By: carlota solé & Sonia parella  (Page 13/18)

Certainly, it is difficult to conclude which of either groups, men or women immigrants, present a situation of greater subordination or vulnerability in the work market. Nevertheless, saving the heterogeneity of situations, only by the fact that domestic service is regulated through a weak contractual relation – halfway between the relation of servitude and the formally free labor relation (Colectivo Ioé 2001b) -; of the ideological devaluation of the works made by women in general and of the domestic work in particular, under the umbrella of the patriarchal configuration of the society; of the strong incidence of the informality of the contractual relation and of the fact that it is carried out in the deprived scope of the home, are sufficient reasons to note that this activity facilitates the invisibility and the defenselessness of the group that takes care in it, so that the employer has a great margin of discretion to commit abuses. The lack of social relations of those newly arrived, especially serious in the case of the intern employees, increases the degree of defenselessness of the workers. Although the domestic-family work has risen to a wage-earning category the category in Spain, with its regulation in 1985, through the Real Decree 1424/1985 August 1, the conditions that this special regime regulates are discriminatory in relation to the rest of the activities, and situates in the lowest layers of the occupational structure, in those more emblematic activities of the discrimination because of gender (Parella 2003).   

For the fact of being immigrants coming from poor countries and, in addition, women, a they are assumed to be a cultured person which opposes the traditional and underdeveloped character, deeply devalued, to that of a western woman, more modern and emancipated (Oso 1998). These stereotypes and prejudices, as part of the dominant system of beliefs, reinforces the discrimination of the immigrant woman in the work market and turns them into an “ideal” candidate to carry out the works tied to social reproduction, for being docile and for their patience, discipline, and subordination. This is how a process of progressive ethnicity of the reproductive services more socially devalued, off the hand of an “army of servants” integrated by immigrant women (Catarino, Oso 2000).

For many of the immigrant domestic employees who have displaced themselves to the western societies in search of remunerated work, making the difficult decision of separating from their children, and of becoming the main source of income to the family, responds to one objective: to obtain a better future for their families. Such option, denominated as “transnational maternity,” takes place even when knowing that the price these mothers are going to pay is the “loss” of the possibility of raising their children and to provide them affection and taken care of them daily and not from a distance (Parella 2004). For the immigrant worker, having to take care of “others” in the receiving society and to provide them well-being (care, company, satisfy their basic necessities of hygiene, feeding, etc.), is incompatible with the possibility of directly taking care of the own family, mainly when the employee works as an intern resides in the home where she works 24 hours a day, totally isolated and, often, having to provide the employer a total availability of her time.