Year 2011.
An image in the magazine “Hola” causes a stir: four women from Valluna high society pose in a mansion;
In the background, two uniformed Afro-descendant workers carry silver trays.
The matriarchs of the family explain on the W Radio station that the publication's journalists proposed said photograph with the domestic service employees because "they thought it was very good that in Cali we worked with people of color."
Year 2015.
María Roa Borja, a displaced woman from a banana farm in Apartadó, Antioquia, employed as a domestic service between 1997 and 2005, gives a speech at Harvard University.
The intervention of the president of the Union of Domestic Service Workers (Utrasd), who grew up “where blood rolls faster than water”, precedes that of the philosopher Noam Chomsky.
Year 2022.
France Elena Márquez Mina, a lawyer and environmental activist, is the vice-presidential formula of the left-wing candidate, Gustavo Petro, leader in the electoral polls.
In April, during the presentation of the head of the debate on the Historical Pact, the Afro-Colombian leader from Suárez, Cauca, said about Iván Duque: “What really bothers the President of the Republic is that today a woman who could be the woman who she has working as a service employee is going to be her vice president.”
She wrote to her co-supporter, a senator of the Historical Pact, on Twitter: “Dear Gustavo Bolívar, I was an employee of the service and I had to endure a lot of humiliation, it was as if they considered me his slave.
Black women, impoverished peasant indigenous women, who work as employees deserve a decent salary and treatment.”
Márquez, who worked in domestic service and today is the potential vice president of Colombia, is the same one who had to explain to a country why she received monetary aid from the State.
The Department of Social Prosperity not only found that she met the beneficiary profile, but also determined the amount allocated: $4,060,000 between April 2020 and April 2022.
If elected, the Petro formula would assume the position of the current vice president, Marta Lucía Ramírez, a woman who represents both the Colombian political and social elites and collusion with the Status Quo.
In contrast, Francia Márquez symbolizes various historical claims (peasant, ethnic, environmentalist, feminist), but among them, one of an urban nature, directly related to the systematic mechanisms of structural discrimination in the country: domestic service workers.
What would the presence of Márquez in the Casa de Nariño mean?
What is the origin and power of a social movement that is about to have a woman in the vice presidency?
Medellín and the “service girls”
On Sundays they meet in the Parque de San Antonio.
The sculptures of the two doves by Fernando Botero –"El Pájaro", semi-destroyed by a bomb in 1995, and the later one that symbolizes the future−, are a metaphor for the conversations that surround them: the "service girls", as they still Domestic service workers (TSD) are called in Medellín, they tell each other their troubles and make plans about the future of their union in that place in the center of the city.
Andrea Londoño Sánchez, founder and director of the Let's Talk About Domestic Work Foundation, recalls that those Afro-Colombian women who arrived in Medellín found domestic work as their only job opportunity.
They shared characteristics such as having been victims of violent displacement, their origins in Choco, and conditions of poverty.
The National Trade Union School (ENS) and the Afro-Colombian Corporation for Social and Cultural Development (Carabantú) carried out a study, the results of which revealed the multiple discriminations they suffer.
The racialization of this work is not a minor issue, as indicated by the research Histories behind the curtains, by Viviana Osorio and Carmenza Jiménez: "Domestic work appears as a racialized occupational category in the case studies: in Cartagena, 80% of the interviewees identify themselves as Afro-Colombian or black;
in Urabá this proportion is 56%.
This has important implications in the ways in which women experience domestic work, and decisively influences the working conditions that are configured for them in the intertwining of oppressions.
Being black in domestic work has meant for the women of Urabá and Cartagena to experience multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion on a daily basis.
In working conditions, this is reflected in the fact that a significant proportion of internal domestic workers are black or Afro-Colombian, and that in smaller proportions they contribute to a pension The idea that black people have greater physical resistance works as a stereotype that seems to make it seem as unnecessary protection against occupational hazards;
this makes it possible to exemplify how the sociocultural imaginaries built around “what is black” end up limiting access to labor rights for black or Afro women workers.”
A woman fills out a form during a meeting of domestic workers.ANDREA LONDOÑO
In the Bogotá of the 1980s, a project to claim the labor rights of the TSD in Colombia emerged, led by the sociologist Magdalena León.
But it is in Medellín where the social movement of domestic workers finds its own voice, autonomous power.
In 2011, the group that would later become the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (Utrasd) emerged, which has advanced in alliance with organizations such as the National Trade Union School, trade union centers such as the CUT, the Bien Humano Foundation, and the Let's Talk About Domestic Work Foundation. and Fescol.
Londoño explains the network that has been woven: “The press serving as a megaphone to make them visible, citizen volunteers contributing hours of work, congressmen who have championed bills, and judges who have equalized their labor rights compared to the rest of the country's workers.
This group of people, mostly residents of Medellín, has worked in an informal alliance, based on trust, for the dignity of domestic workers.”
In the same city, the communication strategy was born that makes Utrasd, the leaders and their complaints visible.
On the power of the Afro voice, Londoño considers: “Afro women who come to the cities in search of work have the vital force of those who have their survival and that of their family at stake […] among Afro women workers there is a greater assessment of the community, the associative, the group.
They help each other, look for each other, talk a lot and have fun with each other.
Having arrived in a culture like Antioquia, where hard work and long hours is common and applauded, has placed higher standards on them than those in other regions of the country.
Having had organizations that supported them as individuals and as a union, and that trained them in rights, communications, political advocacy, has been key”.
In the recent Training Day in Labor Law on Domestic Work, of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, it was established that in the domestic work and cleaning sector there are 35 unions registered with the Ministry of Labor.
0.2% of the unions in the country are from this sector.
The largest presence of these unions is in Medellín, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cartagena, Apartadó and Neiva.
The most active are gathered in an alliance called the Domestic Work Intersindical that assumes the spokesman for the TSD before the Tripartite Table (Government, Employers and Workers) to promote Convention 189 of the International Labor Organization.
Unrecognized productivity
A year ago, in a statement addressed to President Iván Duque and Labor Minister Ángel Custodio Cabrera, several TSD unions, foundations such as Fescol and congressmen such as Ángela María Robledo, María José Pizarro, Iván Marulanda and Angélica Lozano, demanded that the Government stop of discriminating against TSD: “At this time when care, with its housework, is located in the backbone of support for society, we have not found that any of the extraordinary regulations to avert the pandemic, alleviate the crisis and promote labor reactivation, has targeted the paid domestic work sector [...] We do not understand why aid is granted to formal business employment through the payroll subsidy and the service premium, and those same subsidies are excluded from domestic workers”.
In Colombia, domestic work is not recognized as a productive sector, despite the signing of the ILO Convention 189 converted into Law 1595 of 2012 (Domestic Workers Law);
of the decrees, laws and rulings of 2013 and 2016 (Promulgation of the Premium Law 1788);
and the Tripartite Table to promote Convention 189.
What is the legislative debt with the TSD?
“The legislative and governmental stagnation on the issue of domestic work in the last four years is worrying.
In the absence of a government agenda towards domestic work, Utrasd and the Intersindical have had to draw strength and resources from where they do not have: their meetings, the documents prepared, their advocacy strategies, and their trips to Bogotá to attend meetings have been useless. the meetings of the Tripartite Table, because they have not had a serious and committed interlocutor”, says Londoño.
Claribed Palacios García, president of Utrasd, a union with 960 members in Bogotá, Medellín, Huila and Urabá (in the exploratory phase in Quibdó), comments that 80% of its members are Afro-descendants, the rest are mestizo: “There are only five indigenous people, there is not much approach of them to the union processes”.
She assures that the labor formalization of the TSD, from 2016 to date, is around 104,000 domestic workers;
while in all of Colombia there are around 680,000.
Palacios considers Márquez's rise to be more relevant for being of African descent than for having worked in domestic service: "We are a country that, although it discriminates based on trades, discriminates more because of your skin color, your origin, your territory and your linguistic heritage, than by the same trade, because the trades in a certain way can classify them as something transitory”.
Berta Villamizar, from Sintraimagra, spreads the word from house to house so that the TSD know their rights.
She belongs to an organization with more than 600 members of domestic work, with a presence in Santander, Antioquia, Norte de Santander and Bolívar.
About Francia Márquez, she says: “We recognize that our work has been made invisible, working in a home that is private, we are not recognized.
No one believes that one can have the ability to develop a professional activity or lead a process.
We feel very proud that a woman has reached this important achievement, especially an Afro colleague who is a candidate for such an important position.”
What do you expect from the vice-presidential candidate?
“Get out of invisibility, go out and spread the word that we can continue doing this work, but that our rights be recognized.
Our work is one of the first to be developed in history.
It will be an impact for the benefit of the full enjoyment of the law in our sector”, concludes Villamizar.
Centuries of exclusion, invisibility, humiliation and legal gaps today become the silver platter that would "serve" the first alternation in power in the republican history of Colombia.
