Careers Marked by Precarity and Vulnerability: Studying Paid Domestic Cleaning Workers in Switzerland

Abstract

This dissertation investigated how paid domestic cleaning (PDC) workers experience precarious work and how they navigate precarity and vulnerability through career decisions and strategies. The dissertation tackles four research dimensions: a psychosocial analysis of norms and work challenges, a biographical exploration of career narratives, an agentic perspective on workers’ efforts to manage precarity, and a contextual orientation underscoring the role of structural constraints.
Drawing on four qualitative studies involving 225 adolescents and 30 PDC workers in Switzerland, the research combined open-ended questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. Analysis was performed with Consensual Qualitative Research and Reflexive Thematic Analysis techniques. The findings reveal three crosscutting contributions. First, adolescents and PDC workers share convergent representations of precarious and stigmatized occupations, identifying “bad jobs” as socially devalued, insecure, and detrimental to workers’ well-being and capacity to find meaningfulness. Second, the results expose precarity traps, in which persistent resource constraints, unstable conditions, and persisting disadvantages restrict workers’ ability to overcome career and life difficulties over time. Third, our work stresses the role of career counseling in helping clients reflect on career goals, prioritize difficulties, identify supportive networks, name oppression, and advocate for improved social protections.
Our doctoral work highlights the need to strengthening socio legal protections in PDC, which requires ambitious legislation and better enforcement through dedicated monitoring and mediation structures. Counseling institutions and practitioners must reduce structural barriers by enhancing support systems and adapting interventions, while clients can foster career development by using services, reinforcing resources, and expanding career and legal knowledge.