“I don’t want to have a boss over my head”: Changing patterns of paid domestic work among Albanian women in Athens

1) Introduction

The paper is based on material from an extensive period of fieldwork[1] in Athens between April 2004 and December 2005, including participant observation, discussions and interviews with 25 Greek employers of lower-middle class and 20 Albanian domestic workers. It is also based on a brief research trip to Albania in August 2006. In Albania I travelled with one of my key Albanian informants and I met two other informants in their town of origin. In Athens I came into contact with women coming from cities and rural communities in South Albania. These women had lived in Greece for at least five years. They are of various ages ranging, from 25 to 60 years old. Some of them are single, while others are married or divorced with or without children. These women are of different educational backgrounds – primary school, high school, and university. In Albania they have worked in different jobs -teachers, white collars employees, workers in factories and rural labour.

Many of them migrated because of the political and economical instability and uncertainty. Others refer to more personal reasons, such as their wish to meet and live with their husbands, to escape from unpleasant relations, to create new ones, their curiosity to see another country, and to make a trip which was forbidden during the communist period (see  Laliotou 2006: 83-84). Some women migrated with their spouses, while unmarried or divorced women migrated alone. According to them, the key factors that led them to choose Greece as a destination are the geographic proximity to their country, a certain facility of passing through the Greek-Albanian borders even without the required documents, and the presence of friends or relatives, who could provide them with support. During the research, most of them held a residence and work permit, which they renewed every two years.

2) Conceptualization of paid domestic work

Albanian women did not migrate to Greece as domestic helpers as female migrants from Philippines did in the past decades (about the two main types of female migration in Greece see Lazaridis 2000:73). They are part of the Albanians who migrated to Greece after the collapse of the communist regime and they have developed a strategy to incorporate themselves into the large informal labour market (Lazaridis 2000:73). At the beginning, Albanian women turned to this job, as it was the main channel for employment because of the demand by the local population. Their presence – as of those who came from the other former socialist countries – has allowed many lower-middle class Greeks, often for the first time, to hire a domestic worker. This has happened because Albanians constituted a large workforce, which was cheap, flexible and without guaranteed working rights. The arrangement of work was and is still done through the employers’ or employees’ social networks.

During the first years of their migration, a lot of Albanian women who participated at the research were looking after elderly or disabled persons as live-in or live-out, with a monthly salary but without social insurance. Their duties ranged from nursing and keeping company to shopping, cooking, cleaning, ironing and gardening. According to them, as time passed, their finances improved, they got to know Greek people, they learned the Greek language, they entered the process of legalization, and they found their own house. Consequently, they abandoned work for one employer and they started cleaning houses for a number of different employers for a daily payment. This is the type of domestic work that predominates among Albanian women in Athens[2].

It has been suggested that the shift towards day work/housecleaning was the major change in domestic work. It led to improved working conditions – higher hourly wages, a shorter workweek, control over the pace of work, and flexibility in arranging their work schedule –and to its “modernization” (Romero 1992: 135-162; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007 [2001]: 44). Albanian women prefer it because they consider that the working hours and payment are much better not only compared to work for one employer but also compared to any other job they could do in Greece. They also prefer it because they want to avoid being dependent and controlled by a single employer (Morokvasic 2008: 10). As Sevasti said, “I don’t want to have a boss over my head”. Lia points out that when she cleans houses, “I feel free and independent”.

However, Albanian domestic workers state that cleaning different houses is a very tiring and exhausting job, far more tiring than working for one employer. This job is mainly based on their body and on their physical effort. But in the context of migration, their body is conceived as their only disposable and reliable capital. It is conceived as an endless depository of strength and therefore as a source in their effort to maximize their financial profit. For them hard manual work is perceived as the fate of all Albanian migrants, the only decent and respectable way to earn their living as well as a “better life”. By the expression “better life” they mean the saving of money in order to obtain real estate in Albania and in Athens as well as their participation in the consumerist life style of the western world.

Nevertheless, they say that they are not afraid of this fate, as hard work was not only a common experience but also an experience highly evaluated in the communist Albania. As Lia, who was working at a factory in Albania says, “we know from hard work, we were used to work this way during Hoxha’s regime”. Rodoula was teaching Russian language at the high school, Zoi was teaching mathematics and Litsa was a teacher at a primary school. Zoi remembers that, “all teachers worked hard in order to help our pupils learn. Even in the afternoons, we had to do additional lessons to the weaker students”. She also points out that, “it was the day of the teachers. And we gathered all together and we ate, we danced, we singed. It was very nice. We worked hard but we had fun during that time”.  Rodoula adds that, “the state was very demanding as far as education was concerned. It continuously controlled our work. If you were not good, you were firstly criticized in order to improve your teaching methods, otherwise you might even lose your job. But, if you were good at your job, the state honoured you. I was a good teacher and they appointed me in charge of all high schools of my town”. Litsa remembers that during the summer vacation, they used to go to work “at the fields, at the construction of roads, state’s buildings and things like this”.

In Albania, work (punoj) was a central political and social issue of high symbolic importance. The communist party that governed the country after the Second World War was named “Working Party of Albania” (WPA). The legislation instituted an eight-hour working day, equal salaries for equal work, without age or sex discriminations and a fortnight’s paid leave. The Constitution of 1946 considered work as “a duty and honour for the citizen” (Pollo & Puto 1981: 248-251). At the same time, the WPA considered work as the best “anvil” for struggling against “old concepts” and for forging the new socialist mentality. So, all employees, intellectuals and students, had to take on a manual job for one month each year – with volunteer, unpaid work playing an important role. It was believed that in this way, they would reduce the disparities between intellectual and manual work and they would contribute to the economic development of the country. The economic development would ensure the “welfare under socialism”, that is to mean the rise in the standard of living, “the assurance of the material, cultural and spiritual needs of the whole population” and not the satisfaction of personal or class interests (Pollo & Puto 1981: 276-279).

In the socialist context, work was conceived as a vehicle for the well being of all Albanian people, a matter of general interest, and one of the state’s main responsibilities. As the informants used to say, the choice, the finding of a job as well as the regulation of working conditions and relations were not a source of “insecurity” and “anxiety” for the individual. In the capitalist context, as it emerged in Albania after the collapse of the socialist regime and as they encountered it in Greece where they migrated, the conceptualization of punoj changed. Hard and decent work – some researchers talk about the Albanian migrants’ “working ethos” (Pratsinakis 2005:204) – is almost identified with migration and it becomes an individualistic and family strategy, which assures money and the success in migratory experience.

However, the Greek capitalist context is not visualized by these Albanian women merely as a world of opportunities and success. It is also visualized as a dangerous world, where workers, and especially migrant workers, experience insecurity, exploitation and hierarchical relations. Bella says that:

Capitalism is a wild system. My father-in-law used to say it to me and to my husband. We did not believe him and we laughed at him, because he was a communist. And all communists in Albania used to say that all the time. The instructors said the same thing at the Marxist seminars that we had at work. But he was right. Here in Greece there is no law to protect us. Employers exploit employees, especially the migrants. They do not give us our money, our social security and our pay rises. We have to fight alone.

According to the informants, the danger of losing individual autonomy is even bigger, as their work takes place inside the “private” domestic space of the employer. A space, which, as the ethnography of Greece has showed, is considered immune to elements of the “public sphere” such as economic relations, individual interest and paid work (see Friedl 1962; Dubish 1986). These Albanian women perceive the relational aspect of their job as a predicament. Since they cannot rely on state’s or syndicate’s regulations and protection, they assume that they have to try hard and on their own in order to claim their working rights, to control the working process and the pace of work, to reduce, as far as possible, the predicaments of hierarchical relations and to gain their autonomy. As Rosa says:

We work at the houses and the employers cannot always understand that this is our job. And they want us to stay more but without paying overtime. And they say: do this, do that, you have not finished yet. And I argue with them, but you know it is not easy and pleasant to argue all time long.

3) Working strategies

Over the time and in their effort to improve their working position, the Albanian domestic workers involved in the research seemed to be engaged in two main strategies. The first one is the change of the type of domestic work – from working for one employer to working for different employers – as well as changes in the form and the content of day work/housecleaning. The second one is their consent to the division of household work, a division that enables them to define their duties as clearly as possible, affirming, this way, the object of their job. The precise determination of their tasks is critical as they point out two things: that “the household work never ends” and that “everyone wants someone else to do the household work instead of themselves”. These two strategies gradually transformed the world of paid domestic work in Athens and led Albanian employees day after day to greater control of the working conditions and relations and to greater autonomy, making paid domestic work look more like the other “ordinary” professions. Lia is divorced and she migrated to Greece with her daughter at 1997. She points out that:

During the first years that I worked, my employers helped me very much with my life. But they could not see that I was an employee, that I had rights. In the last years they are beginning to understand that I cannot do everything in six or seven hours, that I am also an employee and that I had to get a pay rise every one or two years. Because I pay for my social security, and I have to live like all the others.

3.1 Changes in paid domestic work

Albanian informants emphasize that working for different employers was not always the same for them. They remember that at the beginning, they searched for a house to clean. Marina says how it was like when she arrived in Greece:

I rang the bells in the blocks of flats and I asked if they wanted someone to work. Only this I knew. Nice women opened the door, discussed with me, and they gave me work.

This work entailed the cleaning of the entire house and a daily wage, or a specific chore, such as cleaning of the warehouse, or the windows, which lasted two or three hours and brought her less money. She also remembers that it was the employers who arranged the frequency of work, the tasks and the way to be accomplished. They were the ones who defined the days, the hours of work, the breaks, the wage, and the pay raise. Also Marina concludes: “what could we do, we were in need”. Veta argues that:

In the beginning, they did not know us, we were in need, we used to go all around Athens … we went wherever they told us to go, we did not say no.

Fiona remembers that during the first years she went to clean houses, even if the working relation was not regular. In these houses, the tiredness is much bigger because

they call you once a year and they want you to clean everything … and their houses are a total mess … and they do not tell you that they want you only for once, because they are afraid that you will not go.

Over the time, these Albanian women begin to set conditions of work in their own terms. Veta says: “now I don’t go everywhere, I go only here, close to my house”. As Fiona states that nowadays she does not agree to all work terms. She works in houses that she cleans regularly, specific days of the week or the month. By arranging an irregular working relation, she goes only to houses that “are next to my house, here in the neighbourhood” and to houses that “I know… I know what it is like, how much work it has”. Fiona also demands few other rights, such as to be paid the benefits, since “other employees get their money, why not me?” She wants to be paid not according to the hours that she spends in the house but according to the accomplishment of the chores as well as to be paid her daily wage, in case of an employer’s absence.

I tell them [the employers], why are you looking at your watch, I am not, why do you care how long I stay? … I cleaned the entire house, I am fast and I cleaned it. I do the same to all houses. I go at 8.00a.m. and I leave at 14.00p.m. If I finish earlier, I will not stay any longer. I tell them, do not worry, I’ll fix it all, I will leave nothing, the housework will be done …They phone me and they say don’t come, I will be on a trip, or don’t come, the children are absent, the house is clean. Τhe house is clean because I clean it … They cannot think that this is my work, I need this money, I count on this money, how will I earn my living?

Therefore, nowadays these women choose which house to work in, according to a regular and steady working relation and to the proximity to their own house. They also have their ways to express their disagreements. When the employers keep them longer, give them less money, or refuse to give them pay raises, they abandon them, since they are not their only source of income. They can find another “house”, or another “woman”, as they say, in order to replace the one that they left. And until then, they can cope financially, as they continue to “have other women”, to “go to other houses”. The Albanian informants also point out that nowadays employers are searching for them and not the opposite. They believe that with the high quality of their work and their good attitude they have “won the employers’ trust”, as they used to say. Thus, Greek people want them to work in their houses and, they try not to lose them. They recommend them to other employers and, let them work alone or give them the keys to their houses.

These women also have a concrete work schedule. Their work lasts six hours, from morning to midday; they arrange what time they begin the work and whether they would have a break. They work six days a week and occasionally on Sundays. Whether they will also go to work on Sundays depends on the relation that they have with the employer, their need for money, their family or other obligations and their tiredness. They also manage to control the payment. First of all, this type of work arrangement allows them to earn more money than the work based on a monthly salary. The wage increasingly rises, often at their insistence – from 20EUR in 2002 to 40EUR in 2006. The payment is related to whether the house cleaning is accomplished, that is to say “by the job”, instead of by the hour (see also Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007:46). The accomplishment of the cleaning can be less than six hours in the houses where work is systematically undertaken.

Romero argues that in the domain of paid domestic work the “charging by the house” rather than by time, leads to the creation of a businesslike environment and to the professionalization of the job (1992: 135-162). Hondagneu-Sotelo referring to a “typical of housecleaners”, points out that working 9.00 to 13.00, allows her “to be the kind of wife and mother she wanted to be” (2007: 44-45). This is the case of Albanian domestics too. But there is also another thing. “Charging by house” is a timesaving method, which enables them not to minimize but to maximize their physical effort as it gives them the possibility of combining morning and afternoon work. In the afternoons, most of them clean staircases in blocks of flats or/and do the ironing. Others work at jobs that give them the possibility of obtaining social security.[3]

3.2 The division of household work

In the last decade, women of lower-middle class in Athens hire domestic workers once or twice a week, once every two weeks or once a month.[4] This frequency allows them to be exempted not from the tiredness of “double day” (Romero 1992:13), but from the work that is performed once a week or even more rarely.

During the research it has been noticed that household work does not form a unified whole. There are “clumsy” or “heavy tasks” – like cleaning of shutters and balconies, of light fixtures, scrubbing of the bathtub and the kitchen - “cleaning tasks” – dusting, vacuuming, and mopping the entire house – and “ironing”, which are outsourced to employees. On the other hand, there are the tasks, which are performed by the employers/housewives. These are the “delicate tasks” – dealing with decoration, bookcases, showcases, computers, CD players. It is also the “detail” that concerns the attention with which the work is performed as well as dealing with certain spots that are considered “difficult” to be easily located and cleaned. Finally, there is the “daily tasks”, like shopping, cooking, washing the dishes and tiding up.

This division is adopted from the employers as well as from the employees but is used and interpreted differently by the two parts of the working relation. Employers outsource “heavy” works and “cleaning” to employees because they do not wish to deal with these, as they are considered by them “unpleasant”, “distasteful” and “tiring” (see Lutz and Schwalgin 2004:305). They also believe that these tasks do not require specific knowledge, technique and attention and for these reasons damage by the employee is unlikely to be done. However, they complain that employees cause damages in their rush to finish work and to leave the house soon. Moreover, they claim that because employees are hasty to finish and try to avoid physical pain, they use a lot of detergent and water, thus destroying objects and surfaces, risking the health of the members of the domestic group and polluting the environment. In employees’ hastiness to finish, they are blamed for the disturbance of the order of the house. That is to mean, employees are accused that after the “cleaning” they do not put the various objects, decorations or even furniture, in their previous and proper “place”, a place selected or approved by the employer/housewife. In this regard, Albanian employees seem not only to threaten the well-being and the order of the house but also to undermine the employer’s/housewife’s authority. So, employers underline the necessity of undertaking an additional duty inside the domestic space: the guidance and/or the supervision and the control of Albanian employees.  

Female employers point out that they are in charge of the “qualitative” and demanding work. They undertake “delicate tasks” because they want to and because they believe that employees ignore the value –financial, aesthetic, sentimental– of these objects and spaces, they treat them as “heavy” tasks causing “damages” once again. Moreover, they are engaged with the “details” because as they say, only the housewife really knows the particular needs and secrets of her house, as after all “each house has its particularities”. Employees are excluded from this knowledge, because they do not have daily contact with the house, and they are not intimately related to it. They do not know the “language of the house” and they are not interested in learning it: “she does not care”, “she comes only for the money, she cleans the house and she leaves”, “she does the surface”, “the top of things”. This reminds us that women do not conceive the household work merely as an ordinary performance.  Household work is about devotion and affection, and it requires physical as well as emotional labour.

Greek employers emphasize their superiority and centrality, whereas, on the other hand, they stress the inferiority and the ellipticity, of the employees’ presence. By ellipticity, I mean one’s failure to successfully correspond to its duties and obligations. Albanians’ ellipticity is related to their refusal to be intimately related and devoted to the house. It is also related to the perceived backwardness of their country of origin (see Constable 1997b: 544). This coincides with the perception that Greeks have for the work of Albanian migrants in Greece. Albanians are thought to have undertaken the jobs that the Greeks have abandoned for others of higher prestige; their work is seen as deprived of qualitative characteristics and for this reason it has to be done under the employers’ guidance and surveillance. This discourse is not ideologically neutral but is evaluative and produces hierarchies. It reaffirms and reinforces the “hierarchically structured power relations, which characterize the employer–employee relationship” (Lutz and Schwalgin 2004:300; Palmer 1998). Thus, female employers in Athens attempt to downgrade employees’ work as well as to control employees’ time, tasks and the way of work, physical pain and intentions. On the other hand, these women also want to highlight that they “rule over their house”, as they used to say. As we know from Greek ethnography, the domestic space is women’s realm, the place most closely related to the construction of their identity. The everyday performance of domestic tasks is essential to the making of women’s identity. The presence of another woman represents a threat, which must be handled. Through these ways, employers underline that despite the presence of another woman in their house, they are still the only ones who have the primary and ultimate control of the domestic space.  

Albanian informants accept this division of household work, but interpret it differently. They believe that the most important work that needs to be done in a house lies within their competence; that is the “cleaning” and the “heavy tasks”. The other domestic tasks follow these, not only as far as the chronological order in which they have to be performed, but also hierarchically, since if the house is not clean, expensive furniture and decoration lose their value. They are proud when they speak about the houses that they have taken on. They claim that they were “dirty” and after their intervention became “clean”. Moreover, they underline that this is succeeded at the expense of their own body and health. For example, they say that the use of detergents and water is indispensable in their effort to clean the house properly, to do their work in the best possible way. That’s why they insist on using them, even if their use is neither pleasant nor hygienic especially for them, who after all come in contact with these on a daily basis and for many hours. At the employers’ accusation that they disturb the order of the house, as after the “cleaning” they do not put the various objects in their previous place, they say:

I’ve cleaned everything, if I changed the things, you can put them back in order, you know, it is not difficult.

In this way, they point out that cleaning is their own responsibility and the most difficult part of the household work.

The objects that have been defined by employers as extremely valuable – financially, aesthetically and sentimentally – are belittled by the employees. They think, “what does she need all these things for?” and consider them “rubbish” or “junk”. Albanian employees say that they do not wish to be involved with “delicate tasks” as well as with the “details” and the “depth”, because they believe that dealing with these tasks requires a lot of time. They could be done but at the expense of the work of cleaning. They also point out that if they consent to undertake these works, they will neither be spared from other tasks nor will they be asked to work more often. They would be supposed to “do it all” for the same amount of money, with more intensive work and with unpaid overtime. Therefore, they assert that if an employer wants these tasks to be done, she has specific alternatives: She should “call me another day only to do these”. “She can hire a girl to come every day” or to “live in”. She should contribute too, by working with the employee – she must not just “sit and watch television”, “talk on the telephone”, “go to the gym or shopping”. She should “maintain her house” on a daily basis and she should not leave the daily duties to the employee. Or at least “she must not expect everything to be done in one time”.

Employees also try to organize and perform the works in the way that they consider more efficient, “I have my way of doing it”. They deny the need of guidance and control, the continuous indications, “I know how the works in a house are to be done, what does she want to interfere?”. That’s why they prefer to work in houses where employers are absent and where employers are young because they are considered less demanding and interventionist.

Through this division the Albanian employees involved in the research try to differentiate themselves from the housewife as well as from the “domestic helper” who is connected daily and exclusively with only one house and for this reason, they believe that she has different and many more duties to accomplish. That’s why they do not adopt the definition “domestic helper”, and they define their work in a round abound way, “I clean houses”, “I work in houses”. They also try to differentiate themselves from the employee who is called in the afternoons to iron the clothes – in the morning work their responsibility is to iron a specific amount of clothes, “one or two laundries, not more” as Lia says. They try to differentiate themselves from the employee who is called occasionally, once or twice a year in order to perform “general cleaning”. In both cases, it can be the same employee but another day or time and she will be paid extra, this time according to the hours of work. Thus, Albanian employees do not try to affirm the object of their job attempting to simply reduce their physical effort. They rather attempt to have the control of their physical effort and to maximize it according to their decision or/and when they are paid for it.

Through their involvement in cleaning and “heavy tasks”, employees also try to show that they are capable of doing what Greek women cannot do. It is Albanian women with their work that compensate for the ellipticity of Greek women in this domain. Employers’ ellipticity resides on the ignorance of their strength and their limits – physical, financial, time margins – and the demands of the house that they chose to put into shape. It also resides on Greek women’s failure to participate successfully in the western world, which is conceived not only as a world of affluence and consumption but also that of regulated working relations: among other, when they try to reduce the quantity of water and the detergent that employees use or when they do not want to pay overwork, benefits and to give raises. This coincides with the picture that Albanians migrants have of Greece generally. According to them, Greece does not belong in the “western”, rich, capitalist world, the way Italy, Germany, England or the USA do. It is conceived as a developed but still a Balkan country (see Todorova 1997). They also believe that Greece owes its economic growth and affluence not to its own capacities, work and worth but to an accidental fact: its fortune to have been bound, unlike Albania, to the “Western” side of the world after the World War II.

4) Conclusions

In Athens, more like charwomen of the past and cleaners of nowadays (see McIsaac Cooper 2004), Albanian employees work for different people often on a weekly schedule. They are perceived as self-employed by both themselves, the employers and lately by the state – they have self-insurance and a receipt book from the Social Security Institution (see Parsanoglou and Tsianoglou 2007; Stratigaki 2007:205). They see changes in domestic work as improvement of their working position. During the first years in Greece, because of “need”, they accepted the exclusive work for one employer, live-in or live-out, where they could not escape from performing the three “Cs”, that is to mean “cleaning, cooking and caring” (Anderson 2000). Even those who chose from the beginning to work for different employers, they did not have the chance to “select”, as they say, and to pose their own terms. They ascribe changes in work to the legal status that they have attained, to the years of their migration to Greece and to the claiming of their rights. They also ascribe these changes to their “acquaintances”, to the quality of their work and attitude as well as to their informal network of information, which is extended beyond Greece, in other European countries and in North America. The division of the household work allowed them to control the pace of their work as well as their physical pain and time. Their interpretation of this division allowed them to be proud of their work and of their contribution regarding the Greek women/employers.

On the other hand, they say that they could not work like this forever. The cleaning of different houses every single day, which engages them with the three “Ds”, “demanding, dirty and dangerous works” (Vaiou 2002), and the maximization of their physical effort have time limits. This kind of work destroys day after day their body and their health (see also Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007:47). Older women try to save as much money as possible, to obtain real estate and finally to return to Albania. As Morokvasic states: “their leaving home and going away becomes a strategy for staying at home” (2008:9). Younger women, who intend to stay in Greece, try to get another job in the afternoons and they express the hope that in the future, they’ll manage to leave domestic work behind, to start their own business or to get a white-collar job. We could say that if in the past domestic service was a “life-cycle occupation” (Fauve-Chamoux, A. 2004:4), Albanian female migrants conceive it as part of a “migration-cycle”. For some of them this is already a reality. Rodoula works as a night nurse in a Greek hospital and Zoi works at a fast food place. Marina has returned to Albania, while Rosa migrated to Italy where her sister found her a job at a factory. Others are still at the job. Lia who lives with her daughter is waiting for her to finish school, to go to the university and to get a job, before she decides to leave paid domestic work for another job. 

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[1] This research is part of the EU program “Pythagoras” entitled “Gender, Paid Domestic Work and Ethnic Identity: The Cross-Cultural Construction of Households in Greece”, that has been carried out by the department of Social Anthropology and History of the Aegean University.

[2] According to the quantitative data gathered within the “Pythagoras” Program, 75.6 percent of the 241 Albanian domestic workers who participated in the research were working in more than one house.

[3] In his research among Albanian migrants in Thessalonica, Hatziprokopiou found out that it was a common strategy to rely upon one member of the family who has social security (2003: 1038).

[4] They are women of different ages, professions, educational background, and marital status. When explaining why they hire domestic workers they are referring to various reasons such as age, problems of health, “family tradition”, professional obligations, lack of time, the repulsion and the boredom that they feel towards  “housework”, lack of familiarization with this kind of work, “in my house my mother did the housework”. Older employers talked about their big demands regarding the cleaning and the caring of domestic space. Younger employers talked about their wish to have more free time for their amusement, rest, for the contact with their spouse, their children, their friends and for other activities that please them. However, women of all ages agree that one of the reasons that lead them to hire a domestic worker is that no other member of the household is willing to be occupied with domestic works with the required constancy and consistency.