scholarly journals Making Migrants’ Input Invisible: Intersections of Privilege and Otherness From a Multilevel Perspective

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Palenga‐Möllenbeck
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Complex Interaction ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Multilevel Perspective ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Everyday Discrimination

For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.

Intimate Counter‐Spaces of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon1

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 780-808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amrita Pande
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Paradoxical Effects ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
State Restrictions ◽  
Female Migrant ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

This article examines new nodes of migrants' desire to disrupt the heteronormative focus on married mothers in the literature on migration and gender and the reification of normative notions of both gender and sexuality. It demonstrates that in the presence of intense raced and gendered surveillance of both private and public spaces in Lebanon, migrant domestic workers (MDWs) use public “counter‐spaces” to forge intimate and sexual ties. It offers the frame of intimate counter‐spaces to understand the wider politics of resistance mobilized by MDWs in their everyday lives. Intimate counter‐spaces complicate debates around public/private, sacred/sexual, and confront state restrictions on migrant workers' sexuality. Despite their subversive power, such spaces can also reinforce the hypersexualization of the female migrant and highlight the paradoxical effects of everyday subversive practices used by migrant workers, not just in Middle East and Asia, but also across the world.

scholarly journals Gender, transnational female migration and domestic work in Greece

Collectivus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodoros Fouskas ◽  
Paraskevi Gikopoulou ◽  
Elisavet Ioannidi ◽  
George Koulierakis
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Healthcare Services ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Community Associations ◽  
Female Migrants ◽  
And Gender

In global labour markets, migrant workers are mainly found in precarious, low-status/low-wage occupations in undeclared work and the underground/informal sector of the economy which demands a low paid, uninsured, mobile, temporary and flexible workforce. This article argues that migrant women are mostly employed as domestic workers in various countries that demand precarious, low-status/low-wage service workers and personal services. Feminist scholarship on migration underlines, that social constructions of gender and racial stereotypes drive men and women into specific roles and therefore dictate their experiences. Social constructions of gender cannot be considered separate from social constructions of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; female migrants are disassociated from family relationships, community associations, solidarity networks, and become susceptible to discrimination based on race and ethnicity, class and gender in the reception countries. This article provides an intersectional review of research on domestic work, healthcare and community networks in Greece (1990-2018). Intersectionality produces assumptions set in women’s race and ethnicity, projecting unequal labour rights among sexes in Greece. Gender, race and ethnicity subject women to obedience, susceptibility and exploitation, confining them to domestic work, and low-paid jobs without social rights. Last but not least, this article suggests that ethnic background and unstable legal residence status works as a mechanism of control and suppression, which in turn force female migrants to accept low wages, refrain from demanding healthcare services and from seeking support from migrant community associations. Employers confiscate their documents, monitor them and threaten to report them to the authorities, thus institutionalising exploitation, leading to forceful application of discipline, consent, subordination, obedience and dependency of domestic workers.

scholarly journals Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raffaella Sarti
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
Long Time ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractHistorical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) women's and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) “revival” of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.

Relation between educational qualifications and occupations/incomes in a globalised world: focusing on Nepalese youth

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Naruho Ezaki
Keyword(s):  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Gender Disparity ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
School Records

PurposeGlobalisation drives many people to seek overseas employment. However, research on the relation between educational attainment and occupations/incomes mostly focuses on domestic workers while excluding overseas migrant workers. Therefore, the present study includes overseas migrant labourers and aims to examine the relation between educational attainment and occupations/incomes and gender disparity within this relation in Nepal.Design/methodology/approachThis study conducted interview surveys with teachers and home-visit surveys with the subjects and their families based on the school records to collect information such as educational attainment, current occupation, monthly income, etc. The study compared occupations and incomes by educational attainment and gender and analysed the trend. Gender disparity in average monthly incomes was also analysed.FindingsThe results of this study registered almost no difference in the proportions of mental labour and high incomes for both males and females at the primary to secondary education echelons. Surprisingly, the average monthly incomes of females were around 60% or less than the remunerations offered to male workers with equivalent educational qualifications. This disparity does not narrow even at the higher educational classifications. Moreover, the disparity is widening even more by overseas migrant labour.Originality/valueSince this study gathered extensive data on individual youth and did not rely on secondary data, it was possible to perform an in-depth analysis and accurately portray the real situation faced by Nepalese youth. Moreover, by including overseas migrant labourers, the study could examine the relation between educational attainment and occupations/incomes not only in the domestic market but also in the global market.

Frondeuses and Feminists in the Work of Arvède Barine (1840–1908)

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-112
Author(s):  
Whitney Walton
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
National Library ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
And Gender

This article examines Arvède Barine’s extensive and popular published output from the 1880s to 1908, along with an extraordinary cache of letters addressed to Barine and held in the Manuscript Department of the National Library of France. It asserts that in the process of criticizing contemporary feminist activists and celebrating the achievements of women, especially French women, in history, she constructed the historical and cultural distinctiveness of French women as an ideal blend of femininity, accomplishment, and independence. This notion of the French singularity, indeed the superiority of French women, resolved the contradiction between her condemnation of feminism as a transformation of gender relations and her support for causes and reforms that enabled women to lead intellectually and emotionally fulfilling lives. Barine’s work offers another example of the varied ways that women in Third Republic France engaged with public debates about women and gender.

Triangulations of “Motherly Love”: Negotiated Intimacies among Migrant Domestic Workers, Mothers, and Children

2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2199385
Author(s):  
Iris Hoiting
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mothers And Children ◽  
Care Relationships ◽  
Relational Contexts ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

Persistent economic inequality between men and women, combined with differences in gender expectations and growing inequalities among women globally, has resulted in families “outsourcing” childcare by employing migrant domestic workers (MDWs). While studies have addressed the intimacy and complexity of “mothering” in such contexts, the agentic position of child-recipients of such care have seldom been explored. This article increases our understanding of care-relationships by examining their triangularity among children, MDWs, and mothers in Hong Kong. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people who grew up with MDWs, alongside interviews with MDWs themselves, this article describes processes through which care work transforms into what Lynch describes as “love labor” in these relational contexts. In these contexts, commodified care from MDWs can develop, through a process of mutual trilateral negotiations, into intimate love-laboring relationships that, in turn, reflect larger dynamics of familial transformation that are endemic to “global cities.”

scholarly journals THE ENDURING VULNERABILITY OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN EUROPE

2013 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clíodhna Murphy
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Employment Law ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Labour Standards ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Migration Law ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

AbstractWhile the rights of domestic workers are expanding in international law, including through the adoption of the ILO Domestic Workers Convention in 2011, migrant domestic workers remain particularly vulnerable to employment-related abuse and exploitation. This article explores the intersection of the employment law and migration law regimes applicable to migrant domestic workers in the United Kingdom, France and Ireland. The article suggests that the precarious immigration status of many migrant domestic workers renders employment protections, such as they exist in each jurisdiction, largely illusory in practice for this group of workers. The labour standards contained in the Domestic Workers Convention, together with the recommendations of the UN Committee on Migrant Workers on the features of an appropriate immigration regime for migrant domestic workers, are identified as providing an alternative normative model for national regulatory frameworks.

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