The book's breadth and grounding in labor law make it most accessible and useful to a professional audience, but even nonspecialists and lay readers will appreciate Blackett's insights about law and domestic work and provocative issues such as social stratification and immigration.â• Choice

Adelle Blackett tells the story behind the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention No. 189, and its accompanying Recommendation No. 201 which in 2011 created the first comprehensive international standards to extend fundamental protections and rights to the millions of domestic workers laboring in other peoples' homes throughout the world. As the principal legal architect, Blackett is able to take us behind the scenes to show us how Convention No. 189 transgresses the everyday law of the household workplace to embrace domestic workers' human rights claim to be both workers like any other, and workers like no other.

In doing so, she discusses the importance of understanding historical forms of invisibility, recognizes the influence of the domestic workers themselves, and weaves in poignant experiences, infusing the discussion of laws and standards with intimate examples and sophisticated analyses. Looking to the future, she ponders how international institutions such as the ILO will address labor market informality alongside national and regional law reform. 

Regardless of what comes next, Everyday Transgressions establishes that domestic workers' victory is a victory for the ILO and for all those who struggle for an inclusive, transnational vision of labor law, rooted in social justice.

Prizes

Winner of Canadian Council on International Law Book Award 2020 (United States),Runner-up for W. Wesley Pue Book Prize 2020 (Canada)

The book's breadth and grounding in labor law make it most accessible and useful to a professional audience, but even nonspecialists and lay readers will appreciate Blackett's insights about law and domestic work and provocative issues such as social stratification and immigration.

An important book for legal and policy historians concerned with labor, Blackett's volume encourages her readers to think about why standards for decent work must be transnational, responsive to workers' experiences, and inspired by a desire to see substantive justice rather than formal law implemented.

Everyday Transgressions is a magnificent piece of research. The book sparks numerous questions and provides innovative heuristic tools for answering them. For specialists in this field (legal scholars and social scientists) but also for domestic workers and activists, it can be read as an invitation to explore the international and local dynamics in which state law confronts and defeats (albeit partially and momentarily) the persistent law of the household workplace.

Everyday Transgressions is a magnificent piece of research. The book sparks numerous questions and provides innovative heuristic tools for answering them. For specialists in this field (legal scholars and social scientists) but also for domestic workers and activists, it can be read as an invitation to explore the international and local dynamics in which state law confronts and defeats (albeit partially and momentarily) the persistent law of the household workplace.

Adelle Blackett is Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Labour Law and Development at McGill University.