Mobile phone for empowerment? Global nannies in Paris

Abstract

Feminization of migration has emerged as a common livelihood strategy to alleviate poverty and escape difficult socio-economic, cultural, and familial situations. Mobile phones have become the most crucial and pervasive communication device that enables migrants to be simultaneously mobile and connected, anytime and anywhere. Is the mobile phone empowering or disempowering as a new form of social control? Based on a long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study presents a case for the importance of the detailed investigation of everyday contexts and power relations to better understand the complexities of mobile phone use in work life. This study will argue that, far from an instrument of empowerment, the mobile phone can work to reinforce already existing power relations and mundane social structures, leading to more unequal and enslaving relationships in work life.

Keywords

empowerment everyday contexts global nannies inequality mobile phone Paris power relations work life

Feminization of migration has emerged as a common livelihood strategy to alleviate poverty and escape difficult socio-economic, cultural, and familial situations. Low-income female migrants have little choice about whether or not they live with their families, where they work and where they call home (Silvey, 2006). Global mobility seems the best livelihood option and the only way to earn an income for the deprived and desperate. Increasingly often, women are on the move as never before in history. Millions of women from poor countries in the global south migrate to do the women’s work of the global north – female traditional care work that affluent women are no longer able or willing to do and many men are not able or willing to do either (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002). This global relationship mirrors the traditional relationship between the sexes; in the absence of help from male partners, affluent women have moved into the labor market by turning over the care of children to women from the global south. In addition to childcare, nannies are engaged in other domestic work such as cleaning, cooking, ironing, or dog-walking, when requested by their employers in the flexible and contingent processes of domestic labor. In practice, boundaries between care activities and domestic services are often blurred; nannies are expected to embody a fictitious, ideal housewife providing coordination of the home. Global cities such as Paris and New York are home to global nannies and a proliferation of ‘the professional household without a wife’, constituted by this new type of ‘serving class’ (Sassen, 2009). A stroll through any Paris neighborhood will bear out a visible trend that more and more foreign-born women are pushing baby strollers (The New York Times, 2010). This care work is disproportionately performed by foreign workers of racialized groups as ‘global servants of global capitalism’ (Parrenas, 2001), not only because their labor is cheaper but also because they are poor and compelled to be more deferent and servile (Mozère, 2004). To omit this particular caring function of domestic labor, then, is to ignore the divisions of race and class in reproductive work (Anderson, 2000), the potential slavery, and the relative disempowerment as the reproduction of racial stereotypes, widening class differences and social inequalities in global cities.

There are between 50 and 100 million domestic workers worldwide (International Labour Organization (ILO), 2011). It is hard to pin down the exact numbers since so much of the servant economy is underground, undocumented, and unregulated and since this care work operates inside the private sphere of the home, where more potential for exploitation exists, often without formal labor contracts. Some of the world’s largest flows of undocumented, temporary migrant workers originate in Asia. In three Asian countries – the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka – women are the majority of migrant workers (Campbell, 2006), who have constituted between 60% and 80% of labor migrants since the 1980s (Anggraeni, 2006; Moukarbel, 2009; Parrenas, 2001; Ukwatta, 2010). Approximately 10 million Filipinas, 1.5 million Indonesians, and 1 million Sri Lankans work abroad in the domestic care sector, emerging as some of the largest groups of migrant laborers in the global economy. Asian female migrant workers are very mobile like tourists, becoming global nomads who have labored in multiple countries. Many Asian nannies in Paris worked previously in other countries of Asia or the Middle East (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia) before coming to Paris to care for the children of the French or of European and American expatriates in Paris. Some of these Asian nannies in Paris, who started to arrive in the 1980s, are the runaways fleeing abusive employers when their employers, usually from the Middle East, spent vacations in France (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009). Many others enter through tourist visas, who then overstay the permitted period, to remain in this invisible employment inside private households. French immigration policies do not issue work permits for domestic care service and do not acknowledge it as a sector of employment for migrants, thereby leaving the status of legal employment to the discretion of employers (Briones, 2008; Scrinzi, 2011). However, many employers do not register their employees, further ensuing that forms of exploitation in relation to working conditions and wages remain largely hidden, ultimately with more power and control over their employees. The proportion of illegal migrants (sans-papiers) in the domestic care sector appears remarkably high (over 80%), who are among the most exploited and least protected groups of migrants (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009). Both legal and illegal recruitment agencies, as well as informal social networks by the earlier migration of family members and friends and the use of mobile communication technologies, increasingly facilitate the flows of irregular, undocumented migrants who carry on moving and struggle with multiple mobilities in search of work and stability. Importantly, mobile phones in particular have become the most crucial and pervasive communication device that enables them to be simultaneously mobile and connected, anytime and anywhere. The widespread use of mobile phones, as an integral resource of everyday life, is leading to new practices and complex consequences in work life.

Given the potential exploitation, social isolation, and vulnerability of the labor process, what are the implications of nannies’ use of the mobile phone in work life? Is the mobile phone empowering or disempowering as a new form of social control? How much is this connectivity by the mobile phone creating a sense of empowerment, contributing toward greater autonomy and freedom? Based on a long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study presents a case for the importance of the detailed investigation of everyday contexts and power relations to better understand the complexities of mobile phone use in work life. It importantly recognizes how power relations shape mobile phone culture, by analyzing how nannies’ work lives are experienced and articulated by the everyday use of the mobile phone in the social contexts in which they are situated, and how they are empowered or disempowered by the social structures that influence the technologically mediated sphere of work. It becomes evident in the analysis that the ways in which minorities use the mobile phone, how they feel and think about this new connection, and what consequences it entails are multifaceted reflections of and responses to their marginalized social positioning and employment status. This approach negates any technological determinism that may assume mobile technology’s potential as an autonomous force to transcend social divisions and empower people. A technological progressivism surrounding new digital technologies, which foregrounds fluid, individualized connectivity, control, and freedom, prevents active and critical thinking about technology–knowledge–power (Chun and Keenan, 2006). Amid often optimistic and celebratory views of new digital technologies, it is important to critically understand how such technologies are empowering to which specific groups of people and under what circumstances, and subsequently which people, in what contexts, are getting happier or unhappier (Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002). The role of connectivity in the use of the mobile phone is integral to day-to-day management of work space and perhaps even more significant in this case, given the nannies’ particular employment circumstances and isolated work experiences in this invisible community. Little is known about how they struggle to deal with tensions and anxieties around the mobile phone that has become a major part of their existence and economic survival.

A driving force in the development of digital media including the mobile phone is the goal of total connectivity – the ability to access all, in all places, at all times (Messaris and Humphreys, 2006). The mobile phone has become important mainly because it facilitates the mundane aspects of daily lives, planning activities, and interactions, thanks to the micro-coordination enabled by almost perpetual contact (Ling, 2012). Mobile communication is different from other forms of interpersonal mediation in that mobile telephony provides people with individual addressability (e.g. calling to individuals, not to places or locations), so people are expected to be available to others, family members, and friends via the mobile phone (Ling, 2008). More frequently, more easily, more portably than ever before, mobile phone users are perpetually accessible to others, even their employers to whom they might not want to be connected in private and personal space outside usual work time. These new characteristics of the technology have created an environment in which expectations of instant communication are fully accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and people expect more immediate responses to their needs (Hanson, 2007). Mobile communication is said to enhance the autonomy of individuals, enabling them to set up their own connections and empowering them to have more choice and greater control over their lives. How real is this autonomy? (Castells et al., 2007). How much does this technology actually modify power relations? Who benefits from this connectivity? With more mobility and more choices in how and when people communicate with one another, these technological advances are said to make people’s lives easier, but why do people continue to feel so much stress, anxiety and unhappiness? (Hanson, 2007). There is a need to critically investigate emergent empirical realities and the materialization of these promises and great expectations that are not always met in various social contexts.

The history of mobile digital technologies shows that technologies promise much but have many unintended consequences (Hanson, 2007). Why people use mobile phones often reflects a belief that these technologies will give users greater control over their lives, but perhaps result in an illusion of control that conditions people to have expectations that are often unmet. Relationships with digital possessions, or the specific qualities that individuals perceive the digital items to possess, are generally characterized as providing a sense of bounded control (Cushing, 2013). On one hand, the ‘anytime, anywhere’ connectivity afforded by the mobile phone may well offer moments of individual control – in seeking employment opportunities, connecting with potential employers, and managing work life through micro-coordination. On the other hand, what is positively viewed about technological innovation, the connectivity of the mobile phone and its assumed autonomy, can also work in contradictory ways as a technology of regulation and surveillance that provides an even more complex set of social control – the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure, the policing of private and personal space, and the undermining of privacy and comfort of workers, including their right to be left alone outside work time. Technological innovation in mobile digital communications encapsulates the complex nature of contemporary work life. Innovation implies increased flexibility and freedom, but also increased complexity and the problematics of change where the shadows of uncertainty and risk are always presented (Liestol et al., 2004). Mobile digital technologies are creating new conditions, both solutions and new problems, lure and anxiety about their consequences, with which users routinely live and contest in their daily lives. It is necessary to recognize the double life of technologies with this simultaneous capacity. One of the key issues concerns the way in which technological solutions often themselves create new problems for other people, thus producing a valuable inventory of suspicion of the taken-for-granted technological solutions (Morley, 2007). In an increasingly connected world, the concern is not how to get onto the connection, but how to get off (Shaviro, 2003). For instance, a nanny will never get it out of her life simply by turning off her mobile phone, as it will follow her anyway. Being ‘always on’ is an allegedly wonderful thing, but it also means that her work is able to follow her wherever she goes; she is made available at short notice to her boss who suddenly needs more work or coordination for extra hours. There is a distinct pressure that compels the individual within the mobile and networked society to be connected and ‘always on’, to be a willing and connected node in the networked economy if the individual wants to keep a decent job (Hassan, 2008). There are fewer and fewer refuges in time and space where the individual can be outside the pull of the connection. The pressure to be connected exists at almost every level, and escape is nearly impossible. What it means to live in an increasingly connected and far more mobile world today is a complex and often contradictory affair.

This study will argue that, far from an instrument of empowerment, the mobile phone can work to reinforce already existing power relations and mundane social structures, leading to more unequal and enslaving relationships in work life. The mobile phone is not necessarily creating something autonomous or empowering, but rather introducing a subtle and new trap, generating more work and exploitation, and serving to consolidate the existing power of privileged social groups. As this study will demonstrate, nannies’ autonomy is increasingly constrained by the mobile phone with new and greater expectations that they should be connected and available for their employers, anytime, anywhere. The everyday use of the mobile phone is not separate from, but fully interwoven into and operating within, the enduring structures of power in work life. Traditional power structures and existing patterns of hierarchy in relation to race and class are not undermined, but reproduced and re-inscribed in new technologically mediated forms – thereby generating a site of symbolic struggles, for connection and disconnection, and for control and resistance with the kind of productive tension which simultaneously reshapes the very meaning of the technology within the presence of power. Traditional social constraints are reintroduced and amplified by the almost perpetual contact of the mobile phone and its intrusiveness into private and personal space. This prevailing pattern can keep the weak and marginal even more disempowered. Mobile phone technology can empower people through facilitating communication, but the benefits of such empowerment are mediated by the social positioning of phone users (Lan, 2006). The seeming increase in freedom and autonomy in some aspects often comes with growing exposure to new forms of social control at the same time. Mobile phone culture opens up the dialectics of normative freedom with its normative constraint. This apparent paradox means that no notion of freedom is really absolute but necessarily takes the form of a normative structure, a familiar social order (Miller and Slater, 2000). Technologically determined or techno-centric liberal discourses of freedom tend to obscure how freedoms are always normative and constructed by social structures and power relations.

This study will therefore argue that mobile phone use as mediated by the existing power relations can work to reinforce and even exacerbate, rather than transcend, existing inequalities and social divisions between privileged social groups and their serving class. This critical awareness of oppression and anxiety around the consequences of mobile phone use is a new and hidden feature of digital inequality that may not be immediately salient to those in power, but that is felt acutely by the weak and marginal. All nannies in this study do have their own mobile phone and struggle to deal with new forms of oppression in the management of work life. Based on these findings, this study will further argue that mobile phone culture is less related to a conventional digital divide between the haves and the have-nots or issues of access to technology itself, but it is more importantly about everyday contexts and power relations that influence the ways people use technology and construct a new layer of meanings and a set of social relations as reshaped and contested by digital possessions. This ethnographic study in the global city of Paris gives voice and visibility to marginalized groups of nannies working under conditions of material poverty and oppression and talking about various contexts of where they experience powerlessness in their everyday work lives as intersected with mobile phone use.

Method

As part of a larger project on the experiences of global nannies, this study draws on ethnographic interviews and observations with 140 Filipina, Indonesian, and Sri Lankan nannies in Paris. Data were collected from 2008 to 2014 through informal interactions, in-depth follow-up interviews, observation, and participant observation. This ethnographic work started with many informal encounters with nannies in the wealthy neighborhoods of Paris, chatting with nannies in parks or playgrounds seen as a major nanny hangout, then continued with in-depth individual interviewing and observing, as well as participating in their private gatherings when invited, such as visiting places of worship on nannies’ days off, joining birthday parties, picnicking, cooking, and watching online TV together. Extensive participant observation of such practices was an effective way to gain deeper insights into their circumscribed lives and experiences. Due to their isolated, lonely, and invisible labor inside private households, nannies tend to be more social and friendly in public spaces, usually in parks or playgrounds while guarding their wards during weekdays, and in churches on Sundays. A process of snowball sampling was used as key informants further introduced their friends, sisters, and mothers who also worked as a nanny. Interviews were not always easy to arrange since they tend to work long hours and their time and movements are limited or sometimes restricted by their employers. Most interviews took place outside the homes of the nannies, but a few were conducted in private rooms of live-out nannies. Each interview lasted 1–2 hours, with flexible follow-up interviews whenever they became available. The interviews started with broad biographical questions on their experience of migration, family life, feelings about the conditions of their work, as well as the use of the digital media in everyday life. When interviewees looked uncomfortable about the conversations being audio-recorded, verbatim notes were taken on condition of anonymity and confidentiality.

Through a long-term ethnographic study, life story narratives were collected from these nannies, many of whom (over 80%) were undocumented, irregular migrants at the time of research. Some women did not want to disclose their legal status and income level. Many nannies considered themselves to have low incomes, typically between 600 and 1200 euros a month for a full-time employment (depending on provision of a service room) or 8–10 euros an hour for a part-time job. Participants’ ages ranged from 20s to 50s. More than a half of the Filipina nannies and younger generations in their 20s and 30s had relatively higher educational backgrounds or qualifications from college or teachers/nurses training school. Some of the nannies come from various social and educational backgrounds including engineering and pharmacy. Many women in their 30s to 50s were mothers with left-behind children in their homeland. Open-ended biographical questions about transnational migration, work experiences, family, and relationships elicited intensely emotional responses, simultaneously indicating that there was a surprising lack of opportunity for them to be able to talk about their sense of disempowerment – the important yet often unacknowledged suffering, inequality, and predicaments of human existence. Through the process of storytelling, without always knowing why their stories matter, they felt valued in this rare empathetic encounter. Throughout the text below, all names of the nannies in this study have been withheld to protect their identity and vulnerability.

Mobile phone as social capital

I graduated college in the Philippines but it was very difficult to get a job. I worked in Taiwan, Dubai, and came to Paris because I heard Paris salary is high … But for the first 3 months, I could not find a job. I lived in church for a while because I did not have a room … I met a Filipina woman (nanny) inside a metro train. She smiled at me and asked if I am a Filipina. I kept her number on my mobile phone and we got to know. She introduced me to my first job through her employer … I cannot live without my mobile phone. Everything is done by this. If a friend heard about a new job, she would call me.

I went to work in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Paris with my boss family because they have a house here … But I escaped and found a new job through an Indonesian nanny. I shared a room with three Indonesian friends, and now with one. We help each other … Once I lost my phone. I panicked! Everything is stored in my phone. Without it, I feel like losing my life.

I know several women from my country (Sri Lanka). They live in service rooms (10 square meters, in the 7^th floor without a lift). I am living one week here, one week there. Now I am looking for a job … I have no money, no room for myself. But I have my phone with me wherever I go. Without it, I feel lost.

All nannies in this study use mobile phones that are considered to be more convenient and affordable than landlines in the foreign country. More than a half connect to the Internet on their mobile phone, and the actual use of the mobile Internet is conspicuous in public spaces. The mobile phone, perhaps the first universally accessible information communication technology, is perceived as a necessity, a must-have instrument of everyday life, rather than a luxury for those in higher socio-economic status. Indeed, it has become an essential attribute of human existence, as the most crucial communication tool for most nannies. The significance of its presence or absence (‘cannot live without my mobile phone’, ‘feel lost’, ‘feel like losing my life’) is often claimed with a felt sense of pleasure and insecurity in the lives of socially and economically vulnerable foreign workers. Not being able to live without the mobile phone, they feel a great fear of losing it, and of disconnecting, albeit temporarily. With constant connection come new anxieties of disconnection, a kind of panic. The loss of a mobile phone can feel like a death (Turkle, 2011), or feel seriously disabled, if not totally isolated, in their social networks (Castells et al., 2007). For migrants living away from their homeland for years, the mobile phone becomes a vital tool as the only fragment of home they have left and as the only space where they can be reached by their family or by their boss (Bonini, 2011). Undocumented, irregular migrants may sometimes have no place to sleep, and many indeed live in extreme spatial constraints, but they cannot afford not to have a mobile phone, their own space of flows. They become more attached and dependent on their mobile phone, simultaneously more anxious of unintended disconnection, while surviving on the move (‘living one week here, one week there’). This growing emotional attachment to the mobile phone is an inevitable consequence of the conditions of social deprivation and economic hardship, not only of the dependency relationship that has developed with the technology. As well as being personalized, mobile phones are the repositories of users’ memories and social connections in the phone numbers, photos, and messages that they store, becoming an icon of ‘me, my mobile and my identity’, something that embodies users’ social and emotional life rather than just merely enabling it (Glotz et al., 2005). This human-like attribute of the mobile phone or bodily extension, which is intimately embedded in everyday practices, plays a crucial role in building and maintaining social relationships and, most importantly, in struggling to find work.

A main purpose of mobile phone use in locality is task-oriented and practical – to find work, to call phone numbers in job advertisements, and to maintain friendships and connections with those in work-related contexts. In the resource-poor condition with relatively less choice and power, job referrals and income are usually derived through social connections with friends and acquaintances. Nannies are not active seekers of job information outside their most familiar in-group ties, surprisingly few friends and acquaintances who can respond to their practical concerns, due to the serious difficulties in finding alternative jobs and alternative options for constructing an occupational identity outside the work they do. Workers with no possession of a mobile phone are likely to lose job opportunities and diminish income if they do not remain connected to significant others. The social use of the mobile phone is fundamentally a part of economic survival strategies based on connectivity with in-group ties upon which they can depend, in a social setting that lacks formal and wider networks for migrant workers.

In this sense, mobile phone use as a supplementary support system can translate into social capital and further has overarching consequences for their general sense of well-being and development. The term ‘social capital’ (Putnam, 2000) here refers to social networks, social contacts, and connections among individuals that have value and enhance individual productivity. This kind of social capital involves norms of reciprocity, mutual obligations, and trustworthiness, not as mere contacts (‘I will do this for you now, in the expectation that you will return the favor’). Commonly perceiving to be injured in their precarious life, nannies help each other to find work, exchange job information, fill in for one another in times of emergency, and share food or space to sleep, thereby reflecting upon their shared experiences. To be injured means that one has the chance to reflect upon injury, to find out who else suffers from dispossession, mourning, anxiety, and fear, and all these emotional dispositions leading to reflection on how others have suffered (Butler, 2004). For relatively isolated and vulnerable individuals, such as nannies working inside private households, who are not necessarily rich in social capital and are not well integrated into the host society, and whose physical interactions are constrained by social positions and social institutions, informal social networks through the mobile phone and even hazardous encounters, whether inside a metro or on the street, are often important for finding a job or a helping hand. Undocumented, irregular women are active in social networks, which in part compensate for their exclusion from civil and social rights (Brouckaert, 2012). The mobile phone is used to enhance social capital, emotional support, and productivity, which can be linked to micro-coordination of income-generating activities on the move. It plays an important role in helping nannies contact potential employers, coordinate appointments, arrange work schedules, make adjustments to the daily activities of employers whenever needs arise, and navigate and keep things in order, while commonly struggling to deal with precarious, disposable life.

Disposable life

They call me nanny, but I do everything. I look after two children, sometimes clean the apartment, cook for the children when Madam comes home late, iron Monsieur’s shirts as Madam hates ironing. I walk their dog in the park. Once the dog was lost and Madam cried … It is too much work for my salary (800 euros a month, plus a service room). I still live in their service room, but try to move out.

I work like a slave from 7:00 morning until 9:00 evening. My salary is 600 euros (a month). I was promised 1200 euros in the beginning, but Madam reduced it after taking money for my room and food … If I get sick, Madam gets annoyed, ‘Why are you sick? Take strong medicine’. After several hours she keeps asking me, ‘Can you work now?’ She is demanding … I am asked to do grocery shopping. A butcher tells me, ‘Go and sleep more, you look very tired’. Madam can fire me anytime. Having one employer is risky. It is better to have many (part-time) employers because you never know what will happen tomorrow.

Because my work in Saudi Arabia was so hard, I thought I could work anywhere, I was not afraid to come to Paris … Babysitting is unpredictable, so I cannot just leave after work. I rather prefer cleaning than babysitting. After cleaning, you can just lock the door and leave. But with babysitting, you have to wait until their parents come home, and they do not pay for extra work … Working for 8 years in Paris, now I am preparing for papers as my current boss helps me. No matter what, I try to be nice to the boss so that she can help me to get my card.

These stories are typical of many nannies in this study; whether they are from the Philippines, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka; whether they have worked in Paris for several years or over 10 years; and whether they are currently regulated or unregulated workers, their concerns and struggles reveal similar experiences in their shared role as low-wage workers in the underground economy. Experiences of exploitation, isolation, and enduring marginality of these minorities shape a common, shared identity. Interestingly, it has been observed that the conditions and treatment of migrant domestic workers are virtually identical across time and space; no matter where the job is taking place, by what nationality it is held, the experiences are very much alike (Moukarbel, 2009). Although studies about migrant domestic workers often find exploitation and make a plea for the regulation of women’s legal status, legal migration does not automatically mean that women gain more rights or become more empowered as regulation may also entail more control (De Regt, 2010). Live-in nannies tend to have heavy duties going beyond childcare, extending to some cleaning, light cooking, ironing, food shopping, or dog-walking, whenever such flexibility is required by their employers. What often happens in practice is the blurring of the boundaries between childcare and housework as these two roles are merged informally into one without formal written contracts. Nannies are trapped in this cultivated ambiguity. A few nannies appear to have a good employer, but countless others are less fortunate, as manifested in three common issues concerning working conditions. First, many work for long hours (e.g. 14 hours a day, 6 days a week), for a low wage that is far from acceptable (e.g. between 600 and 1200 euros a month, depending on provision of a service room) and that does not allow them to have a decent standard of living in Paris. Estimates based on available data suggest that migrant domestic workers typically earn less than a half (40%) of average wages in France (ILO, 2012). Second, not all nannies are exploited and dissatisfied with labor conditions; however, it is clear that non-payment of overtime is a common practice contributing to the deepening of social inequality. The informal nature of labor relations – often without formal contracts defining working hours and wage payments but discursively centering around the well-being of children – obscures how much workers are actually entitled to be remunerated. Third, even the well-paid nannies are employed under conditions that are unpredictable and largely beyond their control; for instance, they are expected to be available on duty most of the time, without sick leave and without a general sense of job security. If they call in sick or become ill for several days, they risk being fired without notice as employers are free to do the hiring and the firing.

Overall, these working conditions and the particular vulnerabilities of invisible workers in private homes create a tendency for them to face disposable life as disposable labor, a new modern form of slavery. Slavery today has two key characteristics that make it very different from the slavery of the past; slaves today are ‘cheap’ and they are ‘disposable’ (Bales, 1999). Slavery is not about legal ownership of a person, but it is the complete control of a person for economic exploitation. Slaves are cheaper than they have ever been, and slaves are chosen by vulnerability, with devastating consequences for women. One of the problems with slavery today is that most people think it disappeared a long time ago in the 19th century, but slavery today is more insidious because it is no longer justified by law or ideology. Modern-day slaves suffer all the more for being ‘invisible’ (Parisot, 1998). Invisible nannies can face disposable life as a household slave in Paris, perhaps constituting a part of the estimated 27 million slaves worldwide (Bales, 1999). Hidden away behind the closed doors in private homes, many nannies are exploited as a slave wageworker and become disposable at their employers’ convenience, as they are left to labor in conditions of isolation where all rules, regulations, and transgressions are created by employers. Workers’ documentation status, whether documented or undocumented migrants, does not appear to influence working conditions and exposure to exploitation. Home-based childcare is inherently isolated and invisible, which makes the nature of childcare work emotionally vexing and disempowering to a large extent. Apart from occasional bursts of publicity, invisible migrant domestic workers are perennially vulnerable and more likely to be excluded from social and legal safety nets (ILO, 2011). When migrant workers labor at the pleasure of the host country, with little or no legal protection, their work can slip easily into a version of indentured servitude (Rowe, 2003). Just as slavery produced runaway slaves, many times these conditions result in runaway nannies. Or, they remain stuck in a feudal-like situation (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007), finding it hard to move from a traditional master–slave relationship to modern one of employer–employee (Parisot, 1998).

These jobs are largely unregulated as they take place inside the private sphere of homes; in this uniquely vulnerable condition, a high level of dependency on employers is created and subaltern women are more pressured to be submissive in order to make their employers willing to help them with papers for regularization. Most vulnerable of all are live-in nannies who are expected to be constantly available to their employers as live-in arrangements constitute the blurred boundary between work and private life. While the domination–submission dynamic is at the core of labor relations here, possibilities of resistance do emerge among subjugated minorities to escape a state of constant availability and to negotiate constraints. Strategies of resistance include moving out and working as a live-out nanny or finding multiple employers so that they are not dependent on one employer. These practices of resistance are not always explicitly resistant or completely successful, but nevertheless enhance some degree of autonomy and empowerment of workers.

Mobile connection, disempowerment, and inequality

My employer often calls me. Why should I be available all the time, even though I don’t live in their service room now? She expects me to be available … One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting inside a metro, going to meet my friend. I wore pretty clothes and nail polish. But suddenly I received a call from my employer, ‘Where are you?’ She needed to go out and wanted me to come by 5:00 to look after children. So I got off the train at the next stop … It is difficult to say ‘No’ or turn off the phone.

On Sunday I go to church. If Madam calls me, I bring her child to church … When Madam and her husband went to Venice, she sent me text messages, ‘How is my child doing? How is my dog doing?’ She often calls me, but I cannot call even when I am sick … Sometimes Madam would pick up the child, without calling me and letting me know. I went out to school to pick up the child, but the child already left with her mom. She calls me whenever she needs me, but does not consider me. It is always one-way order.

While I was talking with my friend outside for one hour, I received a call from my boss several times, ‘Where are you? On the way home can you drop by a store and buy juice, this and that?’ Even during the summer vacation (August), it is better to be far away, out of sight. If I stayed in my room, she would constantly ask me to do this and that. There is no privacy … This extra work is not paid. Even if it is paid, I need to rest, I am not a slave.

On one hand, the mobile phone as social capital may empower workers through more social connections and increase their sense of autonomy by enabling them to be simultaneously mobile and connected. On the other hand, a deeper look into this mobile connectivity reveals a different nature; the everyday use of the mobile phone gives rise to the experiences of perpetual contact by employers and the nuanced ways in which expectations of authority come into conflict with autonomy among the less powerful. The mobile phone has prompted the new expectations that one should be available, anytime, anywhere, and should respond immediately, rendering subordinate workers feel more pressured and constrained in the scope for independent mobility. Employers make calls whenever they need to call – regular occurrences and not just simple annoyances in nannies’ situations as these calls compound the double-burden of work and anxiety. In this sense, nannies are further ruled through perpetual connections; mobile technologies may be associated with freedom, but also operate and achieve old rules more efficiently. Paradoxically, the mobile phone binds users in mobility as much as it appears to promise to free users. One of the most frequently asked questions in mobile phone communications is, ‘Where are you?’, often beginning straight by locating the other person to initiate a conversation, substituting the traditional greeting form, ‘How are you?’ (Goliama, 2011). The question ‘where are you?’ is a form of establishing mutual contexts for communication and enables shared circumstances between people communicating at a distance and a relation of mutual accountability and trust (Hamill and Lasen, 2005). Yet, the relation here is not one of equality but is shaped unequally by power dimensions that are embedded in the everyday use of the mobile phone. The concerns revealed in this study are fundamentally about contextual issues of power. Who initiates connection and benefits from it? Why should the less powerful be available? New, nuanced constraints are caused by the problems of working in an unequal power context in which the less powerful (nannies) become conditioned to be continually present at a distance, spontaneous and available to the more powerful (employers). The benefits of the mobile technology are not distributed equally in relations of asymmetrical power.

New inequalities are introduced, not necessarily by a conventional digital divide between the haves and the have-nots of technology, but fundamentally by power relations of people and their differential use of technology based on differential power. Structures of inequality at the macro-level related to race, class, or socio-economic status influence how the mobile phone’s new mediations define the micro-processes of working lives, labor relations, and experiences of work. It can be said that new technologies and ways of thinking about them are generally given shape and meaning by being grafted onto existing rules and expectations about the structure of social relations, as well as a familiar social order that can be further enhanced by new technologies (Marvin, 1988). Although new digital technologies appear to open up new spaces for transcending traditional concepts of structures, social divisions, and differences and although they are seen to have potential to achieve greater social equity and empowerment for marginalized members in a different context (e.g. Mehra et al., 2004), they can also possibly preserve and even reinforce these same structures and divisions. The mobile phone may contribute to intensifying, rather than reducing, differences between social groups operating in asymmetrical power relations. These differences become more significant and stronger to the perceptions of nannies, perhaps more than to the perceptions of madams assuming to be in positions of power. Domestic service is always marked by asymmetrical encounters and cannot function without devices through which multiple axes of social difference including class and race can be established (Delap, 2011). The more communication technology is immersed in society and pervades everyday life, the more it becomes attached to all existing social divisions and strengthens them (Van Dijk, 2005). What is represented as the so-called new digital reality is in actuality the technological and cultural manifestation of underlying class relations interconnected with race that are concealed through the dominant discourses of the digital today assuming a new stage of society more fluid than fixed by social divisions (Wilkie, 2011). Rather than the end of social inequality, the technologically mediated world may generate its global expansion, disciplined subjectivities, and subordination of certain groups. Reproducing social inequality and difference, mobile phone technology can serve to perpetuate, rather than modify, existing power relations and existing social practices, which may further oppress the weak and marginal.

The ‘always connected’ nature in an ‘always on’ environment has paradoxical consequences, both expansive and constraining. What is commonly considered a liberating new technology for certain subjects can also be exploitive and enslaving for others at the same time. Nannies commonly find themselves in an ambivalent position to deal with the tensions of constant connectivity, the struggles in the management of presence and absence, of availability and non-availability, both their acquiescence and awareness of growing inequalities prompted by the mobile phone’s connectivity and increased flexibility in arrangements. Mobile communication offers a chance to fine-tune social arrangements, rather than making an immutable agreement, thereby reconstituting a sense of timekeeping (Ling, 2012). It creates an unspoken reality that time organization can no longer be agreed or fixed in any precise terms, resulting in more work for nannies and benefiting employers. The increased flexibility and mutable agreement enabled by the mobile phone’s connectivity presents an unfavorable condition in which workers are expected to work beyond normal working hours, often without due payment. Paradoxically, mobile communication technology that promises to free and connect people also burdens them with more work due to the increased expectation of availability through perpetual connections. It changes the nature and meaning of work life, blurring the boundaries between work and leisure, or the distinctions between workers’ sold-time and free-time. It can bring unwelcome intrusions into private spaces, seemingly infiltrating every sphere including the bedroom where workers attempt to escape and carve out a constricted yet essential sphere of privacy, however fleeting. Concerns about more work, privacy, and possible surveillance are intimately linked to the everyday use of the mobile phone that contradictorily symbolizes the technology’s presumed potential to enhance the autonomy and empowerment of individuals. The way in which the mobile phone is used by the powerful can alter the very conditions of work life; it can hire workers, but also dispose them if they are not available through this same technological device, if their mobile phone is turned off or not answered immediately, leading to quiet private struggles among workers who have limited power. The everyday use of the technology in profoundly unequal power contexts orders and shapes human relations, while calling into question what it means to be human. Wittingly or unwittingly, it has become new forms of social control and another hidden aspect of disempowerment of workers.

Conclusion

As this study shows, the mobile phone has become an integral part of everyday work life, an important dimension of human existence or bodily extension that possibly contributes toward social capital. It is a survivalist tool in nature that can extend communicative networks and social support in times of needs and that can help nannies survive and improve economic and social well-being. Affordable and accessible mobile technology is not an independent device that determines its effect, but it is embedded in existing social practices and power relations among different social groups. Mobile phone use is situated in asymmetrical power relations contingent on variables such as social class, race, and work conditions that unevenly affect technological benefits in light of connectivity. This situated nature of mobile technology recognizes that its use and meaning can be understood in the specific social context in which individual practices take place and contest. New practices and unrecognized struggles emerge as a new site of tension, a kind of battlefield in which micro-politics of unequal power is confronted, contested, and unresolved. Unresolved ambivalence is a key feature of mobile culture in everyday work life.

The potential consequences of mobile phone use are that deep-rooted social inequalities are reproduced and intensified in the technologically mediated world based on perpetual connectivity and that existing power structures and social differences are reinforced rather than diminished. New social inequalities recognized in this study move beyond a traditional conception of the digital divide defined as the gap between those who do and those who do not have access to technology, and the question of digital inequality as a consequence. The issue in this study is more primarily social than technological; it is not always concerning a binary of access and non-access or a familiar rhetoric of technology haves and have-nots that is insufficient to capture and reflect the techno-social dynamics of power and its significance. There are nuances to the digital divide and digital inequality that can be understood in terms of situational use and relative inequality conditioned by asymmetrical power relations, and thus a position of relational disadvantage. This study has made the case to understand how power relations work in the sphere of mobile connectivity between the more powerful and the less powerful and consequences on a sense of disempowerment in a large degree for the latter.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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