Critical Sociology

This article presents a broad overview of the emerging field of scholarship on gender, migration and care work. The first section provides a rationale for linking the embodied intimate labor of sex workers and surrogate mothers to more traditional caregiving among nannies, nurses and eldercare aids. Through an intersectional optic on power and domination in care workers’ everyday lives, we highlight the ways in which love’s labor is lost and devalued in the sphere of the home as workplace, the family and community as employer, the state as labor recruiter, and the labor market as a site of ethnic boundaries and exclusions. Distinguishing different types of care and its institutional and geographic location matters in explaining current care in transition. Care work, in many domains, has become appropriated by markets. We consider how political, institutional, and cultural factors have shaped, and are reshaping, the ideas and norms of care in the context of transnational care worker migration. Too often, studies of gendered care migration fail to account for the differential impacts of state migration and care policies for women across class and social status within single country contexts. Care workers are beginning to challenge new forms of commodified care work. The final section explores how grassroots efforts to organize and advocate for the rights of domestic workers have evolved in countries in both the Global North and South.

This article examines how the intersectional dynamics of gender, migration, and labor shape the trajectories of immigrant women into home-based elder care and how unions and community organizations mediate its conditions. Our analysis, which uses interviews with In-Home Supportive Services workers in California’s Oakland Chinatown, shows that the growth of publicly-subsidized homecare jobs has created an occupational opportunity for workers who face restrictive labor markets due to declining factory jobs and discriminatory hiring. Workers acknowledge the daily stress of working in low-paid, precarious jobs characterized by high levels of informality and coercive gender and racial-ethnic dynamics but the quasi-public nature of these jobs complicates a facile depiction of it as domestic servitude. Ethnic community organizations and labor unions open up institutional pathways to empowering forms of collective voice. Our findings contribute to the growing effort to understand how the social organization of care work both draws upon and exacerbates existing inequalities.

Unlike other Asian host countries, Japan has been hesitant to open up the employment of migrant domestic helpers or caregivers until very recently. Focusing on the recruitment of migrant nurses and certified care workers through Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), this article examines how the host society and migrant workers negotiate care culture and ethnic differences in the production of “ideal migrant caregivers.” The EPA program associates professionalism with intimate knowledge about Japanese culture, and it emphasizes the capacity to perform bridgework and enhance cultural intimacy for Japanese elders. While migrant care workers are expected to assimilate culturally, the Japanese workplace offers them little cultural intimacy but an eroded sense of value and skills. In response, they highlight their “warm” disposition and “authentic” feelings as a superior alternative to the “cold” professionalism among Japanese coworkers, but such essentialist rhetoric of ethnic differences downgrades their professional abilities to a natural endowment.

This article examines how state eldercare provision influences care workers’ subjectivities and claims for dignity and self-worth. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted in South Korea, I argue that migrant and native-born care workers construct different ideals around what is “good” versus “bad” care through the marking of ethnic and professional boundaries. South Korean women employed as state-certified care workers emphasize the expertise and skill they provide as professional caregivers, and as such, demand expanded rights and protections from the state. In contrast, Korean-Chinese migrant women, who share a similar ethnic background but migrated from China to South Korea, emphasize their value as fictive-kin who can provide wholehearted care as informal workers. These divergent strategies not only result in the use of ethnicity to mark clear boundaries between the care work provided by each group, but they also (re)produce ethnically-segmented, two-tiered labour markets institutionalized by eldercare policies.

Over the last two decades many studies have focused on female migrants’ transnational care practices, while those of stay-behind fathers have hardly been investigated. This chapter deals with masculinity, childcare and fatherhood of stay-behind male partners of female migrants from former socialist countries in Europe. A discussion of the particularities of gender regimes in socialist and postsocialist Europe will be followed by a presentation of three case studies on fatherhood and lone parenting. The article concludes with a discussion of “mothering fathers’” predicaments in a postsocialist situation.

Contemporary anti-trafficking narratives exemplify the centrality of family unaccountability as one of the root causes of sex trafficking. Suggesting that human trafficking can be explained by bad family values, or cultural norms that consider girl children to be disposable, facilitates the heroic, paternalist, and “caring” interventions that have now been well-documented by activists and scholars of trafficking. Focusing on the family, these references also expose two conflicting modes of care work that are implicated in contemporary anti-trafficking activism. Building on an extensive scholarship on care work, which has rarely been read alongside critical human trafficking scholarship, this article asks how human trafficking rescue programs expose disparate types of care work deeply connected to sexual commerce. Extending Rhacel Parreñas’ typology of moral and material care work of Filipina migrant domestic workers, this article argues that the shifting contexts of gendered care work under conditions of global migration, development, and humanitarianism, require an acknowledgment of how the moral care work involved in global “anti-trafficking” rescue performed mainly by first world women operates in opposition to the material care work of supporting families and households performed by migrant sex workers who are being rescued. As an additional articulation of material care work, global sex worker activists have also expressed how care work is a vital component of the labor relations of sex work itself—as a way to call for its recognition as a form of labor.

In the decade following legalization of commercial surrogacy in 2002, India became the largest provider of surrogacy services. Then, in December 2015 commercial surrogacy was banned. In this article I show that commercial surrogacy was no panacea for working-class women, but the ban can potentially be far worse because the Indian state now allows only altruistic surrogacy between citizen couples and their women kinfolk who will provide gestation services for no monetary compensation. By positing altruistic surrogacy as a superior alternative, the Indian state has effectively deregulated surrogacy, potentially allowing deeper exploitation of women. I conclude that if the state wants to halt exploitation of working-class women, which is the expressed reason for banning commercial surrogacy, then policies need to be directed at strengthening labor laws to protect women as productive individuals, rather than wives or mothers.

New reproductive technologies such as egg donation and in-vitro fertilization have opened a global surrogacy market; surrogacy is now one of many options to start a family. However, surrogacy and other intimate acts are not typically categorized as work. The designation of surrogacy arrangements as either “commercial” or “altruistic” has hinged on the surrogate’s motivations, financial hardship, and social locale. These differences, in turn, influence the classification of surrogacy as either work or labor of love. Even when surrogacy is recognized as work – a rare event – altruistic aspects are highlighted while the laboring nature of the activities are obscured. This article argues that surrogates perform reproductive labor; more precisely, their invisible bodily care work, regardless of their locale, motivations, relationship with the intended parent(s), and irrespective of whether they receive payment. Conceptualizing surrogacy as bodily care work has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, extending our understanding of what counts as labor matters. Practically, the recognition of surrogacy as work would extend already existing labor regulations to surrogates as well as allow for the formulation of regulations specific to surrogacy.

This article examines how culture, institution, and social policies interact to shape national approaches to care and the use of migrant care workers. I compare Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to show variations in approaches to care and migration despite their cultural similarities. Through a conceptual framework that intersects culture, institution and policy I identify a spectrum of approaches that are evident across East Asia, ranging from highly regulated institutional to very liberal market oriented. The analysis shows that cultural, institutional and socio-economic factors are continuously interacting with each other to shape national understandings of care and the use of foreign care workers, and that different policies interact with each other referentially as they develop and affect social and cultural norms through policy feedback.

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.

This article investigates how local political context—including civil society and political parties—influences the development of migrant care worker policies in Taiwan. This is particularly important in a national context where the government has actively utilized migrant care worker policies to solve the crisis in the social welfare sector. This article draws upon documentary analysis of policy debates on the proposed implementation of Long-Term Care Insurance and in-depth interviews with government officials, public service providers and non-governmental organizations to explore how the political alliances of political parties, social organizations, and interest groups affect policy outcomes. While current research focuses on the relationship between social welfare policies and the employment of migrant care workers, this article highlights the local political context and explores how political alliances have influenced the development of migrant care worker policies. This article argues that institutional path dependency and the strong policy alliance between the progressive party and social welfare organizations have stymied changes in migrant care worker policies and prevented Taiwan from further socializing the eldercare sector.

Demographic aging can alter physical and social infrastructures in cities, and reshape the broader dynamic processes that theories of urbanization seek to describe and analyze. We argue that both urban and eldercare policy often render paid reproductive labor and the workers who do it invisible. They are invisiblized in both policy and urban space. A neoliberal bias in urban policies, reconstructed in the rhetoric of global cities/creative cities, denies care needs. Normative approaches exacerbate this issue, as in gendered ideologies of home, care and familial responsibility. These approaches too often detach the delicate social problem of eldercare in itself from its feasibility and desirability as a site for paid labor. In that separation, the paid workforce typically disappears from the spotlight. We use comparative case studies and the concept of territorialization to refocus on the urban context of paid eldercare work in two “aspiring” global cities, Shanghai and Vancouver.

An analysis of the international division of reproductive labor is incomplete without acknowledging the proliferation of state regulations in migrant-receiving countries, which result in restricting workers’ ability to maintain their own families and to exercise their full range of labor rights. An overview of trends in nations fueling the need for domestic workers and caregivers includes the social conditions for migrants increasingly fill this niche. The transnational circuits of care migration are constructed by the commercial and legal processes used to recruit and transport domestic workers. These are highlighted by analyzing the policies in the USA and United Arab Emirates to demonstrate the restrictions countries place on migrants seeking employment and the limited labor protections offered migrant domestic workers. Two otherwise different countries have adopted similar entry requirements tying migrant domestic workers to employer sponsored jobs in their homes. However, the USA offers fewer visa options to domestic workers and recruitment systems differ. Vulnerabilities faced by migrant domestics receiving visas are linked to these immigration policies.

This article looks at the gradual development of a ‘global governance of paid domestic work’ by assessing the impact of the ILO Convention n. 189 on campaigns for domestic workers’ rights in different countries. Here I compare the case of Ecuador and India as two contrasting examples of the ways in which state and non-state organizations have positioned themselves around the issue, revealing how the context-dependent character of domestic workers’ rights can ultimately condition the mobilisation of different actors in each context. On the basis of the theory of ‘strategic fields of action’, I also define the promulgation of C189 as an ‘exogenous change’ that has differing impacts on the relevant social actors in two countries. As I will show, these national differences give shape to a very different modality in campaigns for domestic workers’ rights, resulting in different roles, purposes and scope of action for key social actors.

This article examines how paid domestic workers in India fight to reproduce themselves by attaining recognition for their employment relationship and struggling to advance their labor rights. We find a striking convergence toward female-dominated unions that articulate the recipient of domestic services as “employers,” their employment relationship as an exploitative one in terms of time and dignity, and the household as a place of work and profit. To ensure a focus on women members and leaders, domestic workers’ have developed different union types including politically-affiliated and independent unions, as well as unions affiliated to NGOs, faith-based institutions, and cooperatives. Domestic workers’ direct, one-to-one employment relationship has led organizations to empower workers to confront employers’ daily control of workers’ associations (even outside the workplace), citizenship rights, worth, and dignity. However, because domestic workers’ employment relationship is still not recognized by Indian law, domestic workers avoid confronting employers and instead target the state when demanding material concessions to de-commodify their labor. These findings offer important insights into the limits and potential of domestic workers’ struggles.