Hard Numbers and “Velvet Triangles”: Mobilising Statistics for the ILO Convention on Domestic Work

After nearly half a century, domestic workers were again tabled on the agenda of the International Labour Conference in 2008. Three short years later, Conference delegates voted to establish the International Labour Organization’s Convention on Domestic Work (C189). This paper builds on the insight that the campaign to push for C189 was taken up by a feminist “velvet triangle”. These networks are usually comprised of women in social movements, femocrats and academics. The informality of these alliances is due, in part, to the gendered marginality of an issue area, allowing for improvisation and agile coalitions. The paper traces the origins of this triangle to bottom-up calls to develop measurement methodologies to make women’s labour “visible” in the UN Conferences on Women, and later in discussions about the informal economy. It then examines the relations among femocrats in the ILO, academics, and the global trade unions in one important element of the campaign – mobilising statistics on domestic workers worldwide. The paper demonstrates how the production and mobilisation of statistical estimates were crucial in making the sector more tractable. It attends to the under-explored effects of the “power of cognitive resources” in the literature. Finally, the article shows that the explicitly political project of the women’s movements yielded not only a normative labour instrument, but advances in different fields of study. This case shows that the production of scientific knowledge, while still an overwhelmingly elite endeavour, need not always cater to elite demands.