American Behavioral Scientist

The movement of migrant domestic workers constitutes an important aspect of migration flows in Asia. We identify and outline three major research gaps in this area: (1) their unique working environment and the consequences of working under these conditions, (2) formal and informal sources of support, and (3) policies implemented by local government in response to the working environment of migrant domestic workers. We discuss how the articles in this special issue address these major gaps in migration research.

This article discusses an innovative method of collecting survey data on a special population, migrant live-in domestic workers, for which it is difficult to define an appropriate sampling framework. These migrant workers, however, have regular gatherings in public spaces within a certain period of time during the weekends. In this article, we present the method of collecting data on this group of domestic workers and the procedures for implementing the method. We also discuss its limitations, the difficulties encountered, as well as possible directions for improving the method in the future.

Previous studies on workplace aggression and violence have limited their scope to the conventional formal workplace environment. Few have explored the possibility that an increasing number of people, especially females, who work in more informal settings may also face work-related aggression. Our research on a random sample of 2,017 migrant domestic female workers from the Philippines and Indonesia who work in Hong Kong focuses on a nonconventional workplace, the employer’s home, and examines how conditions specific to the home-based working environment are related to workers’ experiences of abuse. Findings suggest that both the working conditions (e.g., types of people served) and the workplace environment (e.g., the size of the home) are related to experiences of abusive behavior performed by employers in the domestic work setting. The findings extend our understanding of the concept of workplace and highlight new factors contributing to aggression and violence against workers when boundaries between work and home are blurred.

This article presents a portrayal of Filipino and Indonesian female domestic workers’ life courses in migration, using the life history calendar data from the 2017 survey of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Applying sequence analysis, we first analyzed migration trajectory features such as individual migration trajectories, duration spent in each state, and longitudinal diversity of state distributions. We found that Indonesian domestic workers, compared with their Filipino counterparts, are more diverse in their migration histories, indicating involvements in serial migration. We also conducted a cluster analysis of the domestic workers’ migratory trajectories. The analysis yielded three meaningful clusters/types of migrant workers—those moved late in life, those who participated in serial migration, and those migrated directly from their home country to Hong Kong. Finally, we investigated the effect of a complex migration history on job satisfaction and the characteristics of membership in the three ideal-typical migration types among the domestic workers older than 39 years.

Migrant domestic workers provide essential services to the families they live with, but they are not considered a part of the family. As a group, they are not well-integrated into the society and often suffer from social isolation. In this article, we explore the potential health buffering effects of their personal network, in terms of family and friendship ties in both the local community and their home country. Existing literature provides inconsistent evidence on who and what matters more, with regard to the nature, strength, and geographic locations of individual personal networks. Using data from the Survey of Migrant domestic Workers in Hong Kong (2017), we find that family ties are extremely important. The presence of family members in Hong Kong as well as daily contact with family, regardless of location, are associated with better self-reported health. Only daily contact with friends in Hong Kong, not with friends in other countries, promotes better health. We also find evidence that the protective effects of family and friends networks depend on each other. Those foreign domestic workers with families in Hong Kong but also maintain daily contact with friends have the best self-reported health among all.

Informal social support from family and friends has often been highlighted as the key form of support for migrants under different forms of transnational movement, particularly for female migrants. Drawing on the findings from qualitative and quantitative studies on Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, this article applies the intersectionality framework to explore how migrant domestic workers approach different forms of support systems based on their multiple identities of gender, ethnicity, and religion. A clear distinction on help-seeking behavior is drawn between approaching formal and informal support systems with migrant domestic workers directly approaching formal support when the problem is employment related but turning to informal support when having emotional needs. Such distinction is found to be related to migrant domestic workers’ perceptions toward gender role and religious practices under transnational movements.

There has been a rising trend of labor migration globally. Given their alien status within the legal framework of the host countries, migrant domestic workers (MDWs) are especially vulnerable to poor employment conditions that may affect their health status, yet there is still a lack of quantitative evidence in this population hitherto. Using randomly sampled data from a cross-sectional survey of 2,017 live-in female MDWs in Hong Kong, a setting with a high concentration of MDWs, this study examined the association of employment conditions with physical and mental health among the MDWs. We observed poorer physical and mental health status among the MDWs when compared with the general population in Hong Kong. Our findings suggest that employment conditions, including household size, working on the rest day, and housing type, and age were associated with physical health, while employment conditions, including not ever receiving wages on time, frequency of financial remittances, paying the employment agency, having a private room, fulfillment of work-related needs, physical abuse, and discrimination, and sociodemographic characteristics, including age and duration of migration, were associated with mental health. Social support in general did not confound these associations, but religious activities and daily contact with friends were also associated with mental health. Our findings have important implications in designing interventions and policies to improve the physical and mental well-being of this vulnerable migrant population.

The accumulation of human and social capital plays a significant role in influencing migrants’ earnings and economic integration in the host society. Although the effects of foreign domestic workers’ bargaining power on their labor market outcome is constrained due to their unique migrant status, domestic workers may still strive to make use of various resources to secure “ideal” jobs as much as possible. Using a randomly selected unique data set collected in Hong Kong in 2017, this study examines whether foreign domestic workers’ human and social capitals are associated with their salary scale, working conditions, and work rights protection. We use education, previously held jobs, migration duration, and language proficiency to measure human capital, and friendship networks and church attendance to indicate social capital. We found that previously having middle-level job experience can reduce the likelihood of experiencing underpay and increase the likelihood of having overpay, taking the legal minimum salary as a reference. English language proficiency could also give them some leverage to access a better pay scale. Previous human capital accumulation is associated with having a private room in the employer’s home. It is also associated with better protection of work rights such as being less likely to experience a “no pay” month. For social capital, frequent participation in Sunday gathering with friends is mainly associated with rights protection. These findings indicate that although foreign domestic workers may be constrained in using their capital accumulation to improve their market value substantially, the capital accumulation can still give some leverage for them to bargain for a slightly improved salary, better working conditions, and protection of their rights.

Although migrant women from neighboring Southeast Asian countries fill crucial care gaps in Singapore households as live-in domestic workers, their social protection remains uneven, uncertain, and indeterminate. Framed as unskilled work shunned by citizens and characterized by isolation in the privatized sphere of the home, domestic work has invariably become low-status, low-visibility, and low-pay work performed by foreign women engaged on private contracts. The access of migrant domestic workers in Singapore to social protection has thus triggered concern among international organizations, governments, and civil society. Using data derived from a survey of Indonesian domestic workers, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival research, this article adopts a transnational social protection research agenda by mapping how institutionalized practices that aim to reduce the vulnerabilities of migrant domestic workers in Singapore have shifted in the past decade. We begin by addressing the circumscribed impact of international conventions and origin government policies. Following our premise that the social support and protection of migrant domestic workers still depend largely on the host society, we focus on two interrelated developments in Singapore. First, we examine the reach of immigration, labor, and criminal law in recent “maid abuse” cases to reveal how criminal law in particular has broadened to account for the specific vulnerability of domestic workers and, relatedly, the culpability of errant employers. Second, we consider how civil society’s campaign for a “mandatory” rest day offers insight into both the success and limitations of developing transnational advocacy for domestic workers in Singapore.

This article summarizes key findings from our research on Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates to reflect on their implications for policy. To illustrate the patterns we have observed, the article traces the migration biographies of two women, one from West Java and one from the Philippines, and it then asks what their experiences reveal about the policy landscape. We find, in concert with a large body of literature on social policy for migrants, that in many cases the policies that currently exist—and the gaps in these policies—are themselves central to producing the problems that migrant domestic workers face. Thus, we focus not on what states or international organizations can do in terms of policy improvements per se, but more generally on how the policy context is part and parcel of the broader social world that affects migrant workers’ welfare over the course of their migration biographies.