Gender, Migration and Domestic Work

Masculinities, Male Labour and Fathering in the UK and USA

M. Kilkey, D. Perrons, A. Plomien

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349334087, 9780230297203
• eBook ISBN: 9781137303936
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on studies conducted in the UK and USA, this book investigates the experiences of suppliers and consumers of masculinized domestic services, exploring issues such as increasing inequality, migration, the rise of commoditized domestic services, contemporary masculinities and the gendering of paid work.

1

Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: An Introduction

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1.1 Gender, migration and domestic work

As the rich have got richer and households have become busier, demand for commoditized household services has risen, with the supply chain becoming increasingly transnational. The emergence of this international market in commoditized services is important for two reasons. First, it shows how reproduction, as well as production, has become part of the global economy. Second, it shows that individuals and households, as well as states and markets, both contribute to and are directly affected by the large-scale social processes of globalization, rising inequalities and migration that are characteristic of contemporary society. A wealth of literature has emerged on female maids and nannies, many of whom are migrants.¹ In this book we consider a parallel trend – the re-emergence of male household workers, that is, men who are paid to do traditionally masculine domestic jobs in and around the houses and gardens of generally wealthier people.² Many of these workers too are migrants, though the proportion of migrants in handyman work remains lower than the proportion of migrants among maids and nannies. Handyman work involves a wide range of small-scale jobs such as fixing shelves, decorating and small-scale repair on an occasional basis, while gardening can involve more regular work including lawn mowing and leaf blowing in extensive suburban gardens. This book investigates the experiences of suppliers and consumers of stereotypically masculine household services at the micro level, but, through its emphasis on contemporary masculinities and the gendering of paid work, the book contributes to wider-scale debates relating to globalization, migration and social reproduction.

The book is based on empirical investigations of migrant handymen in the UK, mainly from Poland, and immigrant Mexican gardeners (jardineros) in the USA. First and foremost, the objective of the book is to highlight the existence of male migrant domestic services in the UK and the USA and to analyse how this phenomenon impacts on both the male workers supplying the services, and in the case of the UK, the lives of the people (henceforth, householders), who buy them. Second, in the context of the extensive literature on female domestic work, our analysis of male domestic work enables us to identify distinctly gendered understandings of domestic work and care. We show how these gendered understandings influence both the differential economic value of and emotional attachment to these different forms of work and the gendered identities of people supplying and buying these services. Third, our analysis enables us to underline the way in which gender intersects with social class, ethnicity and migrant status to influence the well-being of both the migrant workers and the householders who draw on their labour. Fourth, we demonstrate how, by outsourcing, householders can resolve or at least mitigate the ‘father time-bind’, that is, a difficulty in finding enough time to fulfil both new social expectations regarding hands-on, caring fatherhood and more traditional male breadwinning roles; a time-bind complicated further by a highly competitive working environment and limited state support for parents. Fifth, with respect to the two rather different groups of male domestic workers studied, we show how, despite migration restrictions, labour market discrimination and a lack of recognized qualifications, masculine domestic work can provide an opportunity for people to secure a livelihood in another country. Finally, our findings enable us to examine dynamic and varied understandings of masculinity. Because the work involves physical strength the male domestic workers are able to uphold some of the more traditional understandings of masculinity despite frequently being in subservient positions in relation to both their employers and to wider discriminatory contexts. Moreover their earnings are generally higher than they would have been had they remained in their countries of origin, and so facilitates meeting their breadwinning obligations and traditional masculine role. The case studies show the manner in which these relations are varied and highly contingent on specific circumstances, with these differences consistently linked to differential and hierarchical relations associated with the class, gender and geopolitical position of different groups of people. It is, furthermore, this hierarchical difference upon which relations between male domestic workers and householders using their services ultimately depend.

In order to differentiate between the historically distinct international patterns of movement from Poland and from Mexico at both individual and aggregate levels, we use the terms ‘migrant’ to refer to the Polish handymen and ‘immigrant’ to refer to Mexican gardeners. In the Polish case, migration is often temporary or circular, and can include multiple moves between different countries of destination. In the Mexican case, the intent to cross the border is generally long-term or permanent, and settlement in the USA is the final outcome. The original research projects were planned and carried out independently and, therefore, do not match completely, but once we became aware of each other’s work we were struck by how the many similarities and differences provided a novel and stimulating way of contributing to knowledge about male migrant domestic labour.

The empirical investigations are situated within three interrelated contemporary debates: globalization, migration and social reproduction. Within these debates we focus on the overall context of rising social inequalities between and within nations. These inequalities stimulate both migration and the demand for domestic labour, impact upon migrants’ motivations and experiences, and shape gendered identities with respect to paid work, domestic tasks and parenting. Through our focus on men and masculinities, we make a contribution to the literature on migrant domestic labour. In particular, our partial and retrospective comparative analysis offers exciting prospects for developing the understanding of the gendered character of paid domestic work and how it is valued, the dynamic and varied understandings of masculinity, and the manner in which gender and citizenship status intersect in ways that influence migrant well-being.

1.2 Globalization, migration and social reproduction

Globalization is associated with increasing economic integration between states and rising affluence, but also with growing inequalities within and between states; conditions which, as we shall show, stimulate both the demand for commoditized services and a supply of migrant labourers prepared to work in these sectors.

Economic liberalization with respect to trade and capital flows, growing differentiation between people’s living standards, and enhanced communications, have led to increasing migration over the last three decades. This migration has continued despite the economic recession at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Migration, unlike trade or capital flows, is frequently subjected to a range of restrictions which vary between nations and between different world trading blocks, such as North Atlantic Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU); blocs of which the countries in our study are part.

Typically, trading blocs have preferential trading relations among member states. In NAFTA, for instance, trade and capital can flow freely between Mexico and the USA, but this freedom of movement does not extend to labour even though migratory pressures increase as a consequence of the liberal trading arrangements. For instance, while NAFTA consolidates labour intensive manufacturing in Mexico (the maquiladoras), the free movement of the more competitive or cheaper American industrial and agricultural goods has undermined production in Mexico, especially small-scale farm production, which has led to declining living standards among small-scale peasants and agricultural workers. In light of these decreased living standards, migration, despite being fraught with danger, is seen as a way of securing and enhancing livelihoods. By contrast, the EU, which the UK joined in 1973 and Poland in 2004, represents a deeper form of economic and political integration, with labour, capital and trade able to flow relatively freely. The UK is more affluent economically than Poland, and wages are significantly higher, providing a stimulus to migration, but in this case migration is legal. This difference in the legal status of migration in NAFTA and the EU has a profound impact on the rights and opportunities available to the migrants in our study.

Both the UK and USA have seen a large expansion of net inward migration during the last three decades, especially since the start of the twenty-first century. The USA is a major recipient country and has over a million legal and an unknown number of undocumented migrants entering the country each year, with the result that in 2009 one in every six USA workers is foreign born. In California, where one of our study areas is located, the figure is one in three. Migration to the UK is half of this level in absolute terms, but is equally significant relative to the population size. The UK also has a positive migration balance with EU migrants, especially those from new member states (ONS, 2012a).³ The majority of migrants to the UK live in London, where they accounted for two in five of the working population in 2009.⁴ With respect to OECD countries, Poland is the fourth highest supplier of migrant labour and Mexico the fifth. Their primary destinations are the UK and USA respectively (OECD, 2011a). Polish migrants have free access to the UK labour market following accession to the EU, are able to create new enterprises and have rights to family-related benefits.⁵ By contrast, the USA currently has very tight migration restrictions and some of the more recent Mexican migrants in our study lack citizenship rights, exposing them to the risk of deportation and to potentially exploitative working conditions. The majority of Mexicans in the study, however, came to the USA over twenty years ago and secured resident rights or citizenship in the interim.⁶

Motivations for migration vary, but on a world scale just over one-third of all migrants follow an economic gradient from poorer to richer countries and regions, and while the migrants in our studies had multiple and varied rationales for their decision to move, one consistent intention was to enhance their livelihoods by moving to a richer country within their world regional block. They became domestic workers as handymen or jardineros, sectors where qualification and entry restrictions are minimal and demand has been increasing.

In the last three decades, incomes and earnings have polarized in the UK and USA as a result of the top decile, consisting mainly of professional and managerial workers, moving away from the median and lower earning groups (OECD, 2011b; Stiglitz, 2012). These patterns have emerged as a consequence of global economic restructuring, related changes in employment composition away from manufacturing towards the service sector, and the increasing ability of high-income groups to appropriate a rising share of value added as the power of organized labour has diminished (Perrons and Plomien, 2010). Correspondingly, employment has become more flexible, insecure and precarious, leading to a decline in the overall share of income accruing to labour. This decline has been especially noticeable for workers at the lower end of the earnings profile, including less qualified migrants, many of whom struggle to provide a livelihood through paid employment. By contrast professional and managerial households have seen their earnings increase absolutely and relatively to others, but they often work very long hours and experience a time squeeze, finding themselves income rich but time poor (McDowell et al., 2005). The resulting situation is one in which the time poor yet money rich households outsource social reproduction tasks to people who by comparison are currently money-poor and prepared to work long hours to secure their livelihoods. Increasing migration, then, is intimately linked to increasing inequality.

By social reproduction we are referring to ‘the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and inter-generationally’ (Glenn, 1992: 1). These activities include the physical manual work of ensuring that people are fed, clothed, housed and cared for to the socially expected standards, the mental and emotional work associated with such endeavours, the institutional arrangements and social relations within which this work is performed, and the varying ideologies that influence these arrangements (Laslett and Brenner, 1989).⁷ The existing literature in this field has focused primarily on the feminized tasks of cleaning, caring and catering, but in high-income households, maintaining housing standards has become part of the socially expected consumption norms. Typically, maintaining households draws on more masculinized domestic activities of house repair, maintenance and gardening.

While economic conditions, principally including the widening earnings inequalities between professionals and managers compared to manual service workers, influence the scale of overall demand, decisions made by specific households reflect a wide range of issues relating to the social and moral boundaries placed around commoditized domestic services. These boundaries involve ethical and emotional questions concerning the appropriate institutional arrangements – for example – what can be outsourced and what has to be done in the home to maintain social values and sense of identity. In this book we consider whether there are any parallels between outsourcing traditionally male and female work. Do men feel any sense of loss or guilt in not doing the household tasks that their fathers might have done? How does outsourcing to other men affect their sense of masculinity? Important in this regard are social and attitudinal changes with respect to ideas about more active parental care. Fathers increasingly express a desire to be involved in the nurturing of their children alongside their breadwinning activities, generating a time-bind which, in turn, has made outsourcing male domestic work socially acceptable among the middle classes and led to more complex and multifaceted understandings of masculinity.⁸ This is one of a number of important social changes in the last three decades that have influenced the gender division of labour within households.

Social change in the last three decades has been profound. ‘Employment’ has become more feminized in the dual sense of the term: as well as becoming more flexible and insecure, conditions historically associated with female employment, the female share of the labour force has increased worldwide and among all social groups. While many low-income women have always worked in one form or another and in ways that are not always recorded in the statistics, the increase in female employment has been especially notable among highly educated mothers in high-income countries (ONS, 2011a).⁹ This increase has further intensified inequalities, with associative matching between partners or homogamy among the highly educated reinforcing social polarization. In addition high-income households are more likely to stay together than low-income households (among which there is an increasing incidence of divorce and single motherhood), and are also able to invest more time in their children, reinforcing inequality in the next generation.¹⁰

In this context Gosta Esping-Andersen (2009: 169) argues that ‘the quest for gender equality tends to produce social inequality as long as it is a middle class affair’. He argues for an expansion of the welfare state to support carework and increase social efficiency by enabling low as well as high-income women to enter the workforce. Only this expansion, Esping-Andersen (2009) argues, would complete the (gender) revolution, as he deems sufficient change in male behaviour to substitute effectively for the decline in female domestic work very unlikely. Our findings with respect to the UK are simultaneously different yet complimentary, in the sense that one of the rationales given by fathers for drawing on handymen services is to enable them to spend more time with their children, and in this regard we see some change, though not a transformation, in male behaviour and the resultant gender division of labour within employing households.¹¹ At the same time we also see a differentiation by social class between handyman fathers and those who employ them in terms of their opportunities for fathering. While those that employ handymen can make time for their children by outsourcing domestic tasks, both the handymen in the UK and the jardineros in the USA are forced to prioritize time spent breadwinning owing to their lower earnings.

Esping-Andersen (2009) is perhaps wrong, then, to say that significant change is not occurring among men, but he is right to point out that gender change remains a privilege of the middle classes; it takes wealth to employ a handyman, and it is the handyman’s comparatively low income that ensures that he has to work rather than spend time with his own children. It is, therefore, these very social inequalities between men that allow fathers in middle class houses to commit more time to nurturing. This finding reflects issues raised in literature on commoditized feminized domestic work, where questions have been asked about whether this confluence of growing economic inequalities and increasing demand for domestic services and childcare, have resulted in a rearrangement of responsibilities that undermines feminist notions of justice (Tronto, 2002: 35; see also Bowman and Cole, 2009; Esping-Andersen, 2009). Some women are enabled to pursue careers while others – less well-paid women from elsewhere – do ‘their’ housework and care for ‘their’ children. On the one hand, then, some women are empowered, but the way in which they are empowered undermines fundamental feminist concerns regarding equality, resulting in scholars raising the question of whether a feminist can employ a nanny (Tronto, 2002).

Debates on commoditized feminized work, however, tend to leave men and their domestic and caring responsibilities out of the picture. With some exceptions (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Messner, 1997) parallel questions relating to handymen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: An Introduction
• 2 Globalization, Migration and Domestic Work: Gendering the Debate
• 3 Researching Men in the Relationship between Gender, Migration and Domestic Work
• 4 Migrants and Male Domestic Work in the UK: The Rise of the ‘Polish Handyman’
• 5 Connecting Men in the International Division of Domestic Work: The New ‘Father Time-Bind’, Global Divisions between Men and Gender Inequalities
• 6 Mexican Gardeners in the USA 122 Hernan Ramirez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
• 7 Gender Identity and Work: Migrant Domestic Work and Masculinity
• Notes
• References
• Index