Making Room: on inventions within organizing of undocumented migrant domestic workers in The Netherlands

Domestic work has long sat outside hegemonic economic relations; not recognized as labor, and relying on the exploitation of feminized and racialized people. This has kept it outside of preoccupation, although never out of sight, of traditional union struggles. This paper explores the ways in which a group of undocumented migrant domestic workers organized under the FNV, one of the largest labor unions in The Netherlands, confront the lack of capacities that the labor union is able to provide for their struggle. As such, it sets out to think through the research question: how does the inventive organizing of undocumented migrant domestic workers in The Netherlands challenge and expand the capacities of traditional understandings of labor struggles? To do this, I have been involved as a participant-researcher throughout the creation of the Community Theater Collective of Undocumented Migrant Domestic Workers (CTC). This group has been imagining possibilities of organizing beyond traditional union struggles. Following the call of Rodrigo Nunes (2022) to explore political organizing through ecological thinking, the research reflects on the ways in which through imagining alternative ways of doing and coming together, the CTC is rehearsing new forms of unionizing that attune to the feminist and antiracist struggles that entangle the relations to their labor. Furthermore, by posing questions on what this entails, I argue that to set up these inventions, imagination plays a vital role. In order to be able to put this into practice, the first thing that must happen is that we have to come together in a room.