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A Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 AD) Chinese ceramic figurine of a lady servant in a standard formal pose with hands covered by long sleeve cuffs in the traditional fashions

A domestic worker is a person who works within the employer's household. Domestic workers perform a variety of household services for an individual or a family, from providing care for children and elderly dependents to cleaning and household maintenance, known as housekeeping. Responsibilities may also include cooking, doing laundry and ironing, food shopping and other household errands. Some domestic workers live within the household where they work.

The conditions faced by domestic workers have varied considerably throughout history and in the contemporary world. In the course of twentieth-century movements for labour rights, women's rights and immigrant rights, the conditions faced by domestic workers and the problems specific to their class of employment have come to the fore. In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted the Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers which covers decent work conditions for domestic workers. Recent ILO estimates based on national surveys and/or censuses of 117 countries, place the number of domestic workers at around 53 million. But the ILO itself states that "experts say that due to the fact that this kind of work is often hidden and unregistered, the total number of domestic workers could be as high as 100 million". The ILO also states that 83% of domestic workers are women and many are migrant workers.

Servant is an older English term for "domestic worker", though not all servants worked inside the home.

History[link]

French domestic worker, female; by Jean-Étienne Liotard

Domestic service, or the employment of people for wages in their employer's residence, was sometimes simply called "service". It evolved into a hierarchical system in various countries at various times.

The United Kingdom's Master and Servant Act of 1823 was the first of its kind and influenced the creation of domestic service laws in other nations, although legislation tended to favour employers. However, before the passing of such Acts servants, and workers in general, had no protection in law. The only real advantage that domestic service provided was the provision of meals, accommodation, and sometimes clothes, in addition to a modest wage. Service was normally an apprentice system with room for advancement through the ranks.

In Britain this system peaked towards the close of the Victorian era, perhaps reaching its most complicated and rigidly structured state during the Edwardian period, which reflected the limited social mobility of the time. The equivalent in the United States was the Gilded Age.

Current situation around the world[link]

Aristocrat from Bandoeng with a servant sitting on the floor, Dutch East Indies, 1870s.

In July 2011, at the annual International Labour Conference, held by the ILO, conference delegates adopted C189, the Convention on Domestic Workers (2011) by a vote of 396 to 16, with 63 abstentions. The Convention recognizes domestic workers as workers with the same rights as other workers. The Convention text can be found on the ILO website here.^[1] On 26 April 2012, Uruguay was the first country to ratify C189.^[2]

They may live at home, though they are usually "live-in" domestics, meaning they receive room and board as part of their salaries. In some countries, because of the large gap between urban and rural incomes, and the lack of employment opportunities in the countryside, even an ordinary middle class urban family can afford to employ a full-time live-in servant. The majority of domestic workers in China, Mexico, India, and other populous developing countries, are people from the rural areas who are employed by urban families.

'In Guatemala, it is estimated that eight percent of all women work as domestic workers. They hardly have any legal protection. According to Guatemalan labour law, domestic work is “subject neither to a working time statute nor to regulations on the maximum number of working hours in a day”. Legally, domestic helpers are only entitled to ten hours of free time in 24 hours, and one day off per week. But very often, these minimal employment laws are disregarded, and so are basic civil liberties.' ^[3]

In Brazil, domestic workers must be hired under a registered contract and have most of the rights of any other workers, which includes a minimum wage, remunerated vacations and a remunerated weekly day off. It is not uncommon, however, to hire servants without registering them. Since servants come almost always from the lower, uneducated classes, they are sometimes ignorant of their rights, especially in the rural zone. Nevertheless, domestics employed without a proper contract sometimes sue their employers to get compensation from abuses.^{[citation needed]}

In the United States, domestic workers are excluded from many of the legal protections afforded to other classes of worker, including the provisions of the National Labour Relations Act.^[4] Traditionally domestic workers have mostly been women and are likely to be immigrants.^[5]

Child domestic workers[link]

Child maid servant in India. Child domestic workers are common in India, with the children often being sent by their parents to earn extra money, although it is banned by the government.

The use of children as domestic servants continues to be common in parts of the world, such as Latin America or parts of Asia. Such children are very vulnerable to exploitation: often they are not allowed to take breaks or are required to work long hours; many suffer from a lack of access to education, which can contribute to social isolation and a lack of future opportunity. UNICEF considers domestic work to be among the lowest status, and reports that most child domestic workers are live-in workers and are under the round-the-clock control of their employers.^[6] Some estimates suggest that among girls, domestic work is the most common form of employment.^[7] Child domestic work is common in countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan.^[8][9] It has been estimated that globally, at least 10 million children work in domestic labor jobs.^[9]

Domestic work and international migration[link]

Many countries import domestic workers from abroad, usually poorer countries, through recruitment agencies and brokers because their own nationals are no longer obliged or inclined to do domestic work. This includes most Middle Eastern countries, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. For most of these countries, the number of domestic workers run into the hundreds of thousands. There are at least one million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.

Major sources of domestic workers include the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia. Taiwan also imports domestic workers from Vietnam and Mongolia. Organizations such as Kalayaan support the growing number of these migrant domestic workers.

Uniform[link]

Employers may require their domestic workers to wear a uniform, livery or other "domestic workers' clothes" when in their employers' residence. The uniform is usually simple, and was even in the 19th century and 20th centuries. Female servants wore long, plain, dark-coloured dresses or black skirts with white belts and white blouses, and black shoes, and male servants and butlers would wear something from a simple suit, or a white dress shirt, often with tie, and knickers. In traditional portrayals, the attire of domestic workers especially was typically more formal and conservative than that of those whom they serve. For example, in films of the early 20th century, a butler might appear in a tailcoat, while male family members and guests appeared in lounge suits or sports jackets and trousers depending on the occasion. In later portrayals, the employer and guests might wear casual slacks or even jeans, while a male domestic worker wore a jacket and tie or a white dress shirt with black pants, necktie or bowtie, maybe even waistcoat, or a female domestic worker either a blouse and skirt (or trousers) or a dress.

Accommodation[link]

Many domestic workers are live-in domestics. Though they often have their own quarters, their accommodations are not usually as comfortable as those reserved for the family members. In some cases, they sleep in the kitchen or small rooms, such as a box room, sometimes located in the basement or attic.

Notable domestic workers[link]

A poster of an American maid in uniform (ca. 1939)

Alonzo Fields, butler at the White House

Young water carrier (drawing by Heinrich Zille)

A Colombian domestic worker

Real people[link]

• Céleste Albaret, housekeeper of Marcel Proust
• Gladys Aylward, maid, afterwards missionary
• Alice Ayres
• Sarah Balabagan
• Fonzworth Bentley
• Sophie Brzeska, governess and writer
• Paul Burrell, butler to Diana, Princess of Wales
• Flor Contemplacion
• Elizabeth Cotten, singer
• Hannah Cullwick, maid to A. J. Munby
• Lisette Denison Forth, maid and philanthropist
• Caroline Herschel, astronomer (worked as a domestic servant in her father's household until his death)
• Paul Hogan
• Dora Lee Jones
• Margaret Maher, maid to Emily Dickinson
• Papin sisters
• Lillian Rogers Parks
• Rose Porteous
• Margaret Powell, maid and writer
• Casimira Rodríguez
• Margaret Rogers

Different domestic worker jobs[link]

• Au pair, foreign-national domestic assistant working for, and living as part of, a host family
• Babysitter
• Between maid, an in-between maid; her duties being half in the reception rooms and half in the kitchen
• Boot boy, a young male servant, employed mostly to perform footwear maintenance and minor auxiliary tasks
• Butler, a senior employee, almost invariably a man, whose duties traditionally include overseeing the wine cellar, the silverware, and some oversight of the other servants
• Charwoman or char, a female house or office cleaner, usually part-time
• Chauffeur, a personal driver
• Cleaner
• Cook, either a cook who works alone or the head of a team of cooks
• Dog walker
• Footman
• Gardener
• Governess, a woman teacher for the children
• Groundskeeper
• Handyman (household repairs)
• Horse trainer
• Housekeeper, a senior employee, usually female
• Knave
• Lackey
• Laundress
• Maid (or housemaid)
• Masseur/Masseuse
• Nanny (once known as a nurse), a woman taking care of infants and children
• Nursemaid
• Personal shopper
• Personal trainer (fitness, swimming, sports)
• Pool person
• Scullery maid
• Secretary (social or corresponding)
• Security guard
• Stable boy
• Valet or "gentleman's gentleman", responsible for the master's wardrobe and assisting him in dressing, etc. In the armed forces some officers have a soldier (in the British army called a batman) for such duties
• Wet nurse, provides suckling for infants if mothers cannot or do not wish to do so themselves

See also[link]

• Convention on domestic workers
• Female servants in 18th century England
• Foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong
• Household chore
• Isabella Beeton ("Mrs Beeton") and The Book of Household Management
• Maid
• National Union of Domestic Employees
• Saint Zita, the patron saint of domestic servants
• Similar work performed not within the home but, for example, on cruise lines

Fiction

• The Diary of a Chambermaid, a novel by Octave Mirbeau
• The Man Booker prize winning novel The Remains of the Day
• Upstairs, Downstairs, a British television series set in London
• Beryl's Lot, a British television series based on Margaret Powell's memoirs of domestic service
• Downton Abbey, a British-American television series set in a large country house
• You Rang, M'Lord?, a British television comedy series

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• The Duties of Servants; by a member of the aristocracy, author of 'Manners and Rules of Good Society'. London: F. Warne & Co., 1894
• A Few Rules for the Manners of Servants in Good Families. Ladies' Sanitary Association, 1901
• The Servants' Practical Guide: a handbook of duties and rules; by the author of 'Manners and Tone of Good Society'. London: Frederick Warne & Co., [1880]
  • The Management of Servants: a practical guide to the routine of domestic service; by the author of “Manners and Tone of Good Society.” (the same work under a different title)
• Dawes, Frank (1973) Not in Front of the Servants: domestic service in England 1850-1939. London: Wayland ISBN 0-85340-287-6
• Evans, Siân (2011) Life below Stairs in the Victorian and Edwardian Country House. National Trust Books
  • --do.--"Yells, Bells and Smells ... from royal visits ... to the case of the cook and the freezer", in: National Trust Magazine; Autumn 2011, pp. 70–73

External links[link]

Look up domestic worker in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Servants

• International Domestic Workers Network
• List of digitized books on domestic workers in German, English, and other languages at de.wikisource
• ILO resources on domestic workers:

  Resource guide on domestic workers, Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers (June 16, 2011) (PDF), Decent work for domestic workers, Report IV(1) (2010)

• Amnesty International paper on the abuse of domestic workers in the Middle East
• A Global Justice Center paper about domestic workers worldwide
• An international campaign for domestic workers' labour rights
• Human Rights Watch article about migrant domestic workers

Joseph Walton Losey (January 14, 1909, La Crosse, Wisconsin – June 22, 1984, London) was an American theater and film director. After studying in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, Losey returned to the United States, eventually making his way to Hollywood. In the 1950s Losey was blacklisted in the United States and moved to Europe where he made the remainder of his films, mostly in the United Kingdom.

Biography[link]

This section requires expansion.

Early life and career[link]

During the McCarthy Era, Losey was named during hearings of the HUAC for his supposed ties with the Communist Party. Although he was never officially blacklisted, his career in the US declined, and he moved to England to continue working as a director.^[1]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Even in the UK, he experienced problems: his first British film, The Sleeping Tiger, a 1954 film noir crime thriller, bore the pseudonym Victor Hanbury, rather than his own name, in the credits as director, as the stars of the film, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, feared being blacklisted in Hollywood due to working on a film he directed. He was also originally slated to direct the 1956 Hammer Films production X the Unknown; however, after a few days work on the project, star Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathiser and Losey was moved off the project.

Collaboration with Harold Pinter[link]

In the 1960s, Losey began working with playwright Harold Pinter, the collaboration beginning what would be a long friendship and a successful career for Pinter as a screenwriter. Losey realized three films from Pinter's screenplays, The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971), all of which have made a mark in the traditions of British, European, and American art house cinema. The Servant won three British Academy Film Awards.^[2] Accident won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.^[3] And The Go-Between won, among others, the Golden Palm Award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, four prizes at the 1972 BAFTA awards, and 'Best British Screenplay' at the 1972 Writers' Guild of Great Britain awards.^[4] Each of the Pinter-Losey films examines the politics of sexuality, gender, and class in 1960s and 1970s Britain. In The Servant, a manservant named Hugo Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) facilitates the moral and psychological degradation of a member of the nouveau riche named Tony (James Fox); Accident explores male lust, hypocrisy, and ennui amongst the educated middle class as two Oxford tutors named Stephen (Bogarde) and Charley (Stanley Baker) competitively objectify a pupil named Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) against the backdrop of their seemingly idyllic lives. In The Go-Between, a young working class boy named Leo Colston (Dominic Guard) is involved in both facilitating and undermining a socially transgressive affair between an upper class woman named Marian Maudsley (Julie Christie) and a working class farmer named Ted Burgess (Alan Bates).

Losey's move from The Servant to the subsequent two films saw him experimenting increasingly with the mechanisms of cinema, in particular a rendering of time that was not linear but layered and thus exemplary of the subjective experience of memory. Although Losey's films can in the main be described as naturalistic, The Servant's hybridization of Losey's signature Baroque style, film noir, naturalism, and expressionism and both Accident's and The Go-Between's radical cinematography, use of montage, voice over, and musical score amount to a sophisticated construction of cinematic time and narrative perspective which edges this work in the direction of neorealist cinema. All three films are marked by Pinter's sparse, elliptical, and enigmatically subtextual dialogue, something Losey often develops a visual correlate for and occasionally even works against by means of dense and cluttered mise en scene and peripatetic camera work.

Pinter later worked with Losey on The Proust Screenplay (1972), an adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust; however, the finances were never found to realize a film before Losey died.

Later career[link]

In 1975, Losey realized a long-planned adaptation of Brecht's Galileo (aka Life of Galileo). Losey had co-directed the original U.S. production of Galileo with the author himself as the other co-director (and Charles Laughton, who had worked on the translation/adaptation, had had the lead role, taken in the film by Topol). Galileo was produced as part of the subscription film series of the American Film Theatre, though it was shot in England. In the context of that production, Losey also made a half hour film based on Galileo's life.

In 1979 Losey filmed Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, shot in Villa La Rotonda and the Veneto region of Italy: this film was nominated for several César Awards in 1980 including Best Director. He demonstrated a facility for working in the French language and Monsieur Klein (1976) gave Alain Delon as star and producer one of French cinema's earliest chances to highlight the background to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of French Jews in July 1942.

Private life[link]

Losey married three times. From 1956 to 1963 he was married to British actress Dorothy Bromiley; they had a son, Joshua Losey, an actor. He had a son, Gavrik Losey, with the fashion designer/author Elizabeth Hawes. Gavrik helped out with the production on some of his father's films. Losey then married the former Patricia Mohan, who adapted Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto for Don Giovanni, and Nell Dunn's play Steaming. Losey's third marriage lasted for the rest of his life. Joseph Losey is also the grandfather of film directors Marek Losey and Luke Losey.

Filmography as director[link]

Bibliography[link]

• David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, Faber, 1994, ISBN 978-0-571-16449-3
• Michel Ciment, Le Livre de Losey. Entretiens avec le cinéaste, Paris, Stock/Cinéma, 1979, 465 p.
• Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey, London & New York: Metheun, 1985, 436 p.
• Michel Ciment, Joseph Losey: l'oeil du Maître, Institut Lumière/Actes Sud, 1994, 360 p.
• Joaquín Vallet, Joseph Losey, Cátedra, 2010, 330 p.
• Edith DeRahm, Joseph Losey: An American Director in Exile, Pharos, 1995.
• Colin Gardner Joseph Losey, Manchester University Press, 2004.
• Foster Hirsch, Joseph Losey, Twayne, 1980.
• Penelope Houston, "Losey's Paper Handkerchief", Sight and Sound, Summer 1966, pp. 142–143.
• Gilles Jacob "Joseph Losey, or The Camera Calls", Sight and Sound, Spring 1966, pp. 62–67.
• James Leahy, The Cinema of Joseph Losey, A.S Barnes, 1967, 175 p.
• Christian Ledieu Joseph Losey, Seghers, 1963, 188 p.
• Joseph Losey, Losey on Losey, edited and introduced by Tom Milne, Secker & Warburg, 1967, 192 p.
• James Palmer and Michael Riley, The Films of Joseph Losey, Cambridge University Press, 1993,

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Complete Joseph Losey (Links to notes for the retrospective series screened by Harvard Film Archive in July and August, 2008)
• Filmography at BFI Film & TV Database (contains entries not found at IMDb)
• Joseph Losey at filmreference.com includes extensive bibliography
• Joseph Losey at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Joseph Losey at the Internet Movie Database
• Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation (Notes by Steven Seid for the retrospective series screened by Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, March 5-April 16, 2010)
• Joseph Losey's Boom! (1968) by Kimberly Lindbergs; liner notes for the CD release of the film score by John Barry
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• A Child Went Forth at Archive.org
• Dissecting class relations: The film collaborations of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter at the World Socialist Web Site

v t e César Award for Best Director 1976 Bertrand Tavernier 1977 Joseph Losey 1978 Alain Resnais 1979 Christian de Chalonge 1980 Roman Polanski 1981 François Truffaut 1982 Jean-Jacques Annaud 1983 Andrzej Wajda 1984 Ettore Scola 1985 Claude Zidi 1986 Michel Deville 1987 Alain Cavalier 1988 Louis Malle 1989 Jean-Jacques Annaud 1990 Bertrand Blier 1991 Jean-Paul Rappeneau 1992 Alain Corneau 1993 Claude Sautet 1994 Alain Resnais 1995 André Téchiné 1996 Claude Sautet 1997 Patrice Leconte / Bertrand Tavernier 1998 Luc Besson 1999 Patrice Chéreau 2000 Tonie Marshall 2001 Dominik Moll 2002 Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2003 Roman Polanski 2004 Denys Arcand 2005 Abdellatif Kechiche 2006 Jacques Audiard 2007 Guillaume Canet 2008 Abdellatif Kechiche 2009 Jean-François Richet 2010 Jacques Audiard 2011 Roman Polanski 2012 Michel Hazanavicius