“Este tiempo me cambió la vida”: discursos y vivencias del tiempo de las empleadas de hogar durante la pandemia en Granada y Zaragoza, España

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the covid-19 pandemic affected the perceptions and uses of time of domestic workers in Spain, focusing, in particular, on the cities of Granada and Zaragoza. Our work derives from the project “El cuidado importa. Impacto de género en las cuidadoras/es de mayores y dependientes en tiempos de la Covid-19” (CUMADE) coordinated by Universidad Rovira I Virgili de Tarragona-Cataluña (Spain), and run by interdisciplinary research teams from ten Spanish universities between the months of September 2020 and January 2021. The research is qualitative, based on in-depth interviews, and designed to investigate the impact of covid-19 on the care of the elderly and dependents and, more specifically, on the domestic workers’ sector. Temporality, so severely affected by the uncertainty and unpredictability of the new situation, provides an interesting axis for qualitative analysis of the discourses of women workers on the way in which the pandemic has conditioned their daily lives. To undertake this analysis, we base ourselves on the work of Ramón Ramos on las imágenes sociales del tiempo (the social images of time). This approach represents an original and novel analysis of the reality of domestic workers, while at the same time dialoguing with other recent work on this issue. The images of time as a resource, scenario, or horizon serve to analyze the discourse of our interviewees and show how time, understood as a social category, has structured and organized their lives. We consider what they have been able to do and what they have not been able to do, the distribution and intensification of tasks, their plans for the future, and the physical and emotional impact of the pandemic.

Keywords

• care
• covid-19
• domestic work
• gender perspective
• images of time
• temporalities