The Paradoxical World of Daily Domestic Workers in Cali, Colombia Available to Purchase

An overwhelming majority of domestic workers in most of the world are women, but domestic work is largely invisible and devalued. A women's roles approach was used to describe and analyze the satisfying and stressful aspects of the domestic work role for a randomly stratified sample (N=60) of women who worked as daily domestic workers in Cali, a large metropolitan city in Colombia, South America. Women in these jobs are satisfied with several aspects of the job such as working hours, congruency between the work and their interests, and temporary economic support. We also describe the overload and inflexible scheduling imposed upon them, the deep sense of economic insecurity, and the mistreatment experienced by these women, whose strength is demonstrated in the variety of strategies they use to cope with their work situation. We argue that these jobs are necessary for the women who do them, as well as for those women who need them done, yet the needs of these working women have been neglected and their work has neither been valued nor regulated.