Abstract
For a largely invisible workforce, domestic workers wield serious economic clout. Collectively, they account for 4% of total global employment and nearly 8% of total female employment. There are 1.5 million domestic workers in Saudi Arabia alone, and recruitment agencies fly in 40,000 women a month to keep up with demand. (Guardian, 26 October 2015)
As the editors of this impressive collection of essays wryly note, these figures effectively shatter the myth that technology heralded the imminent demise of domestic work. Today, as the 14 chapters in this book demonstrate, domestic workers move between countries of the Global South, as much as to destinations in the Global North. No matter where the base and destination of particular care chains happen to be, all the women concerned share in the experience of disruption and upheaval, and the associated trials of caring for others from different cultures as well as attempting to care for those left behind.
Crucially, it is argued that the growth of care chains and associated migration has been fuelled by growing inequality within and between countries, and, further, that the international division of labour has reproduced a hierarchical care chain based on gender, nationality, class, ethnicity and race. Looking at the US, Susannah Rosenbaum suggests that the American Dream is only sustainable through the labour of migrant care workers, supporting those on the inside – middle class, American-born men and women. Although there are cases drawn from the US and Canada, the book does not focus entirely on North America. Chapters examine themes and cases in Italy, Israel, South Africa, the Lebanon and Egypt among others.
A further driver of care chain expansion is the role of the state. This is firstly through the adoption of neoliberal social policies leading to a drastic reduction in the public provision of care, so that those who can afford it resort to private provision. However, the means used by migrant women to obtain child care work is largely determined by the receiving countries’ immigration policies and labour regulations (or lack of them). Lack of regulation leaves women open to various forms of exploitation, and the use of the sponsor processes (e.g. in Middle East and Gulf countries) leads to work that resembles modern forms of slavery. Some countries (e.g. the Philippines and Sri Lanka) have actively organized women to be sent abroad to act as care workers. Resulting remittances are a vital form of domestic survival, underpinning the home country economy. Visa and immigration restrictions often also force women to leave children and family at home. States therefore rely on and collude in the operation of these hyper-exploitative chains.
The book has four sections, comprising 14 chapters. In the first, contemporary theorizing about domestic work and migration is examined, and in particular how social conceptions of domestic work and gender are embedded in migration policies. Gardiner, Barber and Bryan argue that care migration has to be seen as a strategy to ‘redress the drawbacks of unfettered accumulation under neoliberal capitalism and its antecedents’ (p. 30). They conclude that migrant women are forced to carry the social reproductive tasks of two households – a transnational double duty. Furthermore, this serves to elucidate gender hierarchy while simultaneously obscuring it.
Part II examines the impact of the increasingly important role of married women domestic workers. Romero argues that the children of parents employed in domestic service experience a special stigma and form of exploitation, in that they see the fortunate circumstances of the children of privilege, but experience directly the exchange of inequity. Romero concludes that:
By hiring private household workers and nannies as substitute mothers under inferior working conditions, employers are purchasing services crucial to the reproduction of families and to the social reproduction of privilege. (p. 127)
Part III is concerned with the emotional labour and personal intimacy associated with domestic work. Deidre Meintel and colleagues identify a two-tier home health care labour market in Quebec wherein immigrant women of colour are less likely than non-immigrant women or male immigrants to find home care jobs in the public sector. These jobs are characterized by better working conditions than those in private agencies. Crucially, most workers say that they love their work and have pride in giving service. Meintel and colleagues once again raise the question of whether this is exploited by employers and thus raises an obstacle preventing these workers from obtaining a more just recognition for their work.
This brings us to the question of the regulation of the labour of migrant care workers, dealt with in Part IV. Cynthia Cranford, in an upbeat chapter examining organizing in Personal Support Services in Los Angeles, proposes a three-pronged organization of resistance based on labour market unionism, social movement unionism and community unionism. However, the rest of this section is probably the most disappointing part of this otherwise impressive collection. However, the disappointment is based only on the fact that the isolated, fragmented and often brutalized nature of domestic care work means that it is often immune to regulation and problematic for NGOs, community groups and trade unions.
In Britain at the end of the 19th century, domestic service was the largest employer of women. At the beginning of the 21st century, one of the largest employers of women globally is domestic service (slavery). Plus ça change – invisible rather than immaterial labour.