Paid and unpaid care: Marriage, equality, and domestic workers

This chapter argues that relationships between paid caregivers and care recipients should be eligible for equivalent legal protections to other adult caring relationships. Care workers (or intimate workers, or domestic workers) are a vulnerable group; in law, they are not fully protected as workers or as family members, although they often form close, reciprocal caring relationships with the people they care for. While some legal theorists have recently addressed their rights as workers, this chapter considers their eligibility for rights as family members. It extends my earlier arguments for marriage equality, that marriage law (or a marriage- like law with reduced legal entitlements which I call 'minimal marriage') should protect a wider variety of relationship types than law currently does, on grounds of equal treatment. After reviewing these earlier arguments, I make the case for their application to care workers, addressing both theoretical and practical objections.