Research
Work in Progress
Negotiating Informality: Bargaining Practices and Preferences of Domestic Workers
How do domestic workers value, search for, and bargain for jobs, and how does it relate to informality? Due to the lack of data on contractless work, we carry out a data collection in Lombardy, Italy, to document (i) domestic workers’ preferences for formality, (ii) their job search behavior, (iii) their bargaining experiences over wages and contracts, and (iv) their working conditions. We document high levels of informality and low engagement in wage bargaining in our sample: 43% of workers do not have a contract and 25% have never asked for a raise in their main job. We find that workers in our sample highly value formality, and that finding a job through their social network is associated with having an informal job and with more engagement in wage bargaining.