Abstract
Scholars have highlighted the multiple dimensions of care and its intersections with migratory patterns to collectively show that there are wide-ranging and sometimes unintended consequences to the global intensification of migrant care labor. This article focuses not on migrant workers themselves, nor on people who hire them. Instead, it throws into the mix a class of people who do not have access to migrant care workers, but who nonetheless live in a society where norms and standards are set by people who do. I argue that under the current work–care–migration regime in Singapore, low-income families’ needs are overlooked. As feminist scholars and activists challenge existing state policies, societal norms, and corporate practices, we must continually insert into conversation the question of class variations and inequalities. The article makes the case for an expanded view in thinking about the effects of paid domestic work on public policy and the wellbeing of various groups in society and along the global care chain.
Singapore, a Great Place to Raise Kids… for Whom?
Over the past few years, the Singapore state has increased social support to enable parents—particularly mothers—to balance wage work with the care of children (Teo, 2013). At the same time, the foreign domestic worker program, long a core component of the state’s solution to care needs—far longer, indeed, than childcare centers, continues to grow unabated. 1 In tandem with this growth in public policy attention, a wide range of commercial services oriented toward children have sprouted up. Preschool is not mandated by law, and the sector consists of players both state-linked (but still profit-generating) and wholly commercial. Childcare centers and kindergartens boast facilities, teacher–student ratios, and pedagogies commensurate with their price points. Specialist centers cater to parents who want their children to spend time on hobbies such as music, chess, art and craft, dance, fencing, martial arts, soccer, swimming, tennis, etc. Commercial “tuition centers,” academically oriented, are in every neighborhood shopping mall; these play central roles in the everyday routines of school-going children. Although these “enrichment” and tuition centers are not framed as centers of care, they form important components of the care infrastructure insofar as this is where some children spend many hours of their day, several times a week.
The logistics of moving between home, school, and centers are rendered possible by the vast number of domestic workers whose job includes precisely this daily movement of children from place-to-place. Indeed, in my neighborhood where many European, American, and Australian expatriates live, mothers openly and regularly comment on how wonderful it is to raise children in Singapore, in contrast to their home countries. Two salient issues emerge as they talk about how their lifestyles here could not be replicated back home: there are so many interesting activities available to children, and full-time paid help is so affordable. Put this way, we see that parents with means have access to First World services and Third World servitude. 2
In this context of expanded options, the lived realities of low-income Singaporeans are starkly different. Their everyday realities are hectic with housework, errands, care for children, cooking, and sometimes physically-exhausting shift work as security guards, supermarket cashiers, and cleaners. They are stressed out and anxious about running out of money to buy food and pay for utilities. Their children are, in contrast to middle-class children, extraordinarily independent: they can cook rice and fry eggs at eight years old; go to and from school on their own; and even take care of younger siblings. Importantly, low-income parents speak of how they worry about their children alone at home with nothing to occupy them, or of losing their jobs when they take time off when their children are sick or on school holidays, or of the fact that their wages are insufficient to pay all their bills.
As it turns out, Singapore is not such a great place to raise children when one has low income. The expansion of social support and the dizzying options available to some parent-consumers are not shaping people’s lives in the same ways across class lines. In this article, I direct attention to the significance of class differences, exploring the ways in which a work–care regime that appears to be incredibly “family friendly” to some is not particularly family friendly to others.
Work–Care Regimes
Research on work and care has highlighted shifts in women’s employment, the persistence of gender inequalities, and the effects public policies can have in ameliorating some of these inequalities. Over recent decades, women’s formal employment has steadily increased. This has, however, not been accompanied by an equal increase in men’s participation in housework and care labor (Gornick et al., 2009; Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports, 2009; OECD, 2014). Hence, the experiences of overwork and scarcity of leisure; the emotional drain of hectic schedules; and the stresses of feeling that one is failing on all fronts, have been disproportionately borne by women (Berhau, et al., 2011; Emslie and Hunt, 2009; Le Bihan et al., 2014; Lee and Choo, 2001). Uneven roles in the domestic sphere compound gender inequalities in the professional realm: women are in less regular employment, face wage losses and diminished career advancement because of their familial—especially childrearing—responsibilities (England, 2010; Glass, 2004; International Labour Office, 2012; Ministry of Manpower, 2012).
How people manage wage work and care responsibilities is shaped through work/care regimes—which entails a combination of social norms, institutional arrangements and possibilities, and individual preferences (Pocock, 2005). In particular, institutional arrangements that matter include how employment is structured (including leave/vacation time and work hours); how childcare institutions are structured (for different age groups, in what settings, with what subsidies); and how welfare supports (for men and/or women, for what period of time) which familial relationships. Institutional arrangements, in turn, are deeply influenced by state practices.
Public policies shape how families are defined and function (Daly, 2010; Lister, 2009; Teo, 2013); the claims women and men can and cannot make on the state (O’Connor et al., 1999); the “choices” they deploy in combining wage work and care responsibilities (Lewis and Campbell, 2007; Teo, 2015a); and the consequent experiences, wellbeing, and risks women versus men bear (Saraceno, 2011). Combinations of policies—paid leave for both women and men; flexible work arrangements; support for childcare; anti-discrimination laws that protect employees who are (potential or actual) caregivers—are crucial to bringing about greater gender equality at home and at work (Ejnæs, 2011; Ellingsaeter, 1999; Gornick and Meyers, 2009; Keck and Saraceno, 2013). Conversely, social and labor market policies that are poorly harmonized expand roles for women in wage work without bringing about greater overall gender equality (Peng, 2011; Pocock, 2005).
Global Political Economy of Care Labor
While the studies cited above point to the persistence of unequal gender divisions of labor within families and the effect policies have in shaping these relations, a second line of inquiry expands on the range of social actors involved by interrogating the roles of paid housekeepers and caregivers, and the intensifying global trend of migrant care workers (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Yeates, 2009). That women of lower social standing do care work on behalf of higher-status women is not a recent trend (Glenn, 1992; Romero, 2002). Nonetheless, the expansion of migrant care work—through movement of women from less to more affluent places—is noteworthy (Isaksen et al., 2008; Kofman and Raghuram, 2012). The reliance on women migrant care/domestic workers complicates the issue of gender inequality with intersecting inequalities around ethnonationality and class (Lan, 2006; Parreñas, 2008; Yan, 2008). It generates new sites of conflicts as well as new modes of resistance both within and outside the domestic context (Constable, 1997; Piper, 2005; Yeoh et al., 1999). As a solution to dual needs for wage work and care, the domestic-worker solution exacerbates its privatization and intensify fissures in the interests of women—insofar as the hardships of women in the “global care chain” enable wealthier women to attain some semblance of work–life balance (Hochschild, 2000; Lan, 2006; Parreñas, 2000; Pratt, 2012). Finally, this global care chain involves not merely the resolution of labor needs—its articulation across societies produces neoliberal, middle-class subjects and subjectivities (Chin, 1998; Ray and Qayum, 2009).
Work–Care–Migration Regimes: Singapore and Beyond
The Singapore case vividly illustrates that state interventions in shaping the characteristics of wage work and care labor are not separate from their interventions in migration. However, it also raises a crucial question that is neglected by scholars of the two bodies of work described above: how does a work–care regime that heavily depends on migrant labor impact the lives of those who are not direct participants in the global care chain?
In this special issue, authors show the myriad ways in which there are constant and messy entanglements between the individual, intimate and micro practices of persons and families on the one hand and the larger political economy of care on the other. This article too illustrates the ways in which the ‘choices’ people make are shaped by the options available to them. I illustrate how the options available to families are, in spite of expansions in public support, still heavily dependent on market solutions and participation in formal wage labor. This story is part of a larger story of specific manifestations of neoliberal capitalism and the tendencies of states and societies to favor individualized and marketized solutions to meeting human needs. To the extent that these tendencies persist, if in varied forms, in the contemporary world, it is important to shed light on how these political economic developments are particularly damaging to people in low socioeconomic circumstances.
The articles in this special issue, by highlighting the multiple dimensions of care and its intersections with migratory patterns, collectively show that there are wide-ranging and sometimes unintended consequences to the intensification of migrant care labor. My article focuses not on migrant workers themselves, nor on people who hire them. Instead, it throws into the mix a class of people who do not have access to migrant care workers, but who nonetheless live in a society where norms and standards are set by people who do. In doing so, I aim to show that the effects of work–care regimes that depend heavily on migrant labor go well beyond those who are directly involved global care chains.
The expansion of care needs and the fulfillment of these needs through market solutions more generally and migrant care workers more specifically, are trends likely to persist, particularly in the wealthier cities of the world. We must cast a wide net on understanding the consequences of these trends. I show how these trends obscure the circumstances, needs, and wellbeing of women in lower class circumstances, as well as ultimately undermine the value of housework and care labor.
Data and Methods
To understand how the lives of those with lower income are affected by the class-based nature of the work–care–migration regime in Singapore, I analyze three sources of data: primary and secondary sources which track or describe key events and turning points in the Singapore state’s policies around population, work, and care; policy documents which specify both purposes and criteria of various policies and programs aimed at addressing the care of children; 3 and interviews with women in low-income households.
Through these documentations of key historical stages and speeches by government officials, I relate what is quite well known in Singapore: population policies have historically been class-differentiated. 4 What is less remarked upon is that class differentiation persists in contemporary policies and has become more subtle and impactful through institutionalization. To establish this, I analyze policies targeted at fertility and caregiving over the past few decades. I pay particular attention to the principles embedded in the policies—examining qualifying criteria, means of delivery, and the form and content of support or sanction. 5
In what follows, I show how existing policies ostensibly aimed at supporting families’ care needs render invisible the real labor that has to be done in the home. Three characteristics of Singapore’s work–care regime have undermined the needs of low-income women who do a lot of this invisible labor in the home: (1) strong and class-calibrated state interventions on fertility and family formation; (2) an employment regime in which corporations have great leeway and workers limited leverage; and (3) solutions to care needs that are highly individualized and market-based even as they sometimes appear universal and publicly provided.
Strong State Apparatus and Class-Calibrated Attention to Fertility
The Singapore state coordinates and regulates everyday life to an extraordinary degree. A key site of regulation is that of the family in general, and fertility in particular. State interventions in fertility were established early in the nation-state’s history and have persisted to this day. The intense intervention on fertility—and in particular an ethnoracialized, classed, and gendered mode of articulating fertility problems—continues to frame how the state resolves work–care needs.
The Singapore state, in line with international wisdom about national development in the 1960s, was antinatalist—encouraging Singaporeans with slogans such as “Stop at Two” and “Boy or Girl—Two is Enough,” and putting in place measures that penalized those who had three or more children (Heng and Devan, 1995; Saw, 2005; Wong and Yeoh, 2003). The pronatalist turn came in the early 1980s. This was in response not just to falling fertility rates but also to uneven declines—with the sharpest reductions among ethnic Chinese Singaporeans and, in particular, the more-educated (Lee, 1983). The state therefore targeted a specific class of women, the university-educated—disproportionately ethnic Chinese—to have more children (Heng and Devan, 1995). A eugenics rationale—that more-educated women produce more intelligent children—propelled these early pronatalist policies.
The contemporary work–care regime—as expressed in policies around maternity/paternity leave; the structure and preconditions of childcare support; and subsidies for support of children—continues to be underpinned by a desire to differentially encourage/discourage fertility along intersecting lines of ethnicity and class, as well as strong presumptions about gendered caregiving.
Several examples illustrate this: first, support for children is partly delivered through tax relief for married women. Given that about half of the working population pays no income taxes at all, and that women earn less than men, this form of support is essentially limited to higher-income women.
Second, the Baby Bonus—consisting of a cash component and a co-savings account where individuals receive matching funds from the state when they deposit cash into an account in their child’s name—also has class implications. Parents may put money into a child’s account until she/he is 12 years old. The government deposits matching funds in these amounts: up to S$6,000 for the first and second children; up to S$12,000 for third and fourth children; up to S$18,000 for fifth or subsequent children. The more disposable income one has, the more one is able to put cash into the account, and the more co-savings the government provides. That higher-order children receive more co-savings indicates that it is not the low-income with multiple children who are targeted for this particular scheme.
In contrast, the HOPE Scheme (Home Ownership Plus Education) provides housing grants and various subsidies to low-income and less-educated married couples (or divorced/widowed women with child custody), on condition that they limit their fertility to two children (Ministry of Social and Family Development, 2015). The maximum benefits of the scheme are reaped when applicants undergo irreversible sterilization.
An Employment Regime Where Low-Wage Workers Have Limited Leverage
Despite rhetoric by state agencies and businesses around work–life harmony, care needs of employees—whether the provision of health insurance for dependents or support for childcare—generally fall outside the purview of employers’ formal responsibility. Wages, work hours, and job security—crucial conditions that shape people’s capacities and choices regarding the balance of wage work and care responsibilities—are issues on which employers set the terms. Unsurprisingly, class differences matter: companies’ treatment of workers depends on where in the ranks employees stand; job security varies depending on how replaceable workers are and less-educated, low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable to job losses and have the least bargaining power. Consequently, there is unevenness in workers’ capacities to balance wage work and care responsibilities. Put more generally, absent universal provisions, market rewards also map onto uneven capacities in making market choices. The work–care regime as shaped by the state–corporate nexus is one in which the capacity to balance work and care is differentiated along lines of any given person’s market value.
Individualized and Market-Based Solutions to Care
In Singapore, formal paid care in childcare centers is on the rise but not universally accessible; semi-formal paid care within the home by foreign domestic workers is rising among the middle-to-high income but largely absent for the lower-income parents; informal unpaid care by grandparents is significant for those at the middle and higher ends of the income spectrum and care by mothers is relatively important for those at the high and low ends of the income spectrum.
These patterns arise in the context of two intertwining policy principles: strong reticence to unconditional universal provisions, and deep reliance on individualized solutions that depend on the capacity to pay.
Places in infant care and childcare centers have greatly increased in recent years. From 2009 to 2014, childcare center places increased from 67,980 to 104,774, while infant care center places increased from 2,011 to 5,329 (Early Childhood Development Agency, 2014). Infant care centers care for children aged 6 to 18 months, while childcare centers care for children between 18 months and 6 years. There are also kindergartens which children between ages 4 and 6 may attend for three to four hours a day. The Compulsory Education Act requires that children begin Primary School the year they turn 7. Enrollment in childcare centers or kindergartens prior to this is not mandated nor universally provided. Childcare center hours are generally 7am to 7pm, which means they are quite well-suited to people whose jobs are during typical office hours but less so for low-income workers who are more likely to be in shift work.
There are two major state-linked operators—one run by the national, state-controlled, workers’ union (NTUC My First Skool), and another linked to the ruling political party (PAP Community Foundation Sparkletots Preschool). Private companies operate other centers. In 2014, three anchor operators—one linked to a religious organization (the YMCA) and two explicitly for-profit commercial operators—were appointed by the regulatory government agency, the Early Childhood Development Agency, with the intention of quickly expanding the number of places. They receive direct public subsidies and are to abide by regulations around fee caps (Ng and Chia, 2014). Despite the presence of state players, the preschool and childcare sector is generally run as for-profit businesses.
The particular mix of public and private players has resulted in wide-ranging fees and public perception that quality of care and education varies with cost—with more expensive centers/schools providing superior services compared to cheaper “public” ones. Even though there are public subsidies, then, this bifurcation of services undermines the sense that childcare is a public, evenly distributed universal good.
In addition to this private–public mix and divide, the deployment of conditional state subsidies further ensures individualization (versus universalization) of formal childcare. Subsidies to childcare centers vary depending on household income and employment status of mothers. Basic subsidies are available for all children who are Singapore citizens, with employed mothers receiving S$300 and non-employed mothers S$150. Additional subsidies are available for children from households earning below S$7,500 (or S$1,875 per capita in households with at least five people, including at least two dependents), but to qualify for additional subsidies, a mother (or where no mother is present, a single father) must work a total of at least 56 hours per month (Early Childhood Development Agency, 2013). For low-income mothers in particular, then, employment is a precondition to formal childcare.
Interestingly, childcare centers are undersubscribed, with more places than children enrolled. In 2014, there were 104,774 places and 82,237 enrollments (Early Childhood Development Agency, 2014). Part of the reason for this may be that the locations are not perfectly matched to people’s needs (more on this later). A more significant reason, however, appears to be the major roles played by migrant domestic workers and grandparents within middle- and upper-middle class households and the norms this has produced regarding the importance of home-based care (Teo, 2010).
The expansion of the formal childcare sector happened very recently. In contrast, for about four decades, since 1978, the state has managed the demand for care and household labor primarily by regulating the influx of female domestic workers from neighboring Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka (Lazar, 2001; Yeoh et al., 1999). This has been to “make it easier for married women to work, look after their households, and bring up more children” (Singapore Goverment, 1988). State support for hiring domestic workers has thus historically been directed at working married mothers and oriented toward women who make sufficient wages to replace their labor in the household.
Migrant women’s labor is relatively low-cost because of economic inequalities between Singapore and worker-sending countries. They are, furthermore, highly exploitable—closely monitored and disciplined within households; with limited rest time and no maximum work hours; with no workers’ rights to negotiate or organize; the rules and regulations governing their entry and stay in Singapore strongly favor employers’ needs over workers’ wellbeing (Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, 2015; Teo and Piper, 2009). The number of migrant domestic workers employed as live-in “maids” (or in contemporary parlance, “helpers”) in individual households has been steadily increasing—from 40,000 in 1988 (Singapore Goverment, 1988) to 237,100 in 2016 (Ministry of Manpower, 2016). About one in five households now employ a migrant domestic worker.
While this mode of resolving care needs is more accessible to higher-income households, it has set norms about the importance of home-based care and the necessity of having paid help for certain chores that might otherwise either be done less frequently (e.g. washing of cars or windows; ironing of clothes), or done very differently (e.g. by men and children who are members of the household rather than primarily by women either paid or unpaid). As mentioned in the introduction, the presence of 24–7 “help” also enables higher-income families to reconcile children’s and parents’ schedules insofar as domestic workers are the ones who bring children to and from various activities; this is an important precondition to the further proliferation of commercial activities targeted at children. As such options for occupying children’s time become more common, children whose parents cannot afford them see further gaps in learning and experiences compared to their counterparts from higher-income families.
Aside from domestic workers, grandparents provide a form of semi-formal care within the home. While generally unpaid, there are relations of reciprocity embedded within. Care of the elderly, even more so than childcare, is individualized and seen as the purview of the family and best provided at home. So, while grandparents are generally not directly paid when they care for their grandchildren, adult children are very much responsible for the wellbeing of their parents, and a main source of retirement income (Ng, 2013). In other words, there are expectations among the middle-class that care will be reversed in the long run when grandparent caregivers age and need support and care.
The care of children by grandparents quite often overlaps with care by domestic workers (Teo et al., 2006). The ethnonational and class otherness of migrant domestic workers is a source of anxiety (Yeoh, 2004). Grandparents are often involved in supervising domestic workers and are roped in to be around because parents do not trust domestic workers alone with children (Teo, 2011). This distrust is expressed openly, frequently with racist/classist overtones, in conversations among Singaporeans as well as on various online forum pages. While increasingly ubiquitous, the “maid” solution is experienced as somehow problematic. Particularly for younger children, then, grandparents—and in particular grandmothers—play major roles as caregivers, either with or without domestic workers. The state signals its support for this source of care by giving a tax relief called the Grandparent Caregiver Relief; it further signals that caregiving is women’s work and that marriage should be the precondition for childbearing by limiting this relief to working married women.
Aside from live-in domestic workers and grandparents, there are not many other options for semi-formal paid care. There are some women providing babysitting services to neighbors or relatives in their own homes, but this appears to be becoming less common and there is no public support for it. Each of what I have described above—class-calibrated fertility interventions; a corporate environment where employers have great influence in setting the terms of employment; and the centrality of individualized, market-dependent childcare solutions—constitutes a societal and policy context in which low-income women’s care needs are overlooked and neglected. I turn next to discussing their experiences in such a work–care regime.
Accessing Services that Fulfill Needs: Hidden Unaffordability and Inaccessibility
Employment is a key criterion to most forms of aid directed at those with low-income. This includes subsidies for childcare centers. This is ostensibly to get women from low-income households into the formal work force. In principle, this could be positive for women in low-income households insofar as they are freed up for wage work and assuming employment improves their individual and household circumstances. Yet, accessing childcare is not always straightforward.
Space and distance pose particular challenges to low-income workers. Childcare within walking distance of homes is critical. Although more places have been created in childcare centers in recent years, they are not always located where low-income families need them. The difference between walking and busing distance is very significant. First, transportation costs are a factor that shape low-income persons’ decisions and wellbeing far more than higher-income persons’. Second, it is challenging to get multiple children to where they need to be in addition to getting to work on time. Finally, wage work and childcare center hours rarely coincide perfectly. This means that there are times of the day when care gaps emerge. When childcare centers are within walking distance, parents can arrange for neighbors or their older children to pick up and care for younger siblings for short periods of time.
While subsidies exist both for childcare centers and kindergartens, there are usually still deposits and other costs for items like uniforms. This fits with the state’s general mode of creating co-payments for the ostensible reason of maintaining self-reliance and individual responsibility. Some respondents’ experiences indicate that there are ways of getting around these costs and indeed, officially, there are Start-up Grants. However, these are processed on case-by-case bases. Consequently, unless an applicant knows to ask or an administrator processing applications offers, people may not know about the various forms of aid they are eligible for. Negative experiences such as producing multiple documents and intrusive personal questions also put many off actively seeking assistance.
The use of childcare centers, then, is not as straightforward as one would expect, and there are reasons for their inaccessibility that are not obvious from looking at policy provisions. Even if children are in full-time childcare, care gaps persist. Here, we have to look at the sort of jobs available to people from low-income households.
Work and Lack of Mastery Over Time
Work–life balance is elusive for women (and men) in part because wage workers lack bargaining power and face a global economy in which their labor is replaceable (Standing, 2011). Clawson and Gerstel (2014) show that the confluence of gender and class shape the capacity to manage this unpredictability; women in low-income households face especially difficult conditions when it comes to managing wage work and familial responsibilities.
Most of the people I met work in poor-quality jobs that are physically strenuous that afford them limited bargaining power. Often, women fill positions as cleaners (i.e. janitors), in food service (often in school canteens), as “schoolbus aunties” (assisting in taking care of children as they board and alight from schoolbuses), and as supermarket cashiers. Whether employed full-time or part-time; they have little control over hours. If people are asked to do “OT” (overtime), they accept or risk being fired. These types of jobs can rarely be performed at home. There is also more night-shift work among the lower-income than the higher-income earners; work hours, then, often do not coincide perfectly with childcare center hours.
The lack of control over time and the general poor quality of work makes it hard to maintain stable employment. These conditions affect both men and women, but are particularly problematic for women insofar as they bear heavier responsibility for housework and children. The many small emergencies that arise when one has dependents disrupt their employment.
The state’s requirement that mothers work in order to qualify for childcare center subsidies is therefore not easy to fulfill. The structure of work is not designed to accommodate the rhythms, calendars, and demands of family life. This puts workers with unpaid care responsibilities at a disadvantage in the labor market. For those who can pay for care, some of these tensions are resolved; for low-income persons, however, reconciliation between wage work and care labor is sometimes impossible. To fully appreciate this, we also have to take seriously the labor that goes into maintaining households and caring for children.
Housework is Work, Care Labor is Work
Given needs for mothers to do housework, run errands, and watch over their children, wage work is hard to maintain. Where mothers are employed, the stress of still having to do all this labor is intense. Families have to bear the cost of strained relationships; women recounted stories of conflicts with husbands and children when they are employed and not around to cook, clean, do laundry, supervise, and counsel. They speak of children getting into trouble—not going to school and lying about it, staying out in the neighborhood until late into the night, and getting into other kinds of trouble like stealing or drugs. Many families I met have experienced some of these problems; where they can, they thus make the “choice” to rely on one wage earner, even though this means they cannot fully pay their debts, that the breadwinner feels intense stress, and the family lives in endemic material discomfort.
To date, public policy has not adequately addressed these particular challenges and needs. While low education and low wages are now matters of public debate and embedded in policy reform, little attention has been paid to how women with household and caregiving responsibilities have to meet complex demands before they can seek the many training programs that are currently offered (Teo, 2015b). Insufficient attention has been paid to the conditions of low-wage work; adequate wages, some degree of flexibility, dignity and respect, are important preconditions that have not been seriously considered. While the number of state-supported childcare centers has grown, the combination of complaints about insufficient space with reports that there are in fact more spaces than children suggests that consideration has not been adequately given to where these centers need to be located and how hidden costs and other conditions may prevent everyone from accessing them.
Public policy has been biased toward solutions that depend too heavily on private resources. In facilitating employment of migrant domestic workers as solutions to balancing wage work and care responsibilities, the intense labor required to maintain households and raise children has been devalued and made invisible. The insistence on low-income mothers’ employment as a precondition to childcare subsidies is premised on the idea that this is crucial to “self-reliance.” In this schema, the work that low-income mothers do as caregivers and as housekeepers—and therefore the unpaid labor of social reproduction (Kofman, 2012) they do on an everyday basis—has no value and goes largely unacknowledged. It follows that public policy has not seriously addressed questions about who is to do the work, and what conditions have to be altered, in order for all women to be able to make real choices about wage work.
Class Inequalities Must be Higher Priority
The two bodies of research I discuss earlier—one focusing on work–care regimes and the other on the intensification of migrant care work—lend themselves well to comparative imaginations. On both sets of issues, scholars have used typologies to place countries into ideal typical categories or on general continua.
Gornick and Meyers (2006), for example, argue that Esping-Andersen’s 1990 typology of welfare regimes, though not particularly sensitive to gender, turns out to be appropriate for describing work/care regimes and how gender-egalitarian they are. In their 10-country study of parental leave policies, vacation time, work hour regulations, and subsidies for childcare services, Gornick and Meyers place countries on a continuum from Social Democratic, to Conservative, to Liberal—with the first having the highest levels of support for caregiving, the most gender egalitarian designs, as well as the best outcomes for children. The continuum points to places like Sweden and Denmark as “best practice” places when it comes to attaining gender equality and child wellbeing, while the US and UK are the worst.
On the issue of migrant care labor, Michel and Peng (2012) have also constructed a typology—with Japan and South Korea on one side and Canada and the US on the other—which shows that how nations think about themselves ethnoracially affects their enthusiasm or lack thereof for migrants as paid care workers. In Japan and South Korea, a suspicion of foreigners has led to highly coordinated programs which manage limited immigration of women who do care work (as workers or wives). The US and Canada, while appearing to be more open to immigration, has historically had strong differentiation along ethnoracial–class lines. Though far larger in immigrant numbers, there has been a paradoxical reluctance to openly embrace migration as a strategy for fulfilling care needs; particularly in the US, this has resulted in a large number of undocumented migrants in caregiving jobs.
Ideal types allow us to specify the qualities and imagine the trajectories of specific cases. Applying Gornick and Meyer’s framework, the Singapore case appears to be somewhere between the Liberal and Conservative type, with attendant implications of moderate state support for caregiving and gender egalitarianism. In fact, looking at policy changes in the past few years, there seems to be slight movement from the Liberal type toward the Conservative type insofar as there is increased coordinated state support for childcare and parental leave.
Imagining the Singapore case through Michel and Peng’s lenses, on the other hand, leads us to view the Singapore case as having the best of both worlds—an affinity to immigration and multiculturalism coupled with a strong mandate for state management of ethnoracial relations and inequalities.
Combining the two typologies, the Singapore case appears to be pursuing expansions in public support for care, with overt and aggressive use of migrant workers to fulfill the actual roles of caregivers. In comparative perspective, this does not look like a bad prognosis. Yet, when we view the case through two typologies simultaneously new questions become salient. The first typology embeds within it a position for feminists to push toward the Social Democratic model. It takes a normative position that this will lead to greater wellbeing for all members of society. Introducing the second typology into view reminds us that real solutions to care are unlikely to reside within the boundaries of a country and that the expansion of care support will not likely, given the reality of an ever-expanding global care chain, result in widespread equality across the chain. In other words, if a case can be said to have good prognosis, for whom is it good?
As I have shown in this article, class matters. Low-income families in a context where, despite social expansion, regimes retain important individualistic, market-oriented principles; and where migrant care workers take on care and household labor, continue to have their needs obscured, ignored, overlooked. Work and care under these circumstances entail hardship. Policy-makers and scholars alike have also generally ignored the fact that some of the care labor performed in higher-income families—shuttling children around for various extracurricular activities, for example—also compounds inequalities among children.
Heidi Gottfried has called for utilizing a forensic approach to reveal “different directions of change across domains and policy fields” affecting complex patterns of inequality (Gottfried, 2017). She argues that only by forensically identifying modalities of regulation across policy domains and by interrogating the tensions between and gaps within regulations can we account for the full array of labor market advantages and disadvantages experienced by different groups of men and women. Regulations work through modalities by the topics written into and left out of the phrasing and framing of provisions in regulation that reflect and affect power relationships. Which groups are recognized, what issues are included, and how they are included or excluded from coverage, reflect and affect power resources within and across workplaces, between work and family, and in family life.
As feminist scholars and activists challenge existing state policies, societal norms, and corporate practices, we must continually insert into conversation the question of class variations and inequalities. For too many of us and for too long, this has not been a high priority. We must pay more attention to the ways in which public policy addresses women’s needs in uneven ways; sustained critique of work–care–migration regimes that neglect the actual labor that happens in homes; deeper thinking about the ways in which labor within the home can be supported; more integration of discussion of low wages and work conditions when workplace policies are addressed; and an expanded view in thinking about the effects of paid domestic work on public policy and the wellbeing of various groups in society and along the global care chain.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Heidi Gottfried, Jennifer Chun, and Ito Peng, for bringing together the authors in this special issue, and for valuable feedback on this paper. Thanks also to participants of the 2016 workshop on “The Global Migration in Gendered Care Work” in Vienna for useful questions and suggestions.
Funding
This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education [grant number RG74/12].
