"This Time Changed my Life”: Discourses and Experiences of Domestic Workers During the Pandemic in Granada and Zaragoza, Spain

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the covid-19 pandemic affected the perceptions and uses of time of domestic workers in Spain, focusing, in particular, on the cities of Granada and Zaragoza. Our work derives from the project "El cuidado importa. Impacto de género en las cuidadoras/es de mayores y dependientes en tiempos de la Covid-19” (CUMADE) coordinated by Universidad Rovira I Virgili de Tarragona-Cataluña (Spain), and run by interdisciplinary research teams from ten Spanish universities between the months of September 2020 and January 2021. The research is qualitative, based on in-depth interviews, and designed to investigate the impact of covid-19 on the care of the elderly and dependents and, more specifically, on the domestic workers' sector. Temporality, so severely affected by the uncertainty and unpredictability of the new situation, provides an interesting axis for qualitative analysis of the discourses of women workers on the way in which the pandemic has conditioned their daily lives. To undertake this analysis, we base ourselves on the work of Ramón Ramos on las imágenes sociales del tiempo (the social images of time). This approach represents an original and novel analysis of the reality of domestic workers, while at the same time dialoguing with other recent work on this issue. The images of time as a resource, scenario, or horizon serve to analyze the discourse of our interviewees and show how time, understood as a social category, has structured and organized their lives. We consider what they have been able to do and what they have not been able to do, the distribution and intensification of tasks, their plans for the future, and the physical and emotional impact of the pandemic. © 2023, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota Colombia. All rights reserved.

Domestic work in times of coronavirus: the precariousness of migrant domestic workers in Spain

The precariousness that characterizes domestic employment in Spain is not new;however, the health emergency caused by covid-19 has exacerbated it. The migratory situation of a large number of female employees, as well as the informality that prevails in this labor niche, have been identified as elements of greater vulnerability for this group in the context of the pandemic. In this text, we analyze the impact of covid-19 on domestic employment and care in the Spanish context, specifically we recover the experience of domestic workers in the city of Zaragoza (Spain), highlighting their labor, social and health difficulties, as well as the strategies used to face the consequences of the pandemic. © 2022, Scalabriniano Center for Migratory Studies. All rights reserved.