrant journalist and strategic and creative consultant based in Spain. Her work is committed to social and environmental justice and equity.
