A private business. Labour brokering and domestic work: Opportunities and challenges

The present article focuses on the reality of labour brokering in the field of domestic work, having Italy as a reference context. In a country featured by familistic welfare, in fact, domestic work has always played a crucial role. If until some decades ago it was mainly performed for free by Italian women, now it is often outsourced as waged labour to other –usually migrant-women. Nowadays households aim to outsource not only domestic tasks, but even the management of this particular employment relationship, paving the way for the emergence of different types of Labour Market Intermediaries, in line with the overall process of care marketization. Being both for profit and not-for-profit actors, these intermediaries are subject to specific legal provision and may contribute to formalize a very informal sector, ameliorating both living and working conditions of domestic workers. The main aim of this paper, written starting from my PhD research work, is to focus on the concrete functioning of these intermediaries and its distance from legal regulation, and on the impact they have on domestic workers’ condition of invisibility structured from the lacking acknowledgement of domestic work as «real work» and from the specific spatial dimension where it takes place. I rely on semi-structured interviews I performed with domestic workers, labour intermediaries, national associations of employers and key actors to shed light on the concrete functioning of this specific labour market, which also has consequences in terms of welfare organization and interaction among economic and social institutions. This is one of the first attempts to study labour brokering in the specific realm of domestic work in Italy, but further research is needed, yet more after that Covid-19 pandemic showed us the essential dimension of the domestic and care sector, and its potential in terms of business opportunities.