Abstract

CANEVARO, Santiago. Affections, knowledge and proximity in shaping the management of child  care in the home: Employees and employers of domestic service in the City of Buenos Aires. Trab. soc. [online]. 2014, n.22, pp.175-193. ISSN 1514-6871.

This paper analyzes the logics of affectivization that come into play in the employment relationship between employers and their employees in the City of Buenos Aires from analyzing agreements, negotiations and conflicts that arise in the management of child care work. Using a relational approach, having worked with both the employers and those employed as domestic workers, this study focuses on the interstitial spaces of dialogue, tension and agreements that occur between the parties if the affective dimension comes into play. Our interest is to show how the relationships portrayed in affectivity operate as a matrix that organizes, defines and regulates rights and duties between both parties, making it difficult to determine a unique logic in the "relationship models" that are built daily. Unlike what happens with the cleaning task management, we will show how, where the childcare is concerened, control, disputes as degrees of supervision and criteria of efficiency and effectiveness around knowledge related to care work come into play, having consequences for both sides of the relationship. The customization of the employment relationship constitutes a particular frame of arrangements and meanings that operate as nodal vectors in the negotiations that employers hold with their employees. The intensity of contact and closeness with the children they care for often leads employees to evaluate an employment / contractual relationship in terms of a link that is lived and expressed in terms of family and kinship.

Keywords : Childcare; Middle clases; Domestic work; Inequeality; Affect; Buenos Aires.

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