Workers Like All the Rest of Them

In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, underregulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Catholic Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism has both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality.

“Deeply researched, beautifully crafted, and historiographically and theoretically sophisticated, Workers Like All the Rest of Them is a major contribution to the growing literature on domestic workers and their organizing efforts in the face of legal, cultural, social, and political barriers. Elizabeth Quay Hutchison illuminates the intricacies of social movements in Chile, uncovering the centrality of the Catholic Church to maintaining and increasing domestic worker organization. Hutchison significantly expands our understanding of the interaction between social processes, law, and social movements in the development of domestic worker activism.”, “Presenting a series of timely, important, and often surprising arguments, Workers Like All the Rest of Them will find an audience among Chileanists, historians of gender and labor, as well as social science scholars interested in domestic work around the world.”, “As one of the first histories of domestic labor in Chile, Workers Like All the Rest of Them opens many questions for further research. . . . This beautifully written and engaging book visualizes Chilean domestic workers' life and work.”, “[Workers Like All the Rest of Them] proposes that domestic workers struggled strategically and made alliances with other social actors throughout the twentieth century to obtain labor rights and recognition. . . . [Hutchison’s] book contributes not only by illuminating a hidden history, but as a tool to combat the inequalities that it uncovers.", “A deeply researched and elegantly written work. . . . [Workers Like All the Rest of Them] is an excellent work that has wide application and relevance well beyond its Chilean context for scholars of (women’s) labor rights, urban migration, the development of democracy, and the formation of nation-states throughout the world.”

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison is Professor of Latin American History and Associate Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at The University of New Mexico. She is the author of Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 and coeditor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.