Informalization and migrant labour exploitation: commercialized domestic cleaning in Sweden

This article analyzes how labour relations in the Swedish cleaning industry were affected by the commercialization of domestic cleaning in 2007. It theorizes commercialized domestic cleaning as a specific labour regime (Baglioni et al, 2022) and, based on ethnography, identifies several inherent attributes of domestic cleaning – the labour-intensive nature of work, that the work takes place in private people’s homes, and that there are difficulties of rationalizing working tasks – as essential for understanding how capital disciplines labour in commercial domestic cleaning. By drawing on recent theorizations of the informalization of labour relations in labour process theory (Bagnardi, 2023), the article conceptualizes two forms of informalization in commercial domestic cleaning in Sweden – ‘unrestricted informalization’ and ‘partially-restricted informalization’ – to explain in what way labour exploitation is aggravated. It argues that both smaller and larger, well-established companies with collective agreements partake in the informalization of labour relations, albeit in different ways. Smaller companies engage primarily in unrestricted informalization and ignore collective agreements, while larger ones engage in partially-restricted informalization by demanding labour flexibility, ignoring the necessity of reimbursing travel time and other forms of work intensification. The article concludes that the commercialization of domestic cleaning is an instrument in a wider political endeavour of labour flexibilization in the Swedish labour market, and highlights how such flexibilization poses new challenges for the influence of workers and trade unions in the workplace as labour relations come under increasing pressure from processes of informalization.