Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Making The Machine Work: Technocratic Engineering Of Rights For Domestic Workers At The International Labour Organization, Leila Kawar

Political Science Faculty Publications

In September 2013, the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention concerning decent work for domestic workers entered into force, thereby bringing domestic workers into the mainstream of labor law. This article explores how the interests of the ILO’s constituents were shaken up and reconfigured to build support for new labor protections amidst the shifting global context of deregulation. I argue that technocratic devices—charts, questionnaires, and paragraph formatting—wielded by ILO insiders contributed to this development by creating epistemic space for this new category of employees to be recognized and for consensus to be secured on appropriate labor standards for this group. I …