Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life

International Perspectives

Maria Kontos, Glenda Tibe Bonifacio, Maria Kontos, Glenda Tibe Bonifacio

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349672905, 9781137323545
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323552
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine.

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Introduction: Domestic and Care Work of Migrant Women and the Right to Family Life

Maria Kontos and Glenda Tibe Bonifacio

Globalization and reproductive labor in the 21st century

An increasing number of women migrate alone from poor countries in order to work in the domestic and care sector of wealthier countries. The growing demand for domestic and care workers’ labor – an estimated 53 million of transnational and internal female migrants around the world are involved in domestic and care work (ILO 2013) – has fuelled the autonomous migration of women and the feminization of migration (Kofman, Phizacklea, Raghuram, and Sales 2000; Sassen 2003; Zlotnik 2003). Domestic and care workers are particularly vulnerable since they work in the private households of employers. They work in isolation, the remuneration is low and in many countries, domestic workers are excluded from the protection afforded by labor laws (Gallotti 2009; ILO 2010). This type of work is devalued and considered as unskilled. Moreover, live-in domestic and care workers are separated from their own families. This book is about the family rights of domestic workers and caregivers, in various contexts.

The rising demand for the labor of migrant domestic and care workers in the global North has been well documented by several scholars (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Parreñas 2001; Lutz 2008; Slany, Kontos and Liapi 2010; Williams 2012). Analysis of the working and living conditions, especially of those employed on a live-in basis, has been conducted along the victim/agency dichotomy. The inclusion of domestic work in the list of occupations that are vulnerable to trafficking in the UN Trafficking Protocol in 2000 has given support to those subscribing to the victim-oriented approach and the conceptualization of domestic work as “domestic slavery” (Anderson 2000), “forced labor” and “trafficking” (Anti-Slavery International 2006; Andrees 2008). In 2001, the Council of Europe adopted Recommendation 1523 (2001a) on “domestic slavery” and, in 2004, the Parliamentary Assembly in the Council of Europe adopted Recommendation 1663 (2004) “Domestic Slavery: Servitude, Au Pairs and ‘Mail-Order Brides’”. Both recommendations contextualize domestic work as forced labor and trafficking in human beings.¹ Migrant women working in the households of diplomats appear here as the prototype of the enslaved migrant domestic worker.

Anderson (2000) develops the notion of domestic work as “slavery” based on the assumption that it is “the worker’s personhood”, rather than her labor power, which the employer is attempting to buy. “Selling the self” explains why domestic work is so often undertaken by racialized groups.² Anderson refers to Patterson (1982) who “distinguishes between the pre-modern, personalistic idiom of power, and the materialistic idiom of power under capitalism. In the personalistic idiom, power is openly exercised, its unequal distribution and created personal dependencies acknowledged, but an attempt is made to humanise power relations through social strategies such as gifts and fictive kin” (Anderson 2000, 6). Indeed, within current debates, “the fictive kin” mechanism has been broadly discussed in relation to the metaphor of the domestic worker being “one of the family” (Young 1987; Anderson 2000; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997). The lack of family life, however, has received less attention.

In recent years there has been increasing emphasis on the critique of the victimization of migrant domestic and care workers and a visible shift towards the consideration of migrant domestic and care workers’ own agency (Barber 2000; Gibson, Law and McKay 2001). Within the agency approach, the focus is on coping strategies adopted by migrant women (Constable 2007) and their empowerment (Briones 2009) as they become the main income earners of their transnational household, thus shifting gender power-relations and getting more decision power within their families (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Morokvasic 2007). It is noteworthy that organizations of migrant domestic workers, for instance RESPECT, the organization of migrant domestic workers in Europe, have tried to utilize the “domestic slavery” discourse for making visible the problems of migrant domestic and care workers.³ RESPECT, however, soon distanced itself from this discourse, recognizing that this is not compatible with the goal of empowerment of the workers and the realization of their rights (Schwenken 2006; Kontos 2013). RESPECT now proposes the viewing of migrant domestic and care workers as women with agency instead of as victims.

Research and advocacy on rights for migrant domestic and care workers have highlighted the protection of workers’ rights but they adopt a one-sided understanding of these rights. The recognition of domestic and care work as “proper work” instead of “help” is at the forefront, but most scholars and policy makers are silent on the abuse of migrant domestic workers’ right to family life, and there is an ambiguous stance when it comes to this issue. The right to family life as part of workers’ rights has been thematized only implicitly here and there. Migrants’ family life and own care responsibilities and tasks are included in concepts for the analysis of living and working conditions of migrant domestic and care workers: the global care chains (Parreñas 2001; Hochschild 2001), transnational families and motherhood (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001), and the more comprehensive concept of the “international division of reproductive labor”,⁴ the latter meaning activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally (Glenn 1983, 1).⁵ Also in debates about the concept of citizenship, the topic of the right to family life comes up. Parreñas (2001) developed the concept of partial citizenship, as a result of the lack of reproductive rights, based on the lack of rights for settlement in many countries of work and the lack of rights for reunification with a migrant’s own family, either because of immigration laws, or because of the prevalence of anti-immigrant sentiments. Other scholars have discussed citizenship for migrant domestic and care workers with the focus on the social rights and the right to family reunification within immigration policies and formal rights of mobility (Anderson 2000; Apitzsch and Schmidbauer 2011; Erel 2012; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012).

In all these debates, however, the issue of the right to family life remains under-theorized. It has not been debated substantially and there is no systematic analysis thus far. This omission is most striking when we recollect that family unification constitutes a considerable part of scholarly literature on (non-feminized) migration, and that the right to family life is anchored in international treaties – albeit in the case of migrants rather in the form of soft law, in non-binding instruments, operating as declarations, resolutions and recommendations (Perez Gonzalez 2012).⁶

This book aims to extend the concept of the rights of domestic and care workers to embrace the right to family life. To this end, the book argues that live-in care structurally inhibits the right to family life of the migrant domestic worker/care worker. Taking both a rights- and an agency-based perspective, and focusing on the right to family life and how migrant care workers cope with and may experience the lack of this right, our book aims at delivering insights into the complexity of relationships that arises for migrant domestic and care workers through their long-term separation from their families. This introductory chapter focuses on the following:

(a)The specific structure of the transnational family of migrant domestic and care workers in relation to the transnational family discussed in migration research;

(b)The structural conditions or the logics for the lack of the right to family life of migrant domestic and care workers, with the familialization of work and the defamilialization of the worker;

(c)The moral logic and legal framework to the right of family life for migrant domestic and care workers including feminist interventions in the debate, as well as the understanding of human rights of women as rights to liberation from the patriarchal family structures;

(d)The methodological considerations for exploring the experiences legitimizing the right to family life and the normative work of the women vis-à-vis the lack of this right; and

(e)The structure of the book in relation to the experiences, consequences of long-term separation from families, and coping strategies and normative orientations that emerge.

The transnational family of migrant domestic and care workers

According to Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding (2007, 13) the concept of the transnational family is intended “to capture the growing awareness that members of families retain their sense of collectivity and kinship in spite of being spread across multiple nations. At the same time, it is important not to underestimate the impact of distance and borders on these relationships and on the practices of transnational care giving”. In line with other migration studies, the authors investigate the transnational family of those migrants who migrate either with their family or in the pre-family phase, or who can make use of the right to family reunification. These migrants have to cope with the geographical distance from their elderly parents who may be in need of care. Thus, research on the mainstream transnational family brings into focus the bonds and care responsibilities towards the older generation, the parents, they have left back in their homeland. Inherent in this figure is the assumption of the migrant being able/free to live with her/his family, that is, their spouse and children.⁷ From the different types of care that families provide to their members, namely financial support, practical support (assistance with daily household activities), personal support (intimate or manual care), accommodation (shelter), and emotional or moral support (Finch and Mason 1993), only a few can be realized in the transnational family. Migrants may practice care in return visits to the country of origin, whether routinely planned or motivated through crisis (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007) although there may be barriers, for instance visa regulations and costs of the journey, that might hinder or aggravate travelling.

Migrant domestic workers’ transnational families differ from mainstream transnational families that have been the main focus of migration studies. Working and living conditions of live-in migrant domestic and care workers produce a different and distinct type of transnational family. Migrant women in live-in domestic and care work migrate without their families and are separated from their kin, including their children, for long periods of time. In debates mentioned above, migrants have been discussed as being concerned with the care of the older generation back home, while female migrants in domestic and care work are concerned additionally with the care of the young or adult children they have left behind (Baldock 2000). Return visits at regular intervals are seldom. Most are not in a position to travel to their families when family members are in crisis. They do not have the “license to leave” (Baldassar 2001). This is, on the one hand, related to travel costs – these would effectively diminish the remittances, that is, the main form of care achieved through migration (Parreñas 2012) – and, on the other hand, to the priority of the care needs of the employer and the risk of losing the job if they are absent for any substantial length of time. Migrant domestic workers are called “transnational migrants”, yet mostly the frequent mobility between the host and the country of origin, that according to the understanding of many scholars (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Østergaard-Nielsen 2003), constitutes the character of transnational migration which does not apply to them. The majority of migrant domestic and care workers are trapped in the immobility of “transnational” paid care work (Menjivar 2012).

Migrant domestic and care workers are involved in the care of their family with financial support (remittances) as well as emotional and moral support through modern means of telecommunication such as the Internet, Skype, and cellphone texting. The more immediate and everyday kind of support is not possible through occasional visits back home. Family bonds are maintained through the specific “time–space compression” that occurs through the new technologies of communication (Harvey 1989). Moreover, the transnational family involves new forms of maintaining emotional bonds between the members, and economic aspects become central within intimate relationships, producing a kind of “commodified love” through supplying the loved ones with material goods (Parreñas 2001, 88).

Efforts to adapt to the remote care situation cannot fully mitigate the suffering of children and mothers (Hondagneu Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2001). However, feminist scholars avoid giving emphasis to this suffering as this might be interpreted as an argument for the reification of motherhood and for legitimizing the exclusion of women from paid work (Widding Isaksen, Uma Devi and Hochschild 2008). Instead, they highlight the experience of autonomy and empowerment that migrant domestic workers might derive from their ability to send earnings to their families and from the experience of the (contradictory) upward social mobility in the country of origin through those remittances (Parreñas 2001; Briones 2009). Transnational families of migrant domestic and care workers are rather discussed as creative responses and result of adaptation strategies of displaced workers in developing countries (Parreñas 2001, 115). Migrant women secure their children’s care by relying on culturally-backed resources of mutual help and solidarity in their extended family networks (Foner 1997). Some scholars engage in the effort to “normalize” the transnational family separation. They point to differences in cultures of family organization, stressing that the critique of the separation of families through migration has been developed against a background of unquestioned western cultural assumptions about families and the nature of “parent–child bonding”. This would suggest that separation from the mother is a traumatic experience, ignoring th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Domestic and Care Work of Migrant Women and the Right to Family Life
• Part I  Framing Legalities, Employment, and Family Rights
• Part II  Public Discourse, Family Separation, and Reunification
• Part III  Remote Mothering, Survival Strategies, and Mobilization
• Part IV  The Metaphor of Family Member
• Index