Live-in domestic work in Mexico, Digi Mart USA News: Mexican law promises eight-hour workdays, written contracts and social security for every worker. But when that worker lives in the home where they work, according to Zona Docs, that promise appears to stop at the front door.
Specialists Mariana Camacho and Alejandra Cota, who work in labor law, gender and human trafficking, agree that live-in domestic work operates under a logic of permanent availability. It is sustained by a discourse of affection that replaces the contract, and by a home layout that separates the person who cleans, cares and cooks from the rest of the household.
Official figures document near-total informality. According to the National Survey of Occupation and Employment (ENOE) of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for the third quarter of 2023, Mexico had 2.5 million people employed in paid domestic work.
Of that total, 95% were in informal employment and only 5% had formal jobs.
The same report states that 97.1% of these workers had no written contract and 69.5% received no labor benefits. By contrast, Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) records show only 59,414 domestic workers registered nationwide as of January 2024: 38,670 women and 20,744 men.
A guard that never ends. Late at night, while the city rests, a request comes from the main bedroom in a home in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area: the grandmother cared for by a live-in worker needs something before bed.
The task seems simple, but for those in this arrangement it does not mark the end of the day, only the resumption of a shift that never fully ends.
Under the pseudonym Fátima, to protect her identity, a domestic worker agreed to discuss her daily routine. “You close your bedroom door at night, but you know they could call you at any moment.
Being there makes them think you are always available.”
Mexico maintains relevant reforms to the Federal Labor Law (LFT), Article 123 of the Constitution, and the mandatory enrollment of domestic workers in the IMSS. On paper, this should guarantee access to healthcare and decent employment.
However, according to Alejandra Cota, a professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey specializing in gender, power and diversity, the problem starts at the foundation. Domestic work was recognized as formal work only recently, and the violation of these rights historically falls on feminized roles.
Cota outlined what, in her view, should exist in any contract for a person living in the home where they work: working hours, how many days or hours of rest per week, which tasks are and are not included, vacation days, coverage during maternity leave and illness, and retirement conditions.
The absence of such a document is not an administrative oversight but part of a power relationship. “Employers consider workers almost as their property,” the specialist says of those who hire live-in domestic workers under this scheme.
Being “de planta” means sleeping in the place where one works. Although on paper this should be limited to an eight-hour day, in practice it becomes the myth of permanent availability.
Mayra Hernández, an anti-trafficking activist and president of the civil association Back Home, explains that the COVID-19 pandemic worsened this dynamic: “they didn’t let them leave,” she recalls, and in those cases “neither schedules nor overtime were respected, nothing.”
Hernández describes an arrangement in which room and board becomes a mechanism of control: “With live-in work, there is often this manipulation of ‘I am giving you all of this, so you have to endure it,'” she says. She adds that in many cases the only rest day is Sunday, while the rest of the week the workday covers “absolutely the whole day, breakfast, lunch, dinner.”
Answering calls at odd hours, caring for children in the early morning, or cleaning after a social event without overtime pay are, according to both specialists, normalized practices within this arrangement. This “guard that never switches off” violates the right to rest, free time and mental health, and turns living inside the home into a continuous cycle of exhaustion and isolation.
One of the most common ways to strip formality from this work is to invoke kinship. The phrase “she is like part of the family” functions almost as a substitute for a written contract: by using it, the demand for basic rights is neutralized before it is even raised.
Cota places this dynamic within a colonial legacy that persists in the Mexican imagination, where even language reveals the hierarchy: the specialist notes that in conversations within her circle, the word “patrón” is still used to refer to the employer. Under this same logic, measures such as mandatory registration with the IMSS, a maximum workday, or a fair wage are read by employers as a breach in the affectionate relationship.
By appealing to “gratitude” for providing shelter or food, the employer transforms a legal obligation into a personal favor; in this way, the weight of affection ends up taking priority over compliance with the law, and the written contract is omitted entirely.
Affection, then, ends up taking priority, and the contract is omitted.
Cota goes further, arguing that under a discourse of domination and social class, many employing families do not regard these workers as employees but as “their property, their objects,” and she notes that a significant share are women of Indigenous background for whom Spanish is not their first language.
Amid the debate between mobilization and institutional punishment, the proposal of the National Union of Domestic Workers (SINACTRAHO) puts on paper what enforcing the law would involve. In its Collective Labor Contract for the live-in arrangement, the union sets a detailed standard aimed at dismantling, point by point, the logic of permanent availability.
The union document starts from a basic principle: living at the workplace does not give the employer property rights over the worker’s time. It therefore requires that the worker have an exclusive bedroom space that guarantees dignified, comfortable, hygienic, safe and fully private conditions, free of pets, dampness and any toxic substance or health risk.
It also requires three nutritious and sufficient meals a day, with at least half an hour of uninterrupted time for each.
To prevent an “infinite guard,” the contract imposes strict time limits: nine consecutive hours of uninterrupted night rest, plus a mandatory three-hour break between morning and afternoon duties. Any work performed between 10:00 p.m.
and 6:00 a.m. must be compensated as ordinary night work, and if the employer requires overtime, it must have the worker’s consent and be requested in writing to be valid.
The SINACTRAHO contract also safeguards workers’ economic independence and autonomy: it explicitly prohibits any deduction from wages for food or lodging, establishes the non-waivable obligation of IMSS registration, recognizes a weekly rest of one and a half uninterrupted days, and clarifies that the employer’s vacation does not count as the worker’s vacation. It is an attempt to draw, through a legal instrument, the legal boundary that the state has yet to enforce when crossing the threshold of a private home.
Social inequality within homes is also measured in square meters. While common areas of residences feature spacious rooms and luxury finishes, so-called “service rooms” are often characterized by minimal dimensions, poor lighting, inadequate ventilation, or simultaneous use as storage.
Hernández, who is also an architect, explains that this pattern is not accidental but by design: “These types of houses and apartments were designed in which there was no dignified place either for security personnel or for the people who worked inside the homes,” she says.
She recalls that during her training, a teacher taught her that every user of a home “had to have a dignified place,” including the domestic worker. For Hernández, the experience is also personal: she acknowledges she could not have practiced her profession full time without the support of two people who helped with housework and the care of her children.
This architectural segregation, and the implicit or explicit restriction on using shared areas of the dwelling, represent a form of physical discrimination that perpetuates class distance and the invisibility of care work.
The deepest human cost of the live-in arrangement is emotional distance. Many people employed under these conditions are internal migrants or belong to Indigenous communities and must leave their own children in the care of relatives in their home communities.
This creates what gender studies specialists have described as a fracture in care chains: those who sustain the well-being, child-rearing and daily life of urban families must exercise their own motherhood from a distance, often through brief phone calls at the end of the day. Cota sums up the phenomenon by stating that this kind of labor domination “breaks, destroys and violates these chains of care,” and with them, the emotional communities of these people.
Official figures available do not distinguish the live-in arrangement from the rest of paid domestic work.
According to the most recent INEGI release with this breakdown, based on the ENOE for the third quarter of 2023, Mexico had 2.5 million people employed in paid domestic work. Of them, 95% (2,361,408 people) were in informal employment, and only 5% (123,785) had formal jobs.
The same report states that 97.1% of these people worked without a written contract, and 69.5% received no labor benefits.
By contrast, IMSS records, drawn from its enrollment program in force since January 2024 (and therefore not exactly the same time frame as the ENOE), report 59,414 domestic workers registered with the IMSS nationwide: 38,670 women and 20,744 men.
In other words, even compared only against the already small formal segment documented by INEGI, the number of workers registered with the IMSS does not reach half. Informality in this sector is not the exception; it is the norm under which almost all domestic work in the country operates.
There are also no easily accessible public figures on how many workers specifically in the live-in arrangement are registered with the IMSS. For Cota, this same absence of data is itself part of the problem: “If there are no institutions, it is because no one wants there to be,” she says.
This lack of enforcement has a structural root: the inviolability of the home prevents the Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS) from conducting inspections inside private residences, even when violations of working hours or benefits are suspected.
Cota poses a question without a clear institutional answer: to which prosecutor’s office, municipal office or government agency would a live-in worker go to file a complaint? “It is not safe at all, it is not viable at all, it is not accessible at all,” she answers herself, adding that the absence of institutions prepared to receive such complaints “is not innocent.”
In practice, this leaves compliance with the law dependent on the goodwill of the employer, and leaves workers with very few safe routes to file complaints without losing, at the same time, their job and the roof over their heads. Mayra Hernández of Back Home agrees that this is, of all the modalities linked to human trafficking, “the least visible and the most normalized.”
Civil society organizations such as SINACTRAHO and the Support and Training Center for Domestic Employees (CACEH), together with the specialists consulted, agree that no legislative reform will be effective until servitude within the privacy of the home is addressed. Moving from a servile view to recognizing domestic workers as full rights holders means inspecting habitability conditions, guaranteeing real written contracts and eradicating the structural discrimination that continues to operate behind closed doors.
But this shared diagnosis does not translate into a single path to a solution. Alejandra Cota argues that change will not come from institutions: “social mobilization,” organization in collectives and even “the strike is the next step,” she says, noting that the Mexican state has historically responded late, or never, to the causes affecting the most vulnerable sectors.
Hernández, by contrast, sees institutional sanction as the starting point: she proposes beginning with fines for employers who hire without meeting legal benefits, and having the employer, not the worker, bear the cost of social security. “We cannot wait in good faith for it to happen,” she says.
This report was produced as part of the Convergent Journalism Production Block of the Tec de Monterrey Guadalajara Campus, of which ZonaDocs served as a training partner.
