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Lages, J., Saaristo, S.-M. & Dias, N. (2023). Who cleans our desks? The Nexus of Housing and Labour Struggles of University’s Cleaning Staff in Portugal . Colloque international - Habiter le care.

J. P. Lages et al.,  "Who cleans our desks? The Nexus of Housing and Labour Struggles of University’s Cleaning Staff in Portugal ", in Colloque international - Habiter le care, Bruxelas, 2023

@misc{lages2023_1777394986295,
	author = "Lages, J. and Saaristo, S.-M. and Dias, N.",
	title = "Who cleans our desks? The Nexus of Housing and Labour Struggles of University’s Cleaning Staff in Portugal ",
	year = "2023",
	url = "https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/lab/evenements/colloque-international-habiter"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Who cleans our desks? The Nexus of Housing and Labour Struggles of University’s Cleaning Staff in Portugal 
T2  - Colloque international - Habiter le care
AU  - Lages, J.
AU  - Saaristo, S.-M.
AU  - Dias, N.
PY  - 2023
CY  - Bruxelas
UR  - https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/lab/evenements/colloque-international-habiter
AB  - Housing precarity is a growing phenomenon in Europe, affecting around 260 million people (Clair et al. 2019), with significantly higher levels in southern European countries such as Portugal. In the country, the issue of precarious housing and the lack of responses to lower income groups marked the 20th century and continues to mark the 21st century: the most recent data indicates that in July 2023, the 258 municipalities that already have approved Local Housing Strategies signalled 77,000 families living in substandard conditions in Portugal. Yet housing precarity affects different population groups in dissimilar ways. In Portugal, Roma and Afrodescendents are disproportionally affected by inadequate housing conditions (CERD, 2017; Farha, 2017).  Single parents, of which 85% are women in the country, are also particularly affected, due to their higher risk of poverty. Many women, especially racialised women, struggle against displacements and housing precarity work in the precarious low-wage service sector (Sassen, 2009; Soederberg, 2021), notably in the care sector (Ferguson & McNally, 2015; Tronto, 2013), not earning a sufficient salary to cover living costs, including paying their rent. 

Taking Iscte, the university we work at, as a point of departure, we make a reversal of the traditional ethnographic case study that focusses on a selected geographical area, often far away from the confined academic spaces. Starting from the university, not only as a locus of reflexivity and problematization of social relations and categories, but also as its producer, we find an observatory on the spatialization of different professional functions along gender and racial lines. Our paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork inside the university buildings alongside the female cleaning workers, which will make it possible to assess the social construction of privilege boundaries (Tronto, 2013) guaranteed by the detached relationship with the practice of caring for the spaces we inhabit. 

Departing from the observation that these workers are women, many of them migrants, and live in peripheral areas of the city, our aim is to explore the links that gendered cleaning work has with housing conditions. The relationship between cleaning and care as an institutional backstage activity (Goffman, 1956) is based on the paradox of the simultaneity of the conspicuous and the invisible in which the activity of professional care takes place (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007). Noting that caring for the society also takes place also outside the confined space of home, we ask what kind of living conditions paid care work enables for the people who care for institutional spaces. In addition to paid cleaning work, these women are mostly responsible also for work related to unpaid care work at home, which in turn affects their availability and flexibility for paid work. 

Despite their long-standing migration and their central role within the care work sector in Portugal, few studies have considered the life, work, and trajectories of migrant women – especially African - in the country. In particular, Cabo Verdean labour power became an integral part of many sectors of the Portuguese economy from the 1960s onwards (Weeks, 2015), experiencing various grades of both belonging and exclusion (Fikes, 2009). With this exploratory research, we hope to shed light on the working and housing conditions of these women, identifying common trajectories and narratives that can shape the way towards further conceptualisation of interconnections of gender, race, housing and work. Methodologically the research is based on 12 open-ended individual and focus group interviews. 
ER  -