Domestic labor. Day laborer. Socio-professional identity. Informality.
Day laborers in paid domestic work are the workers who are paid by the day and provide their services in more than one household. In recent years, the number of day laborers in Brazil has grown steadily, making this link increasingly significant in Brazilian domestic work, even in the face of the restricted access to rights provided by the labour legislation on domestic employment. Given this conjuncture, in order to better understand this reconfiguration of domestic worker bonds, this research aimed to analyze the conditions and motivations present in the processes of becoming and remaining a day laborer, mediated by the self-perception of these workers about their socioprofessional identities. From the proposed research, the results reveal that becoming a day laborer in domestic work is not a planned personal choice, but the consequence of a conjuncture in which the increase in unemployment coexisted with the increase in demand for day laborers. However, throughout the exercise of domestic work with the daily wage bond, day laborers perceive their work in a positive way as a consequence of a constellation of immediate benefits that make them prefer to be day laborers. These benefits consist of material and subjective issues such as better pay, greater recognition of their work and autonomy, which stand out in the level of importance attributed by them and cover up the absence of labor rights.