Labor Discipline and Domestic Service during the Late Franco Dictatorship in Spain: An Approach in Three Stages (1960–1975)

Abstract Although Franco’s dictatorship in Spain was rooted in the repression of the labor movement and the working class, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed political and social changes that enabled the anti-Franco unions to achieve better conditions for workers. However, domestic workers were denied these improvements due to their exclusion from the formal labor system. This exclusion kept domestic workers in the informal sector and ensured their continued feminization and precarity. This article contributes to debates on the level of coercion in non-productive work by examining labor discipline in the Spanish domestic service during the 1960s and 1970s. It follows Marcel van der Linden’s proposal to focus on three defining stages of labor discipline: entry, work and exit. Although the working conditions and identities of Spanish domestic workers in the 1960s and 1970s have been studied, coercion and resistance have rarely been put at the center of analysis. Doing so introduces Spanish domestic labor into the study of coerced work, showing how it was affected by global features such as migration, feminization, all-day work, and control over workers’ bodies. This paper sees labor discipline as dialectically constructed, shaped by both adherence to and negation of established norms. Therefore, it is important to study both how domestic workers complied with rules set by employers and how everyday forms of resistance challenged labor discipline and thus contributed to its refinement. Some of these forms of resistance (petty theft, change of employment) caused confrontation, while others (marriage) fell within accepted moral and legal boundaries. The article is based on a wide range of sources, including surveys and reports by Catholic working-class organizations, letters sent by domestic workers to the Elena Francis radio advice program, and court records and newspaper reports about domestic workers’ theft. These sources make it possible to analyze labor discipline from different perspectives, showing variation in mistresses’ coercive measures, domestic workers’ attitude towards coercion, and autonomous practices against household discipline. While this paper focuses specifically on the intersection between class and gender in late Franco Spain, it contributes to labor and coercion studies in other geographical and historical contexts.