This chapter explores how cleaners experience and approach dirt. Dirt plays a pivotal role in their everyday work life. It matters not just symbolically but also in its very materiality. Working with dirt can feel cyclical, frustrating, painful and futile. It can threaten cleaners’ health, safety and their dignity. At the same time, cleaners also find in their work opportunities for earning an honest living, a sense of satisfaction and the respect of others. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when turning dirty spaces into clean ones. Working with dirt can allow for liberties, providing cleaners with a sense of autonomy. As much as dirt can disgust, it also fascinates cleaners. The pursuit of dirt can make their work exciting, fun, and even hot. All this shows how treating dirt as merely a source of shame, a common assumption in academia and public, does not do justice to cleaners’ lived experiences. This assumption risks reinforcing a stigma and deny that cleaners can approach what they do with both interest and motivation. Whereas dirt plays a significant, even starring role in the cleaners’ workplace dramas of dignity, it is but only one of many.

This chapter explores the cleaners’ relationships and interactions within their microcosm. It examines how cleaners show little interest in defining themselves as one group and articulating common interests. Friendships and coalitions as well as divisions and strife characterize the cleaners’ microcosm. Cleaners form alliances and divisions as they seek to establish a status hierarchy, by creating and enforcing markers of difference. These markers range from age, gender and ethnicity to fashion, cultural tastes and educational backgrounds. Some are subtle, some are stark. But despite these differentiations, a sense of equivalence persists, posing a threat to any sense of specialness. It is a negative equivalence of belonging to a stigmatized group of “anyones”. Cleaners wish to believe that their work and their presence are on some level unique and valued as such, that they are not interchangeable and replaceable; and to fortify their sense of worth they resort to the creation and enforcement of status hierarchies. Such constructions all too often rest on the most fragile of foundations, and the risk of collapse plays no small role in cleaners’ dramas of dignity.

This chapter sets out the case for studying cleaners’ dignity at work. It starts with a description of my arrival at Potsdamer Platz, of the cleaners and the corporate underworld. The overarching question concerning what happens to cleaners’ dignity in social interactions is developed, and the book’s central notion of “dramas of dignity” is introduced. The chapter ends with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

In the postscript, I discuss what happened to the cleaners after I left the field, focusing on the current work situation of some of the book’s main characters. I also point out how the more recent coronavirus crisis has affected cleaners. The developments are discussed in relation to the theme of dignity.

The conclusion starts with a description of me leaving the field as this made the status differences between the cleaners and me come to the fore. Following this, it explicates cleaners’ dramas of dignity by bringing together the findings of the previous chapters. It discusses the extent to which the book’s insights can be transferred to invisible service work, more generally. Placing these insights into their historical context, I discuss whether we are currently witnessing a return of the servant society. The book ends with a reflection on the encounter of two images – The Statue of Liberty and Harold Lloyd – in Potsdamer Platz’s underworld.

This chapter explores the stories of four cleaners, Alex, Ali, Luisa and Marcel, to illustrate the different paths people take into cleaning. The chapter begins with an overview of the occupation of cleaning, its history and status, followed by a discussion of CleanUp’s human resource management's approach. I develop how the occupation is stigmatized not only because it is low-skilled, low-paid and deals with dirt. The stigma also derives from the groups of people perceived to do it. CleanUp seeks to counter the stigma by emphasizing professionalism. The stories of the four cleaners illustrate how cleaning constitutes a catch basin for a variety of people. People enter cleaning from different walks of life, however, they all share origins in the social underworld. While CleanUp’s professionalization efforts have limited impact on cleaners’ understanding of their work and role, they all want to be recognized for their work, display a strong work ethic and work independently. The association of cleaning with degrading, unskilled, undignified work does not necessarily corrupt the cleaners’ sense of self. They regard cleaning as a portal to dignity, a source of satisfaction and pride.

The debate around the international framework for HRtWS is permeated by challenges and endorsements from United Nations member states and civil society. Such a debate has implications both as to what precisely the content of the rights are and what the nature of countries’ obligations related to such rights is, as well as how these should be concretely realized in practical terms.

This chapter discusses efforts to transcend disagreements between carer and disability rights perspectives in relation to care and support. The tension between these perspectives rests on a dichotomous view of people with disabilities as being either dependent on others and in need of ‘care’ or independent holders of rights. Ethics of care theorists have challenged this dichotomy, arguing that interdependence – both giving and receiving care – must be reconceived as normal and universal human experiences and elements of citizenship. Some disability scholars have engaged with the ethics of care perspective, drawing especially on a human rights perspective on disability, to devise an approach that can recognize and meet care and support needs on the basis of shared dignity rather than shared vulnerability. This would require the introduction of care and support policies that recognize and extend support to people in all forms of care and support relationships, recognize diversity of need, impairment and preference and facilitate the exercise of the full suite of citizenship and human rights. While this approach is promising, some conceptual differences between the carer and disability rights perspectives remain unaddressed, including a persistent tendency to prioritize one side of the care or support relationship over the other.

This chapter examines forced encampment litigation in Kenya. Refugees living in urban areas resisting facing the prospect of relocation to a refugee camp, as well as refugees living in camps seeking permission to leave have initiated these cases. I examine how judges use human rights in the Kenyan Constitution and rights in the Refugee Convention as prisms to articulate the functions and nature of refuge. I show that Kenyan courts have understood refuge as a process as well as a human rights remedy that must allow refugees to live a liveable life in the present, have hope for the future and heal from past trauma. Judges arrive at these sophisticated understandings of refuge when they identify and reflect on irreducible aspects of refugeehood. However, in more recent cases, Kenyan judges instead focus on the uniqueness of the protection from refuge litigant. This results in conceptualising refuge as a limited commodity that, akin to welfare, must be given to those most in need or most deserving. Nevertheless, a feminist analysis indicates that in identifying the anomalous refugee, Kenyan courts have addressed protection concerns relating to gender, age and disability in a sensitive and nuanced manner.

This introduction states the basic thesis underpinning the entire book: over a period of two centuries, human dignity moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system. In a system shaped by another embodiment of dignity, sovereign dignity, human dignity came to nuance, then influence and, ultimately, fundamentally transform the very architecture of international law. The introduction summarizes the long and sinuous road followed by human dignity as a value and then as a norm. It then describes the analytical angle adopted in the book, and the overall organization of the demonstration.

Chapter Two focuses on the concept of dignity. It characterizes the two main competing conceptions subsequently analysed in the book, sovereign and human dignity. It begins by exploring the intellectual origins of the concept of dignity – with its religious and philosophical strands. Within human dignity, particular emphasis is laid on the Christian and Kantian (secularised) conceptions of human dignity due to their distinctive historical influence on the shaping of international law. On this basis, the first component of the analytical framework is built, namely the conceptual categories of dignity that will, subsequently, be used to explore how dignity has found expression in international law.

Chapter One is devoted to the clarification of the methodological structure. It characterizes the analytical framework developed to study the place of human dignity in international law introducing its four main components: (i) the definition of the concept of dignity and of the main analytical distinctions used in the study; (ii) the characterization of the processes of progressive recognition of human dignity in international law, which are referred to in this study as ‘constitutive stages’; (iii) an analytical cartography of different legal instruments, understood as specific ways of formulating a norm (principles, rights, obligations, crimes), on which the analysis of the legal expression of human dignity in international law is subsequently conducted; and (iv) the main overall narrative and argument regarding the place of human dignity in international law developed in the study.

This chapter considers the ‘state duty to protect’ model developed at the international level which imposes obligations on the state to protect individuals against harms to their fundamental rights by non-state actors. The model attempts to preserve the state-centric nature of international law but, I argue, is not consonant with the legal normative foundations of fundamental rights which are agnostic as to the agents who must realise them. In particular, I show that the model requires understanding what the state must protect individuals against which, in turn, requires determining what the legally enforceable obligations of non-state actors are. Through examining cases of the European Court of Human Rights, I analyse how the Court in fact reasons about the substantive content of such obligations. I show how it lacks a clear analytical framework but references several normative factors and utilises a balancing process which provide the seeds for the multi-factoral approach developed later in the book.

This chapter argues against several intuitively plausible but misguided arguments against autonomous organizations, and it defends those organizations as a matter of policy in view of their flexibility and the opportunities they create for innovation.