Those above and those below. Domestic Service and Its “Regulation” in Córdoba (Argentina) in the First Decades of the 20th century

Abstract

Between the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, Córdoba saw a process of increasing commoditization of the domestic service, a space traversed by sensitive class asymmetries, which meant the destabilization of the traditional ways of regulation of the service and a certain weakening of the employers' control. This situation fuelled the discomfort and the increasing concerns of employers in relation to their domestic help and the emergency of the demand of the need for State intervention. The objective of this article is to examine and characterize those repeated demands for “regulation” and, above everything else, to reconstruct the answers given to them by the State of Córdoba in that period, with the intention of profiling their nature, scope and meaning, as well as establishing the reality of their application. To work on this, different documentation was consulted, such as municipal regulation and the local press of the time with different ideologies. As a conclusion, it can be stated that said modalities of “regulation” meant the individualization and the control by the state and police of the domestic help, and they would occupy the space left by traditional ways of sector regulation. However, some initiatives also considered state intervention instances in the contractual relationship between the employers and the domestic help, which consisted of conciliatory arbitration in case of conflict.