This Essay takes as a starting point federal retrenchment in workers’ rights to envision a stronger legal regime the domestic workers’ movement inspired. That movement has driven twelve states, two cities, and the District of Columbia to adopt Domestic Workers’ Bills of Rights, extending long-denied labor protections while also pioneering new rights and a participatory regulatory institution. These victories—uneven though they may be—reveal not only discrete rules but also the contours of a new moral economy of the labor market: a framework of values, norms, and institutions that reshape work relations and redefine workers’ role in the political economy. Although enacting a comprehensive federal statute that extends these gains to all U.S. workers is quixotic at present, reformers can focus on consolidating these rights for domestic workers and for all other workers and on seizing future opportunities to press for federal legislation when the time is ripe.

Continue reading From the Margins to the Citadel: Domestic Workers and a New Moral Economy of the Labor Market.