When Care Work Goes Global

Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work

Mary Romero, Valerie Preston, Wenona Giles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134762323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Women who migrate into domestic labour and care work are the single largest female occupational group migrating globally at present. Their participation in global migration systems has been acknowledged but remains under-theorized. Specifically, the impacts of women migrating into care work in the receiving as well as the sending societies are profound, altering gendered aspects of both societies. We know that migration systems link the women who migrate and the households and organizations that employ domestic and care workers, but how do these migration systems work, and more importantly, what are their impacts on the sending as well as the receiving societies? How do sending and receiving societies regulate women's migration for care work and how do these labour market exchanges take place? How is reproductive labour changed in the receiving society when it is done by women who are subject to multifaceted othering/racializing processes? A must buy acquisition, When Care Work Goes Global will be an extremely valuable addition for course adoption in migration, labour and gender courses taught in Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Women's Studies, Area Studies, and International Development Studies.

Chapter 1 Care Work in a Globalizing World

Mary Romero, Valerie Preston and Wenona Giles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315547374-1

Women who migrate into care work are the single largest female occupational group migrating globally at present (Human Rights Watch 2010: 12). This is an extremely mobile group that moves internationally to care for family and non-family members and continues to draw the attention of scholars across the social sciences. Their impact on receiving as well as sending societies is profound, often changing gendered aspects of migration in both societies, as well as social and economic development in these sites. This book reflects a keen interest to find out more about how sending societies are affected by the out-migration of sizeable numbers of married and single women who care for their families transnationally from a distance, and how reproductive labour changes in the receiving society when it is done by women who are subject to multifaceted othering or racializing processes.

The genesis of this collection lies in social history, as well as the editors’ and contributors’ enduring interest in the links between international migration and social reproduction. Beginning with a workshop in 2009 that brought together sociologists, historians, anthropologists and geographers to consider the trends and explanations for the contemporary international migration of domestic workers, the book evolved out of ongoing conversations and research among some of the participants in the workshop, as well as others who are working in sites around the world on this issue. We draw on research in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia to examine the contemporary migration of women to take up domestic work.

The project began at the urging of Christiane Harzig, a historian who studied the movement of German peasant women to domestic work in towns and cities across Europe and North America. In the edited collection entitled Peasant Maids – City Women, From the European Countryside to Urban America, she and her collaborators investigated how women had experienced the challenges and potentials of migration from rural Europe to North American cities. She insisted that even with all the disruptions and the exploitation that many women experienced as domestic workers, that scholars must also recognize the benefits of migration for many women. The question of who was likely to benefit from this migration and who would suffer persistent social disadvantage was crucial to her analysis of the gender dynamics of historical and contemporary migration.

This book builds on the social-historical foundations established by Christiane Harzig¹ and links them with those of sociology, anthropology and geography. Her untimely death has meant that the current collection necessarily reflects the editors’ own views and opinions, however, in all our decisions, we have sought to maintain the originality of Christiane’s scholarship that was always open to considering apparently contradictory views.

1 Christiane Harzig was instrumental in obtaining funding from the German Historical Society for the workshop that contributed to this collection.

As our edited volume goes to print, we are witnessing hopeful signs that the working and living conditions for the 52.6 million men and women domestic workers around the world are improving (ILO 2010, ILO 2013a). The 100th Session of the International Labour Conference in June, 2011 adopted the Convention on Domestic Workers. The Convention recognized the ‘significant contribution of domestic workers to the global economy’ who perform labour that is ‘undervalued and invisible, and is mainly carried out by women and girls, many of whom are migrants or members of disadvantaged communities’. It affirmed that these workers have the same fundamental rights as other workers:

• the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining
• the elimination of all forms of forced labour
• the effective abolition of child labour, and
• the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.

This international attention from the ILO underscores the plight of women crossing national borders to care for families in other countries. Locating social relations in contemporary care work shines a spot light on the growing global gap between wealthy and poor countries; the state regulations of specific receiving countries that increasingly restrict the movement and labour choices available to migrant² workers; the complexities and inequalities inherent in traditional notions of women’s work and the intersections of race, class, ethnicity and citizenship in care work that is delivered globally. There is an increasing need for care work in countries throughout the world and a wide range of work arrangements that exist simultaneously in these global sites. An overview of workers’ migration patterns offers a glimpse of the various recruitment processes and the ways that citizenship restrictions influence the decisions made by these working women. Working conditions reflect the devaluation of work perceived as ‘women’s work’, unskilled and outside the legal regulation offered to other workers. The work that migrant domestic workers do under restricted conditions or as undocumented increases their vulnerability. We conclude with a look at the wide range of organizing activity among domestic workers around the world.

2 Given the diverse immigration and labour policy regimes that affect women migrating into care work, we have labelled all of them as migrants. While we recognize that migrant care workers are known as immigrants in some places, few have access to permanent residence, so we have used the terminology followed by the majority of researchers and policymakers.

This collection recognizes the breadth and diversity of care work, the activities involved in looking after and providing for the various physical, social and emotional needs of others (Oakley 1974 cited in Luxton 2011: 13). Care work allows dependent people to function at a socially determined acceptable level of capability, comfort, and safety, be they children (before they are legal adults), those who are either temporarily or permanently ill or disabled, or elderly (Friedemann-Sanchez and Griffin 2011: 514, Williams and Brennan 2012). It also supports the workplace attachments of able adults, male and female (Luxton 2011). As a form of social reproduction, care work is an essential aspect of every society. This definition of care work includes housework and services provided to individuals such as child care and elder care. While the activities that we have called care work are sometimes labelled domestic work, care work is not necessarily confined to domestic locations. For example, people who are ill may be cared for by paid workers and unpaid friends and families in hospitals and other institutional settings. Indeed, paid elder care in institutional and domestic locations is one of the most rapidly growing forms of care work (Williams and Brennan 2012). We use the term domestic work to refer to housework and services provided within private homes. In this context, domestic service refers to the hiring of workers to undertake domestic work for pay in the home of the employer. Our focus is on the migrant workers recruited to undertake domestic work, often in the homes of their employers and sometimes in other private homes. Often viewed as unskilled workers, the migrant workers examined in the chapters that follow rarely benefit from the policies and programs designed ostensibly to facilitate the migration of increasing numbers of highly skilled care workers such as nurses, teachers, and social workers (Kofman and Raghuram 2006, Yeates 2009).

Debates about domestic work have centred on its location, its status as paid or unpaid work, and its gendered nature. Much domestic work takes place in homes rather than formal workplaces where it is devalued by virtue of its location in a private residence beyond the purview of state regulation (England 2005). Although paid domestic work is a growing phenomenon, much domestic work is still unpaid work that many view as an intrinsically rewarding labour of love that does not require payment (England 2005, Lutz 2011). Several authors have argued that the gendered nature of domestic work which is still done disproportionately by women and has proven remarkably resistant to change also contributes to its devaluation (Lutz 2011, Luxton 2011, ILO 2013a). Many processes contribute to the gendered nature of domestic work specifically and care work generally, however, recent studies offer little evidence of change and have argued that live-in arrangements constitute a re-familialization of domestic work (Michel and Peng 2012), which keeps it in the shadows (Arat-Koc 2006). Careful analysis shows that well paid, professional women who devote less time to domestic work than other working women achieve these time savings by hiring a domestic worker who is almost always another woman (Luxton 2011). Other analysis has called attention to four sets of relations that apply to all forms of care work including domestic work: the migrant worker and those she is hired to care for; the family members she has left behind and who she cares for through remittances; family members traveling with her; and her own welfare (Kofman and Rhaguram 2010).

Recent literature addresses the impact of globalization on care relations from three perspectives (Yeates 2009). Some argue that a new international division of reproductive labour has arisen in tandem with and in support of the new international division of labour (Lan 2006, Lutz 2011). According to this analysis, female migrant workers are recruited from poor countries to do care work in wealthier ones. The impacts of the persistent gender and racial inequalities evident in the devaluation of care work are borne disproportionately by female migrant workers who are viewed as minorities in the societies where they work (Parreñas 2008). Scholars of care regimes suggest that the demand for migrant domestic workers is also fuelled by neo-liberal policies and tendencies that have stimulated a growing demand for care workers in general (Mahon et al. 2012, Michel and Peng 2012). Government funding for paid care work has diminished rendering many of these jobs so poorly paid and insecure that they do not appeal to local workers. Reduced government funding has also increased the demand for privately provided care workers to assist patients and clients in hospitals and other institutional settings. Thus, a second perspective examines how responsibility for care work is also being individualized, so that parents, adult children, households and voluntary organizations are expected to take on more care work (Lutz 2011, Mahon et al. 2012). In response to these tendencies and aided and abetted by the state’s migration policies, working women in the wealthy nations of the global North have recruited migrant workers to do the domestic work that would otherwise have fallen to them. The same tendencies, reinforced by a long history of domestic service, have also increased the demand for migrant workers in the global South. Neoliberal governments around the globe have implemented policies that facilitate the recruitment of migrant women to meet the growing demand for domestic workers. Studying transnational families, a third body of research has examined the social relations of care that develop when female migrant care workers care for their families across borders (Parreñas 2005, Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007, Pratt 2012). This collection contributes a global view to our understanding of the new international division of reproductive labour by juxtaposing case studies drawn from the global South and the global North. Addressing the motivations and migration experiences of domestic workers and their conditions of work, the chapters also demonstrate how various care regimes impinge upon the everyday lives of migrant domestic workers and the tensions between women’s herculean efforts to maintain transnational families and the regulations that heighten their absence.

The articles in this collection examine the experiences of the women who move around the globe to engage in care work in different locations. Although their legal status varies from one context to another and, over time, we describe them as moving across national borders as migrants. Some, such as those who migrate to Canada as live-in caregivers, may enter legally and eventually obtain permanent residency as immigrants. Others move illicitly across borders and work without permits, for example, in Israel and Italy; still others enter legally as temporary residents who are barred from ever becoming permanent residents, particularly in the Middle East and the Gulf Region. Consequently, receiving countries of globalized care work have had a significant impact upon the limited citizenship rights of workers (Sarvasy and Longo 2004). Individual chapters in this collection recognize the diverse circumstances of women migrating to do domestic work in specific places. Despite their diverse migration histories, all of the women who move for domestic work share the experiences of disruption and upheaval associated with relocation, the trials of caring for others from different cultural and social backgrounds, and the challenges of continuing to provide care for people left behind.

The Global Demand for Care Work

Over the last 100 years, social scientists predicted the demise of domestic service, arguing that household labour would be modernized and disappear with the introduction of household appliances, the commercialization of domestic work and the unwillingness of employers and employees to replicate outdated social relations of mistress and maid who served as ‘one of the family’ (Coser 1973). In the global South, researchers also expected that the constant turnover of employees from rural areas who sought employment in better neighbourhoods in the city once they had some experience as domestics would lead to the end of domestic service (Chaplin 1967). In Central and South America, this hypothesis, known as ‘phasing out’, clearly did not happen (Leon 1989). The commercialization of domestic work and the introduction of modern appliances did not reduce the amount of labour required to maintain a household in either the global North or the global South.

In contrast, the prediction that only migrants and racialized groups would continue to do the stigmatized work of serving others has proved prescient. For over 40 years, women have migrated from rural areas to urban areas and across national borders in search of work as nannies, domestic workers and caregivers. The migration has been fuelled by growing economic inequalities within and between countries. The demand for migrant domestic workers in the Middle East and Gulf states was stimulated by the oil boom in 1970 that created wealthy national elites. Young women from poor families in the Middle East frequently worked as domestic workers for wealthy families in exchange for food, lodging and clothing. In Lebanon, Jureidini (2009) found that poor women and girls from local villages were hired to work in Lebanese households along with Kurdish, Syrian, Egyptian and Palestinians. After the civil war of 1975, non-Arab workers, namely Asian and African migrant women, were hired. In the early 1990s, large numbers of Sri Lankan women migrated to Lebanon to work in private households as domestics (Jureidini and Moukarbel 2004). The international division of labour has reproduced a hierarchical care chain based on gender, nationality, class, ethnicity, and race (Onuki 2011). This distinct work force engaged in domestic work continues to be stigmatized (Tronto 2011a) linking ‘the narrative of global inequality to the narrative of taking care of my family’ (Tronto 2011b: 167).

Economic inequalities between countries are important for understanding recent shifts in the geographical flows of care workers and in their social backgrounds. Unlike previous waves of European women, African slaves or indigenous women who worked as domestics in the United States (Kaztman 1981), Central and South America (Chaney and Garcia Castro 1989), Canada and Australia (Higman 2002) in the 1800s and early 1900s, today’s care workers are predominantly from Asia, North Africa, South America and Central America where low wages and limited employment opportunities push many women to migrate. Women migrants are crossing national borders to work in private homes as nannies, caregivers to the elderly and domestic workers in countries around the world, including in Thailand, China, Lebanon, Malaysia, Canada, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the USA. Current migrants move between countries of the global South as much as they migrate from countries of the global South to destinations in the global North (Lan 2006, Hujo and Piper 2007). Cu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Care Work in a Globalizing World
• Part I Situating the International Movement of Domestic and Care Workers: Social Reproduction and Globalization
• Part II International Domestic Work and the Family: Remaking Femininity and Motherhood
• Part III Emotional Labour and Intimate Care Work
• Part IV Questions of Regulation and Protection
• Bibliography
• Index