Essential and forgotten. Domestic work and the impact of policy responses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain and Italy

Results from the European project RESISTIRÉ show that the pandemic outbreak and policies adopted to contain the virus have reinforced pre-existing gender inequalities, resulting in a “spiral of increasing inequalities” (Axelsson et al., 2021: 110). The care domain is a key part of this spiral and has been at the centre of debates and of some of the COVID-19 policy responses. However, for the most part, policy interventions in the care domain have focused primarily on work-life balance, neglecting the impact of health-related policy restrictions on domestic workers – a highly feminised and racialised sector. Yet these workers have been dramatically affected by the pandemic and related policies, not only in terms of exposure to infection, but also in terms of exacerbation of pre-existing and intersecting inequalities. Moreover, when policies did address the domestic sector, they often reproduced gender stereotyped understandings of the nature of care work, and reinforced racist assumptions on migration. This paper compares the policies on domestic workers enacted during the pandemic in Italy and Spain, which illustrate how public policy engages in gendering and racializing domestic workers. Drawing on Bacchi’s methodology, it seeks to unfold and problematise the representations and implicit assumptions related to care work, and the gender and racial hierarchies underpinning them.