Introduction
Gisela Fosado
The extreme and grotesque cases of domestic worker exploitation
periodically make newspaper headlines: "Couple Held Two Servants Captive
for Years, U.S. Says," "Ex-Teacher Maude Paulin Convicted of Forcing
Slavery," "Diplomatic Immunity Leaves Abused Workers
in Shadows."[1]
The daily, commonplace devaluation and exploitation of domestic workers,
however, is often unnoticed by many of us who have learned to accept the
status quo. Imagine if your middle-class buddy suddenly faced
termination without severance pay or unpaid holidays, vacation or sick
days in her job. What if she worked 70-80 hours per week with pay below
the minimum wage and without compensation for overtime? What does it
mean that so little attention is paid to the fact that an entire sector
of labor is structured in this draconian fashion? And what would our
society do without the labor of the countless women, predominantly women
of color, who, as our contributors note, make all other work
possible?
Part 1 of this issue, entitled "Invisible Work," focuses on recent
framings and representations of domestic work by scholars who push us to
make the power dynamics in this sector of employment more visible, and
who show the pervasiveness and depth of the problems related to care
work and other types of domestic work worldwide. These scholars analyze
the way we understand the sexual division of domestic labor, how race
and nationality affect this work, the ways other sectors have positioned
themselves in relation to domestic work, as well as representations of
domestic work in recent documentaries.
The essay by Jennifer Klein and Eileen Boris
gives us a glimpse into
the mechanisms by which in-home care work was bracketed from worker
protection legislation over the second half of the twentieth century.
They provide a lens onto the path by which we ended up with so little
protection for domestic workers. Saskia Sassen's essay presents a
context where domestic work becomes more visible, as is the case in
leading sectors within "global cities." She analyzes the growing
inequalities that are becoming an essential part of "advanced
economies," but also the ways in which global cities open up
opportunities for marginalized sectors to organize and mobilize.
Sassen's contribution is followed by Arlie Russell Hochschild's work
on the global trend to hire immigrant women for care work in the
industrialized world and the deepening of inequality through what she
and others have called the 'global care chain.' Hochschild notes that,
"A typical global care chain might work something like this: an older
daughter from a poor family in a Third World country cares for her
siblings (the first link in the chain) while her mother works as a nanny
caring for the children of a nanny migrating to a First World country
(the second link) who, in turn, cares for the child of a family in a
rich country (the final link)". Pei-Chia Lan's contribution gives us an
example of the care chain that Hochschild analyzes in her piece. Lan
looks at the changing dynamics in East Asia as wealthy families in
countries such as Taiwan are increasingly reliant on immigrant labor for
domestic work as a way to push women into the workforce. She argues
that 'guest worker' programs in these countries "have maintained the
status of migrant workers as disposable labor and as transient
residents," which further exploits these women.
Wendy Kozol's review essay looks at six recent documentaries on
domestic workers across the globe, which "make visible both the
ideological and structural forces that maintain domestic work as a
poorly paid and undervalued racial, gendered, class-based and
increasingly transnational labor practice." We close Part I with
Christine Bose's writing, summarizing some of the work she has done over
the past few decades on the undervaluation of both paid and unpaid
domestic labor and their interconnections, as well as the beginnings of
her forthcoming collaborative work on migration for marriage and its
relation to the demand of reproductive and domestic labor.
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