Gendered Experiences of Racial Capitalism: Maids and Day Laborers in Barcelona’s Migrant Precariat

Abstract

A growing body of research characterizes contemporary global neoliberal hegemony through the lens of racial capitalism—a framework that traces the connections between colonial exploitation, slavery, and the foundations of economic growth, linking these histories to the expanding migrant precariat across Western societies today. Largely unexplored is how gender influences job conditions, alternatives, and forms of collective organization among migrant workers at the bottom strata of the labor market. Using the case of Spain, a country whose immigration history is closely linked to the expansion of precarious labor markets, we conducted our research in Barcelona, a hub in terms of migrant labor, collective agency and migrants’ rights struggles. We apply an intersectional lens to compare job conditions and collective action strategies of female and male migrant workers in two sectors: domestic and construction work, respectively. Both are strongly gendered, ethnically stratified, and highly informal. Many of the workers live in a daily reality marked by racism and exploitation, and we find that while there are important gender-related differences shaping the workers’ alternatives and forms of collective agency, their shared condition as racialized, poor migrants entails more commonalities than differences in terms of the role they fill in a late capitalist economy and the alternatives they have for change.

1. Introduction

The notion of racial capitalism has gained significant traction in recent years, providing a conceptual framework to analyze the interrelation between racism and economic structures that originates in colonialism and persists in different shapes, globally and locally, in the present context of late neoliberalism and growing criminalization of migration (Lentin 2021; Romanos 2017; Melamed 2015). We argue that racial capitalism provides a useful lens to understand the role migrant workers play in contemporary western societies to subsidize middle-class citizens’ living standards. Racial capitalism depends on racialization and racism in order to produce workers that have economic value but barely any worth (Burden-Stelly 2020). From this perspective, racialization accentuates exploitability. Anderson (2010) for instance addressed this phenomenon as she unveiled how British households demanded racialized (Filipina) domestic workers rather than native working-class women, since they were uncomfortable engaging in deeply unequal labor relations when the workers looked like themselves—in other words, were white.

Recognizing that an intersectional perspective is necessary to examine how different social categories and their interaction produce inequalities, in this article we are specifically interested in how gender conditions the social stratification of migrant workers. We address how racial capitalism is gendered by focusing on migrant labor in two strongly gendered and precarized forms of employment in the context of Barcelona, Spain: domestic workers and day laborers in the construction sector. Like Matambanadzo (2022, p. 203), we understand gender as “a co-constitutive force in the operation and administration of racial capitalism”. We expect that gender as a social category both enhances workers’ subordination and provides a more fine-grained lens to inquire into different forms of racialized exploitation. In addition, it harbors the potential to expand our knowledge of how different forms of migrant agency against injustices emerge in contexts that are strongly shaped by gendered experiences.

We address the following research questions:

1. 

In what ways are the experiences of migrant precarity gendered?

2. 

How do gendered and racialized experiences of precarious labor shape different forms of emerging collective organization and agency?

Spain is an illustrative case for this endeavor, given the expansion of a large migrant precariat in the country over the last decades (Bowman 2025; Hellgren and Gabrielli 2021; Moreno-Colom and De Alós 2016). The current Socialist government has implemented measures against precarious work, such as substantially raising the minimum wage, extending full labor rights to domestic workers, and as we write these words in early 2026, approved a mass regularization of undocumented migrants. Moreover, the Spanish migration regime is known for its comparably permissive practices and implicit tolerance of undocumented migrants and their function in the economy (Moffette 2018). The Spanish middle classes’ dependence on a low-wage workforce remains deeply entrenched. A combination of market factors and government austerity have necessitated middle-class dependence on cheap labor in their homes (Ruiz-Collantes and Sánchez-Sánchez 2019; Hellgren 2024; Romanos 2017). This labor is disproportionally provided by migrants, who are forced into precarious situations in order to make ends meet and who serve as the country’s front line in the face of the elder care crisis, domestic work and escalating costs for home maintenance and remodeling that far outstrip the increase in wages for working and middle-class households (Van Hooren 2020; Hellgren and Serrano 2019; Peterson 2018; Hobson et al. 2018).

Barcelona is an interesting case as a city widely known for its predominant political climate of interculturality and tolerance and vast network of organized civil society and subaltern groups. It is also among the most ethnically diverse and culturally plural cities in Europe, with 36% of its population being foreign-born (INE 2025). Among the more than 180 nationalities represented across its neighborhoods (Barcelona City Council 2025), a vast variety of life situations and migrant trajectories are represented, spanning from economically privileged “expats”, digital nomads and retirees from the global north to undocumented Pakistani or African migrants struggling to survive in the city’s large informal economy (Bowman 2025). Barcelona breathes openness and creativity, attracting free professionals from across the globe. Yet it is also the scene of vast migrant vulnerability, labor exploitation, and growing racism (OND 2024).

In the present article, we engage with this darker side of the “flagship city of interculturalism” (Peruzzi Castellani 2023). We draw on ethnographic research carried out by both authors in the Barcelona metropolitan area between 2013–2023, including 32 in-depth interviews with female migrant domestic workers and 23 with male migrant day laborers. Through an intersectional lens, we compare two groups of precarized workers: domestic workers and construction day laborers, specifically those working on small projects mostly in private homes. Both groups are made up primarily of immigrant workers of varying national origins (though with a preponderance of Latin American migrants) who work in private homes for individuals or small-scale contractors. Both groups are strongly racialized and face significant vulnerabilities regarding workplace abuse, low pay and poor job security. In both sectors, formal labor organization is extraordinarily difficult due both to the employment circumstances and the various levels of intersecting vulnerabilities of the workers, many of whom are undocumented (Bowman 2025; Hellgren 2024). These two spaces are extremely gender-segregated, with nearly all day laborers being male and nearly all domestic workers being female. We are interested in how gender plays a role for how economic precarity is experienced, and in what forms of resistance and collective organization emerge among the workers, demonstrating how gender and racialization work together to produce precarious outcomes.

2. Gendered Racial Capitalism as Analytical Framework

Similar to what happened during the eras of normalized, institutionalized slavery, racial capitalism rests on the normalized, systematic inferiorization of people with certain characteristics (migrant, non-white, undocumented, etc.), which are both driven by and contribute to reproducing profound inequalities between visibly different groups of human beings (De Genova 2023; Melamed 2015). Gendered racial capitalism provides a useful lens for examining how male and female migrant workers are stereotyped and exploited in both similar and gender-specific ways. Gender norms from both origin and receiving societies can function as mechanisms of control—through migrants’ internalized expectations about appropriate gender roles—as well as heuristics for desirable worker characteristics, with employers drawing on stereotypes linked to gender, race, and national origin when making hiring decisions (Chaves 2023).

Female migrant domestic workers and male migrant construction workers constitute paradigmatic cases to inquire how racial capitalism is gendered. Both groups are inserted into transnational labor regimes structured by racialized hierarchies, legal precarity, and differential valuation of work, yet they are positioned in sharply gendered sectors that shape how exploitation is organized and lived (Berg 2017; Zou 2015). Domestic work, feminized and privatized within the household, relies on affective labor, intimacy, and moralized notions of care that naturalize invisibility and underpayment (Vosman et al. 2020). Construction work, by contrast, is masculinized, spatially public, and organized around bodily endurance and disposability, rendering injury and even death somewhat acceptable (Ness 2012). These strongly gendered norms appear to become further accentuated when workers are also racialized migrants, often with legally precarious situations. Deeply rooted stereotypes of caring Latina women or strong African men contribute to justify ethnically/racially segmented and gendered labor markets. Comparing the experiences of women and men in these distinct labor regimes reveals how racial capitalism operationalizes gender in divergent ways to generate value—privileging care, intimacy, and affect in one case, and physical risk, endurance, and disposability in the other—while sustaining intersecting hierarchies of race, citizenship, and class.

Applying this analytical framework to the potential for the most precarious workers’ collective organization, it appears necessary to also address the structural obstacles making such organization both difficult and with doubtful impact on workers’ actual job conditions. Fraser points out that “the expropriated, for the most part, are not likely to make, at least in today’s form of capitalism, large-scale institutional and structural change by themselves” (Chaves 2023). Hellgren (2024) reaches similar conclusions in her analysis of the possibilities and limitations of change through domestic workers’ collective organization. She argues that the structural factors sustaining labor precarity in the sector are so powerful that, even under favorable political conditions, they effectively hinder the implementation of reforms aimed at improving workers’ rights. When structural transformation appears (almost) unattainable, individual survival strategies become the primary viable means of change—for instance, exiting exploitative employment when access to better alternatives is possible. In this context, collective organization often assumes less overtly political objectives, instead providing forms of mutual support and “communities of coping,” as described by Korczynski (2003). Several scholars have furthermore suggested that the increasingly popular concept of “resilience” itself may contribute to the depoliticization of collective organization. From this perspective, the notion of resilience aligns with a neoliberal hegemonic framework in which structural change is foreclosed, and individuals are instead expected to continually develop new coping strategies to manage the harm produced by a profoundly unequal and unjust economic system (Chee 2020; Joseph 2013; Cannon and Müller-Mahn 2010). Van Hooren (2020) refers to Anderson and Ruhs’ (2010) work and suggests that it is precisely the precarity of these workers that makes them accept poor labor conditions, which in turn makes them attractive employees. Rather than workers’ empowerment, these dynamics appear to foster a form of submissive “resilience” in line with Chee’s (2020) description of the kind of migrant domestic workers that clients prefer as “successful subordinates”.

In addition, existing research on the coping strategies of (female) migrant domestic workers highlights the central role of motherhood in shaping the gendered nature of their experiences and opportunities. Many female migrants from the Global South are single mothers who leave their own children behind to provide care for children and older adults in destination countries—a phenomenon famously conceptualized by Parreñas (2001) as “global care chains.” These women are often the sole breadwinners for their families, carrying immense responsibilities, as their limited incomes from domestic work are expected to secure the wellbeing of multiple generations in their countries of origin. At the same time, gendered and racialized stereotypes—such as expectations that Latina women are naturally warm, caring, and submissive—feature prominently in employers’ preferences and shape domestic workers’ access to employment as well as their working conditions (Hellgren and Serrano 2019).

Existing research on (male) day laborers tends to focus on the ways that the open laborer market exaggerates competition between the workers and inhibits organization (see Ordóñez 2015; Camou 2009; Fernández 2018). Existing in public spaces such as street corners or construction stores, these workers must struggle to balance projecting the strength and vigor needed for work with ensuring that those around them feel unthreatened by their status as physically strong, male and potentially dangerous outsiders (Walter et al. 2004). Indeed, as Charsley and Wray (2015) explain, negative press, restrictive policy and antagonistic public opinion is often if not usually couched in fears related to male migration. Moreover, they may face emotional turmoil due to their inability to meet internalized standards of masculinity related to providing for their families. Thus, the migrant men’s perceived strength and otherness puts them in a position of needing to stress the fact they are not dangerous by being exceedingly cooperative and unassuming while also proving their toughness by being willing to work hard, long and in dangerous situations without complaint.

Both domestic labor and construction-related day labor are illustrative examples of the practical functioning of racial capitalism. Both involve work carried out for private individuals (or small-scale contractors) in diffuse locations with very little oversight. Both kinds of work have a strong presence of racial minorities and immigrants, and both labor under pay and conditions that would generally not be accepted by native workers. Even so, and as pointed out by both Vergès (2019) and Burden-Stelly (2020), gender dynamics also play a role in creating differences between the two groups. While day laborers face discrimination, workplace abuse, wage theft and a host of other issues, they are in theory construction workers. Prevailing collective bargaining agreements improve the working conditions of their peers in more formal situations with locally recognized certifications and skills, thus making it easier for them to compete on price. Domestic work, on the other hand, as a traditionally female and lower-class occupation, was exempted from Spanish labor law until 2022 (ILO 2022), putting undocumented domestic workers in direct competition with native and documented workers, a situation that is common in many countries (Albin and Mantouvalou 2012) and that Burden-Stelly refers to as “triple oppression” (Burden-Stelly 2020). While domestic workers since 2022 benefit from Spanish labor law, they remain dependent on the legal minimum wage, meaning their salaries are still lower than those established in the sectoral agreements protecting construction workers (Meardi et al. 2012).

Gender, in both the sending and receiving societies, conditions the migrant experience in many ways. McIlwaine (2010), working in London, found that race, class and educational attainment affected the experiences of men and women from Latin America differently. The immigration experience transformed gender relations, with work being easier to find in traditionally “feminine” sectors. Hellgren and Serrano (2019) observed that following the 2008 financial crisis, workers in traditionally male spaces lost their jobs, while those in the domestic care and domestic work sectors were more likely to face increasing competition from native workers, leading to fewer hours and lower pay, but not necessarily to a full loss of employment. Herrera (2012) further elaborates how differences in gendered sectors affect men and women differently. The implosion of the construction sector led many men to lose their well-paid jobs completely, which also put their immigration status in jeopardy. For day laborers, migration status has become a sort of revolving door, reflecting the same kind of instability that characterizes day labor itself. The female workers that Herrera interviewed, on the other hand, were generally able to hold onto their jobs and their legal status if they had it, albeit under worse conditions, greater stress, and the need to support their families in the likely event that their partners had lost income and potentially migration status. On the other hand, she also observed that the men had greater geographic, sectoral and temporal freedom when it came to looking for new opportunities, since women were often stuck with care responsibilities that limited their mobility, a difference that can also be seen in the current study.

3. Materials and Methods

The methodology used in the studies that this article is based on largely consists of qualitative data collection through ethnographic fieldwork (on-site observations, partly participatory) and altogether 55 in-depth interviews with female migrant domestic workers and male day laborers in the construction sector. Interview transcripts and observation notes were thematically coded and analyzed with respect to experiences of precarity linked to their gender, and the different forms of collective organization that were found in each sector.

The Results sections dealing with male day laborers are based on twenty-three semi-structured interviews combined with 32 participant observation activities at three day laborer sites in metropolitan Barcelona between 2020 and 2023 as well as one interview with a representative from a major trade union. The majority of the workers interviewed were from Central and South America, with a significant minority coming from several countries in Africa, most notably Morocco, Algeria, Ghana and Senegal. The men had varying levels of educational attainment, and many of them had specialized construction skills. Many lacked legal status or were waiting for it, but some either had legal status or had it in the past and lost it. The workers were mostly men in their 20s and 30s although some older workers were also present, including a few men over 60 years old.

The Result sections about female migrant domestic workers draw on thirty semi-structured interviews carried out in Barcelona between 2013 and 2014. The interviewed migrant women came from a wide range of regions, including Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Maghreb, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority had started their life in Spain without legal status, and nine interviewees remained undocumented at the time of the interviews. Overall, the women in the sample were relatively highly educated, reflecting patterns identified in previous research on the skill levels of migrant women in Spain (Vidal-Coso and Miret-Gamundi 2014). This earlier analysis was expanded in 2022–2023 through a focused field study of the domestic workers’ trade union Sindihogar. The additional material includes analysis of the union’s website, participation in meetings, conversations and shared activities with migrant domestic workers, movement narratives, and interviews with activists published in a book about the same union, titled Cuidadoras (Cañada 2021). In addition, two in-depth interviews were conducted with leading union representatives. Sindihogar was selected due to its position as the first organization of domestic workers in Spain to self-identify as a trade union and its prominent role in advocating for domestic workers’ rights in Barcelona. The follow-up study further confirmed that the experiences described in 2013–2014 remain widespread among migrant domestic workers, and that the legal and policy changes implemented since then have not significantly improved their actual working conditions (see also Hellgren 2024).

4. Results: Migrant Experiences and Collective Organization in the Two Sectors

Both groups in our study experience a high degree of racialization, with most of the workers being from Latin America, Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Their condition as racialized migrants with highly vulnerable socio-economic situations represented an advantage from employers’ point of view. It enhanced their perceived willingness to accept working conditions that would be rejected as indecent by their autochthonous peers, and employers’ ability to otherize them in order to justify exploitation. This racialization is thoroughly ingrained in the economics of the work, and even takes place internally within the groups, with different levels of desirability of certain workers based on their racial characteristics. Here, race and gender collide to create a societally defined concept of the “ideal worker,” emphasizing the specific values ascribed to the race and gender of the worker to minimize cost. This is illustrated by the case of Filipina workers prized by upper-class families for being presumably submissive and willing to also act as English teachers for the children, taking on multiple professional roles for the moderate cost of a domestic worker. In both sectors, Latin American workers who were perceived as more indigenous were more likely to face abuse and discrimination, and African workers (whether from North Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa) struggled more to find work. In the construction sector, they also dealt with perceptions of being less cooperative or fit for purpose for more delicate or specialized tasks. Legal status constituted one possible limitation for male and female workers alike, but many of them had residence permits, indicating that other factors of marginalization had more influence than legal status on generating their precarity.

4.1. Intersections of Gender and Racialization in the Workers’ Experiences of Precariousness

In a similar way that racialization serves to justify exploitation, gender stereotypes contribute to defining the “ideal worker.” Gender functions from the outside as a simple heuristic for certain qualities, and also from the inside with workers seeking to fulfill internalized gender-based norms: men are seen as free, flexible, strong, independent and willing to put themselves at risk of physical harm. Women are seen as nurturing, dependable, and having responsibilities that keep them grounded, reliable and tied to the job. These gender stereotypes are intricately linked to racial stereotypes, as can be seen in the preference for Latin American women for childcare as they are perceived as more caring, while Moroccan women were often considered as only capable of cleaning and doing other domestic chores. There was also a preference for Latin American men as day laborers, perceived as hardworking and easy to get along with, while African workers often faced increased discrimination and were perceived as more dangerous and less skilled.

Gendered and racial stereotypes of Latin or “third world” women as submissive and accommodating further exacerbate the asymmetric relationship. In the Spanish context at large, the “lady of the house” typically manages the professional relationship with the female domestic employee. There are numerous examples from our interviews of how this is expressed in practices such as employers asking their employees for “small favors”, such as working extra hours for free to help children with homework or prepare a dinner party. “Luz” from Honduras narrates her experiences:

“Luz” is 26 years old and has a husband and a 5-year old daughter in Honduras. She is undocumented in Spain and works informally, 6 h per day cleaning the apartment of a Spanish family, earning 500 euro of which 100 is sent as remittances to support her family back home. She describes the family she works for as good people, and explains that she sometimes does extra services for them and would not dare ask to get paid for it:

“When their daughters get sick, since they have nobody else who can help… I would not say no, never. To be honest I never got paid, and since they are such good people I never asked, but I guess that I should get 10 euro per hour. But I didn’t want to ask, I felt very uncomfortable.” “Luz”, Barcelona 2014

The perception of “Luz” as caring and generous serves to help her get work, but also locks her into extra, unpaid work. These stereotypes combine with work in intimate spaces with no witnesses, facilitating other forms of abuse as well. Several of the women in our sample had experiences of different forms of sexual assault or abuse, and some had earned their livelihood from prostitution at the beginning of their trajectory in Spain. Unwelcome petitions from clients may be difficult to reject when they are heavily dependent on the employer, and sometimes there is a thin line between abuse and an acceptable, even if deeply unequal, relationship. “Silvana” from Romania exemplifies this situation:

“Silvana” is 38 years old and as an EU citizen, she has no problems with documentation. Yet, she experienced heavy exploitation as a textile industry worker both in Romania and in Spain, where she left the sector after having been locked up in the factory where she worked. She had worked for 9 years as a cleaner at the time of the interview, and had to leave her earlier employment because the man in the family tried to rape her. Like many other migrant domestic workers, she suffered greatly from the loss of jobs in post-crisis Spain (Hellgren and Serrano 2019). Lacking social networks, she turned to the church for help. There, she got to know a 72-year old Spanish man and moved in with him:

“He leaves me a room for free and in exchange I clean his apartment and keep him company. Sometimes I make dinner, sometimes he does, and we talk a little. His wife died 3 years ago and he was very depressed.” “Silvana”, Barcelona 2015

Even if Silvana’s relationship with her new employer may not necessarily constitute direct abuse, he seems to intentionally blur the line between work and familial responsibility. Her experiences illustrate how gender shapes value extraction and forms of control, by employers taking advantage of feminine stereotypes of reliability and meek companionship to extract unpaid work. Many of the domestic workers were also denied time off, less of a concern for the day laborers as they spent most of their time unemployed and often even perceived the flexibility of their work as a positive aspect of day labor. Their dominant strategies for dealing with abuse varied quite a bit, with day laborers much freer to discriminate against and leave abusive employers knowing that their jobs were temporary and at worst they may give up a couple days’ worth of wages, while domestic workers were much more attached to abusive situations. When dealing with verbal abuse, the domestic workers were more likely to seek emotional support from their peers, while the day laborers were in some cases able to confront employers, leaning into stereotypes as a strong, intimidating other in an attempt to gain respect, as illustrated by a Senegalese worker, “Ousmane”, who had faced frequent issues with wage theft. On one particular occasion, he saw a boss with whom he had worked for over a week in the grocery store, buying groceries with his family. Ousmane made a scene, angrily confronting the man right there in public, in front of his family. The man immediately paid him his back wages and went away quickly. In this case, being threatening worked in Ousmane’s favor, but it is a double-edged sword that must be carefully managed in order to get work, and the men put significant effort into ensuring that their presence at the construction stores is unthreatening.

Though usually less dramatic than Ousmane’s case, the day laborers’ options for dealing with abuses were more individual and made up an important part of the bargaining process involved in getting hired (though the process of choosing whether to go with an employer or not was collectively informed, with the workers openly sharing information about bosses among themselves), whereas the women’s strategies tended toward more organization or simply surviving through community support until an opportunity for escape presented itself.

As the workers compete primarily on price of their labor and struggle to make themselves stand out in the labor pool, employers depend on simple heuristics around race and gender in order to make their hiring decisions. This leads to the aforementioned racial hierarchies within the groups, as well as the near total gender segregation of tasks. The two sectors create a perfect binary between strong, independent, time-flexible men and caring, reliable, dependent women. As we will see below, these stereotypes and the kind of workplace they produce also have profound impacts on the barriers to labor organization for the two groups, even if the ultimate outcomes remain largely the same.

4.2. Racial Hierarchies at Work

For the domestic workers, we found the most discrimination experiences among “indigenous” Latina workers (particularly Bolivian) and the few black women in the sample, while white Latinas and Eastern European workers faced less racism. As mentioned briefly before, there was a specific case for Filipina workers, who were physically racialized but aided by their high status as English speakers, and were a preferred choice for upper-class families—the Filipina workers in our sample acted simultaneously as live-in maids and English teachers for the children in the household.

“Ana”, 51, migrated from Bolivia 8 years ago, because she was a single mother of five children aged 10–31, and grandmother of three small children, and could not make ends meet. She has worked in the domestic sector ever since and experienced vastly exploitative conditions, most recently being required to work fulltime for a half-time salary of 350 euro; she refused and was unemployed at the time of the interview. Which means that she may not be able to renew the residence permit she achieved one year ago, dependent on employment. She has often felt disrespected because of her origin and appearance as an indigenous-origin Bolivian woman, and describes how ethnic hierarchies operate in the domestic sector and define clients’ preferences in a sector where the supply of migrant workers is far higher than the job offers:

“The clients prefer someone who knows languages. They ask for workers with driver’s license, to act as driver as well, to clean, to care for the children. And some want you to speak English, to teach the children so that they don’t have to pay for an English teacher. When I first came here, the maid was the maid and the nanny, the nanny. But now you have to be everything, gardener, driver, cleaner, babysitter … The clients prefer Spanish workers and if they can’t find one, Filipinas are very solicited since they speak English well and also accept very low salaries.” “Ana”, Barcelona 2013

Among the day laborers, a similar situation emerged, with mestizo and indigenous workers from central and south America facing some discrimination, but with everyone agreeing that the Africans faced the most. Race was a common topic of discussion at the worker sites and was internalized and went both ways, with the workers often discussing what kinds of bosses they prefer to work for based on racial and ethnic stereotypes. One day, a group of Colombian and Peruvian workers chatting amongst themselves shared racial stereotypes that they had internalized, saying things like, “Chinese people work you too hard!” or “Gypsies and Romanians are all thieves, they’re the ones who rob all over Europe”. The workers frequently talked about the unreliability of Peruvians in general, pointing to general discrimination against more indigenous workers.

“Paco”, a worker from Honduras, lives with his partner in a suburb of the city. His partner also works, but she only makes about 20€ a day and can only help with groceries. It is up to Paco to cover rent and the rest of the family’s expenses, while also sending money to his family in Honduras. He has had frequent issues with employers, and he explained the racial hierarchy in the sector this way,

“What I don’t like is that there’s a lot of racism against our African friends just because they’re a different color from us. There’s more racism towards them and I don’t like that. Not between the workers, but from the Spanish people. And they’re racist against us too, although not as much because our skin is a little bit whiter.” “Paco”, Barcelona 2021

4.3. Forms of Collective Organization and Workers’ Solidarity

We found that while traditional union organization is difficult for both groups in our study given the nature of their work, internal structures of solidarity do emerge in different shapes. The different forms of collective action also take on gendered dimensions, as illustrated by the empirical examples provided below:

• Domestic workers

Most of the interviewed migrant domestic workers were not active in any form of collective organization. Organizing for these women is very difficult because of the atomized, personal spaces in which their work takes place. There is no common workplace, so much of the organization happens in non-work-related social spaces such as churches, social organizations and friendship networks. Many of these spaces are depoliticized, and their primary actions take place in the form of spiritual and emotional support, as well as material support in the form of in-kind assistance, especially in the case of religious organizations.

Even so, collective organization by domestic workers has become more visible across Spain in recent years and led to some improvement of their job conditions. Some of these networks and organizations title themselves trade unions and some build alliances with other subaltern forms of organization, e.g., networks of undocumented migrants or alternative feminist groups (Hellgren 2024) Supported by legal advisors and trade union actors among others, groups of domestic workers formulated claims on the government, denouncing their unfair exclusion from measures applied to support workers during the pandemic (Olías 2022). In 2022, the law was changed to improve labor rights and social security of domestic workers, and in 2023 the ratification of ILO Domestic Workers Convention 189 was completed. Actors representing a migrant domestic workers’ trade union, however, argue that extended formal rights are not leading to actually improved conditions, and that there are scarce possibilities to put pressure on employers (in Spain mostly private households) to offer better conditions and higher salaries (Hellgren 2024). This is frequently an issue for the day laborers as well, as the mere acquisition of legal residency status does not guarantee a position in the formal labor market, and the nature of work in private homes means that obtaining a formal contract can be difficult.

In order to understand how collective organization among migrant workers is gendered, Korczynski’s notion of “communities of coping” appears useful. He found that collective organization among migrant domestic workers largely occurred beyond “traditional” collective claims-making such as workers demanding more rights and better conditions. Instead, the domestic workers’ support networks, alternative trade unions and informal organizations fill an important role as “communities of coping” (Korczynski 2003). This aligns with our recent findings from Spain, based on fieldwork with the migrant domestic workers’ union Sindihogar, which was founded partly as a reaction to the lacking voice and visibility the migrant domestic workers were given within the conventional trade unions. The representatives of the Sindihogar are explicit about perceiving alternative strategies as more constructive, and more realistic, than reproducing traditional, “male” forms of unionism.

“We are a union but we function a bit like a feminist cooperative in Latin America, these left-wing, indigenous movements. Art is also very important for us. […] The core of our work is personal change and development through activism.” “Sonia,” activist, Barcelona 2022

“We don’t consider the possibility of negotiating collective agreements at present. There is no employers’ organization to negotiate with, and even if we could… Well, I think that we are still at such a basic level of our struggle. Talking of collective agreements is too far from our reality.” “Daniela,” activist, Barcelona 2022

In a context where making demands on household employers often seems unrealistic, attention shifts toward alternative forms of support. Rather than functioning as a conventional trade union, Sindihogar operates as a community of coping and mutual aid, in a framework of female solidarity, anti-racism and non-hegemonic feminism. The collective runs catering services, produces and sells feminist art, and collaborates with lawyers who provide free legal advice for migrants and assistance with obtaining residence permits. Each time a member secures the highly sought-after “papers,” the achievement is marked by a collective celebration. Members of the network generally aspire to leave the domestic work sector and access better employment opportunities (Hellgren 2024). In this sense, the union’s primary role is not collective bargaining, but the provision of support, solidarity, and sisterhood—resources that can help these women envision and pursue alternative futures beyond domestic work.

• Day laborers

Few of the interviewed men working in day labor talk about direct political action or put much faith in unions. Collective organization is extraordinarily difficult due to the lack of a concrete definition of whom the employer is, hindering the formation of what Però (2019) refers to as “communities of struggle”. Labor organization is seen as at best a distraction and at worst dangerous. Even so, some collective actions emerge, taking on a very different nature than the domestic workers’ emotional and material support networks, being more explicitly focused on their job conditions. The day laborers in the sample do in fact have centralized locations where they get together to look for work, facilitating communication and coordination. They enforce price floors, ice out bad employers and share skills and contacts in order to strengthen their abilities to get jobs and make money. What’s more, as they may be perceived as threatening due to their status as racial minority men in a country that is often fearful of migrant men as perpetrators of crime, they band together to enforce a certain form of respectability politics, ensuring the space remains clean, calm and coordinated in order to mitigate any perception of threat. The low barriers of entry into their space and the paucity of available work, however, severely limit their potential for more consequential labor organization as their primary competitive advantage is their flexibility and affordability in a volatile sector.

Outside of these specific tactical actions, collective organization is essentially non-existent among the interviewed day laborers. This study found no knowledge or even interest in more formal organization on the part of the workers, and limited interviews with union representatives also failed to turn up any formal activities. The extreme atomization of the day laborers’ work on multiple axes (extremely short employment periods, mysterious employers who show up one day and not the next, black-market, cash economy and mutual wariness between formal and informal workers) renders collective attempts to improve conditions strenuous, time intensive and ultimately unlikely to be successful. Organization is further undermined by the stereotypically masculine attributes that it exploits, with the workers emphasizing their willingness to work, their autonomy and flexibility and their ability to suffer what they must in order to ‘provide’ for themselves and their families. Multiple workers in the study, for example, emphasized the fact that they had turned down some sort of public assistance or charity because of the fact that “it is for people who need it, and I’m a worker.” Because of these factors and others, research on day laborer organization is overwhelmingly pessimistic, and what little optimism can be found is more likely to be seen in studies focused on more broad-based political organization based around normalization of immigration status for a large segment of the population, rather than on organizing to improve day labor itself (Huerta 2008).

“Aurelio’s” story perfectly illustrates the frustrations and the lack of options available to the workers. “Aurelio” lives with his mother and younger sister. They receive some support from the state because of his minor sister, but most of the family income comes from Aurelio’s work. He is trying to regularize his status, as he has been in Spain for 7 years and should qualify for “arraigo social1”. Even so, since he cannot get a stable, formal job, he has not been able to complete the process. He finds the grind of constantly searching for tiny jobs, negotiating terms and trying to avoid getting scammed exhausting, in addition to the fact that not having a stable job is the only thing standing between him and legal residency:

“There should be a little more work for people like us… I don’t say it to be rude, but there are people who have papers and aren’t even interested in working, and then there are people who always want to make things work, and in my humble opinion… there should be more work for those of us that are out here looking.” “Aurelio”, Barcelona 2021

4.4. The Same but Different? Racial Capitalism and the Common Experience of Precarized Labor

The key element that unites all of the migrant workers in our sample is the precarious nature of their work. The work they do is often informal, carried out outside the bounds of the official economy whose existence they facilitate, as highlighted by Vergès (2019). Migrant status (many of the workers are undocumented) is merely one aspect in the production of precarious work. In fact, many of the workers move in and out of legal status, suggesting that legal status was not their primary barrier to accessing the formal economy. Being of migrant backgrounds, poor, and racialized as non-white reinforced their exploitability, even when they were highly educated. This can be seen in preferences among employers for workers from certain origins, due to both stereotypes about their work and the necessary otherization needed to justify exploitation. In both sectors, the employers are usually from middle or working-class backgrounds themselves and cannot afford or are unwilling to pay decent wages for the work being done. Otherizing the worker as perhaps even being fortunate to be able to work in Spain even if the work was degrading, low-pay or dangerous was a key justification for low wages and poor working conditions, reflecting the relevance of racial capitalism as a crucial perspective for understanding their situation.

Both groups also work in largely unregulated spaces, inside private homes, with the employer being, in most cases, a private individual or small-time contractor working in diffuse spaces where labor inspection is nearly impossible. For both groups, labor organization is additionally hindered by the fact that both groups see exit from the sector as their primary strategy going forward. There is little belief that the sectors themselves can be elevated to become long-term solutions to the workers’ economic situations. The first priority is survival, and once survival is secured, exit, even if in reality the workers may continue in the same economic activity for years or even decades. In the case of the day laborers, existing within a highly regulated sector with broad union representation actually exhibits a threat, as they are relegated to only the most precarious operations and are excluded from more lucrative formal work within their occupation.

Though the primary setting for both groups is the private homes of wealthier individuals, they exist at far ends of a spectrum between a traditional, patron-client relationship reminiscent of a sort of nineteenth-century servitude on the one end, and a stereotype of neoliberal flexibility on the other. The domestic workers, after all, normally work for one or more regular employers who hold outsized power over them, paying them their monthly wages and ultimately deciding whether or not they will be adopted into the formal economy through a contract. The day laborers, on the other hand, are hired by the day or even by the hour, and may in extreme cases work for multiple employers in a single day, rarely with any expectation that they will ever see today’s boss again.

For both groups, workplace abuse is commonplace, although the kinds of abuse differ, conditioned both by the context in which they carry out their work and by their gender. While both groups had certain challenges in common (underpayment, overwork, denial of certain workplace rights and verbal abuse), there were some important differences. Wage theft was an incredibly common experience for the day laborers, but was less of an issue for the domestic workers, probably because an employer expects a domestic worker to come in week after week and knows that failure to pay would likely lead them to seek employment elsewhere. Similarly, the lack of safety standards constituted a constant threat for the day laborers, as the construction industry exposes the workers to very serious risk of physical injury. This was less of an issue for the domestic workers. On the other hand the role between the employer and employee in domestic services often contains subtle forms of abuse, disguised as friendship or at least a certain complicity that masks the deeply unequal labor relation. One place where local attitudes around the nexus of gender, class and race had an outsized effect on the differences between the two sectors was in terms of pay. Leaving aside the fact that both groups lack non-pay benefits normally afforded to workers, the primary source of economic precarity for the domestic laborers was the low salary. This low salary is in part a reflection of the fact that, until very recently, even domestic workers operating in the formal economy were exempt from most minimum wage and benefits laws, a policy often explicitly justified as an aid to the working and middle classes that depend on low-wage domestic workers in order to afford necessary services unmet by the public welfare system (Hellgren 2024). That is to say, even under the legal provisions for workers’ rights, domestic workers, coded as female, lower class and racialized minorities, are expected to work for less than decent wages. This legal situation has been improved by the current government, but the attitude remains ingrained in society and practice.

In contrast, the primary driver of precarity for the day laborers is not low wages, but rather infrequent wages. Even if they make less than their formally employed peers, most of the day laborers actually do better than minimum wage per hour of work. Those with specialized skills can do much better than that, and the men communicate and coordinate to set price floors that keep the employers from going too far below what they consider fair. Even so, the great weakness in the sector is the scarcity of work. While the per-hour rate may not be terrible, the workers struggle to get enough work to cover their expenses, and often depend on another family member in a more stable situation to supplement their income, or they face homelessness and hunger. This is also part of a structural situation, with construction being the opposite of domestic labor: relatively formalized and covered by collective bargaining agreements. The day laborers merely represent a labor reserve for when the formal, lucrative construction industry cannot meet demand, or more commonly for peripheral situations where a private household or small-time contractor would like to undercut the prices of a formal construction firm.

Finally, we found rather unexpected similarities between the two groups of workers in relation to their experiences of parenthood. While many of the male workers in the sample were single, and motherhood played a central role in the lives of the interviewed domestic workers, those men who were fathers had similar experiences of huge responsibilities and pressure to provide for more than themselves based on low and unstable earnings. For the domestic workers, the responsibility for children—and often also elderly relatives—frequently as sole breadwinners, intensifies these women’s dependence on paid domestic work and significantly weakens their bargaining power. As a result, many are compelled to accept almost any available job, as their children’s wellbeing depends largely, if not entirely, on their income. For those who have left their children in their countries of origin, there is strong pressure to send substantial remittances (see also, e.g., Hellgren and Serrano 2019). Others have brought their children with them, which imposes further constraints on the types of employment they can accept, particularly in relation to school schedules and care responsibilities. “Abeni”’s narrative is illustrative of this situation:

“Abeni” is 32 years old and migrated alone, and pregnant, from Nigeria. She does not want to talk about the details, but she escaped domestic abuse and experienced much hardship during her long journey to Spain. After her first son died under unclear circumstances while in his father’s custody, she decided to escape. In Spain, she gave birth to another son, who is now 5 years old. She lives alone with him in an apartment provided by Caritas on a temporary basis, and works informally, part-time as a cleaner. After 4 years in Spain, she achieved a temporary residence permit. She describes how difficult it is to make ends meet and how her responsibility as mother conditions her possibilities to work, while she must work to guarantee her and her son’s subsistence:

“The lady I work for now doesn’t want to make a contract, she won’t pay for the social security costs. I make 400 euro per month working informally, and another 10 euros per hour for occasional hours in other houses. All in all, about 600 per month. […] It is very difficult, and I have a very limited schedule, I don’t have family here, nobody can help me with the kid so I can only accept jobs during school hours.” “Abeni”, Barcelona 2014

Abeni’s motherhood, intersecting with racial discrimination, a lack of legal status and the unwillingness of her employer to elevate her status leave her with very few options.

Among the male construction workers, fatherhood, perhaps more clearly articulated as ‘manhood’, also comes with responsibilities, expectations and issues, as can be seen with “Abdul,” an Algerian man in his twenties who has been looking for work at a day labor site for a little over a month. He lives with his wife and daughter who depend on him exclusively for income. He speaks enough Spanish to get by, but is much more confident speaking French. He has had serious problems with wage theft, having worked with an employer for some weeks who now refuses to pay. He and his family had lived with his mother-in-law for a while, but there was too little space for all of them. He would like to go back to school, but his family depends on his meager income from day labor to survive, and being undocumented he has no access to social services. Getting work as a day laborer depends on good feelings with the employer, and he feels that being North African affects his job prospects, a sentiment others agreed with.

It’s all about who gets lucky, it depends on luck. And if you have a good conversation, and the employer likes you, that’s it” “Abdul”, Barcelona 2021

Abdul spends a large portion of his time looking for work, and his role as a father both motivates him and makes him more desperate in his search for work, in spite of the racial discrimination he faces. Though the specific gender-based attributes that reinforce Abdul and Abeni’s precarity differ, the character of their lived experiences as parents is strikingly similar.

5. Discussion

In this article, we have analyzed how gender influences the experiences of precarity within the context of global racial capitalism, materialized in a European society where there is growing demand for cheap services performed largely by migrant workers. We posed two specific research questions: (i) In what ways are the experiences of migrant precarity gendered; and (ii) How do gendered and racialized experiences of precarious labor shape different forms of emerging collective organization and agency?

Addressing the first question, we found empirical examples of migrant precarity that are both gendered and gender-neutral. The migrant men and women working as day laborers and domestic workers in our studies face similar challenges in the sense that they struggle to gain access to the formal economy, workplace protections and decent job conditions. The key element that unites all migrant men and women in our studies is the precarious nature of their work. The work they do is often carried out outside the boundaries of the official economy. Though we could talk about their varying legal statuses, this is merely one aspect in the production of precarious work. Their exploitability was primarily reinforced by the fact that they were migrants, poor, and often also visibly racialized. Even so, the experience of exploitation is reinforced differently based on the way gender stereotypes and roles are produced in society to create two different worker categories: Flexible day laborers who are coded as masculine, defined by strength and independence and submissive domestic workers defined by stereotypically feminine attributes of responsibility, care and loyalty, exhibiting different but complementary kinds of disposability facilitating the formal economy as outlined by Vergès (2019).

Shifting focus to our second question, we inquired what forms of collective organization emerged among the workers. Addressing this issue is potentially useful to advancing the analyses of potential collective struggles that transcend boundaries defined by intersecting social categories. We found that collective organization of both groups is challenged by the diffuse nature of their employment, the lack of clear employer representatives against whom to struggle (Però 2019), and the variation in the legal status of the workers. For workers at the bottom layer of the (informal) economy, their precarious status may be their principal competitive advantage. If “too many” rights are achieved, then some of the workers may be regulated out of a job. As can be seen with the day laborers, even in the case of highly regulated sectors, an informal shadow economy can emerge if the market factors demand it. Earlier analyses of the domestic sector in Spain have argued that the large supply of low-paid migrant women was largely tolerated by the state since they served to prevent massive demands for more affordable, public care services (Hellgren and Serrano 2019; Hobson et al. 2018).

Nearly as significant as the structural barriers to collective organization was the fact that workers in these sectors often viewed individual exit as more attainable than collective voice. In recent years, Spain has introduced important labor reforms, including a substantial increase in the minimum wage and, as we write in early 2026, a large-scale regularization of undocumented migrants. The effects of these measures on the working conditions of the most vulnerable actors of the labor market—such as the migrant men and women in our study—remain to be seen. We suggest that any sustainable, long-term response to the consolidation of a permanent migrant precariat must adopt a broad approach, including measures such as facilitating the recognition of non-European university degrees. At the same time, our findings indicate that demand for these workers is closely tied to their exploitability. This raises a fundamental question: to what extent can the provision of affordable services in sectors such as domestic work, home repairs or deliveries be reconciled with decent employment conditions? Further research is needed to deepen our understanding of the societal and economic dynamics that generate both the demand for and supply of precarious migrant labor, as well as the opportunity structures that might improve workers’ prospects—whether through collective action, strengthened regulation, or more ambitious public policy.

To conclude this article, we return to our theoretical framework, conceptualized as gendered experiences of racial capitalism. Our contribution to the literature on racial capitalism primarily lies in providing empirical findings that illustrate its complexities. Rather than engaging in debates over which categories constitute the primary axes of inequality—race, class, or gender (see, e.g., Go 2021)—we instead highlight how these categories intersect and continuously shift in their impact on migrant workers’ lived experiences. Moreover, the notion of the “racial” should not be reduced to a simplistic dichotomy between white and non-white workers. Our study shows that migrants of different origins are racialized in distinct ways, with direct consequences for their positioning within the migrant precariat.