Bhavna lived with her mother in the family home. Bhavna's mother managed the household with the help of domestic workers. As Bhavna talked about her relationship with the workers, the contextual nature of institutionalised misrecognition became apparent:

Introduction

Two factors informed the analysis presented in this chapter, which builds on and adds to the already extensively elucidated socio-cultural processes of power that shape occupational relations in paid domestic work (see Chapter 1). First, the UK respondents’ class identities were not in absolute opposition. Five service-users were first-generation middleclass, and Libby's service-provider also worked for her (still) working-class grandmother, who had herself been in domestic service. Four serviceproviders identified as middle-class. In India, upwardly mobile lowercaste people also outsource domestic work. Second, as the quotation from a conversation with Bhavna, a freelancer in publishing, illustrates, the intersectional influences of gender, race, class/caste, and our relative valuation of housework shape the cultural injustices experienced by the cleaning service-provider.

Fraser (1996, 2013) has argued that material and cultural injustices are mutually constitutive and their simultaneous redress is necessary for people to function as ‘full partners and participants’ in all their social relations – ‘formal legal equality’ is not enough.