Migrant Domestic Workers: Debating Transnationalism, Identity Politics, and Family Relations. A Review Essay

Abstract

If in the 1970s modernization theorists predicted the demise of paid domestic work, developments during the last two decades have proven them wrong. Both in the North and in the South the number of those engaged in paid domestic work has grown rapidly. In some cases, like China and India, intra-state migration is predominant. Elsewhere, in the United States, Canada, and Western-Europe, as well as in growth areas such as the Gulf States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, the presence of large numbers of migrant domestic workers from abroad has been particularly striking. In fact, in a number of cases the growth of domestic labor as a field of employment has led to the feminization of outmigration. By the late 1990s, there were between 1.3 and 1.5 million Asian women working in the Middle East. Whereas in the 1970s women formed about 15 percent of the migrant labor force, in the mid-1990s almost 60 percent of the Filipino migrant labor force was female, and women constituted approximately 80 percent of the Sri Lankan and the Indonesian migrant labor force (Gamburd 2000:35).

A Very Private Business

“…I've a right to know' and I said, fair enough, and gave her to another family. (Au pair agency, 'Markets for Migrant Sex and Domestic Workers ') While there is a growing literature on 'race' and domestic work there has, as Moors (2003) has observed, been less work done on the role of religion in European Journal of Women's Studies 14(3) 252 employment in private households, and certainly this seems to be a factor that employers and host families feel able to make reference to:…”

„Es war ein Opfer, welches wir erbrachten …“ Perspektiven auf Migration in Familien

“…Dies stellt eine Möglichkeit dar, sich aus der Distanz um die Kinder zu kümmern und so auf eine andere Weise dem Ideal der fürsorgenden Mutter zu entsprechen. In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch von einer "commodifi cation of love" (Moors 2003) gesprochen, wobei diese Praxis der Mütter oft negativ bewertet wird (Boccagni 2012: 269). Eine andere Möglichkeit, sich aus der Distanz um die Kinder zu kümmern, sind regelmäßige Telefon-oder Skypegespräche.…”

Respect, Status and Domestic Work: Female Migrants at Home and Work

“…Though the identities and status of the domestic workers and their employers are often constructed in opposition to each other (Dickey and Adams, 2000;Moors, 2003;Qayum and Ray, 2003), my focus in this article is on the interaction between the identities of the migrant domestic workers in the workplace and in their village home as shaping the shifts in their social position and search for respect through their life course. The physical and cultural separation between the home and the workplace influences domestics' ways of negotiating power relations at both ends, seeking to balance hard working conditions with the prospects of respect at home.…”