TO UNDERSTAND how maids are regarded by many in Brazil you only have to look at @AMinhaEmpregada (“my maid”), a Twitter feed that retweets the unpleasant, aggressive and sometimes racist things that some employers say about their staff. In 2011 there were 6.7m domestic workers among the country’s 201m people. These workers are overwhelmingly female, many of them black and most of them poor. They have long been treated as second-class citizens, not only by their employers but also, until recently, by the law.
