Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestic Workers in Asia
The increasing prosperity of East Asia since the mid-1970s has
stimulated substantial international migration within the region. It is
estimated that the number of temporary migrant workers in Asia, with or
without legal documents, reached 6.1 million by
2000.[1] Women occupy
one third of this migrant labor force, concentrated in particular
occupations like the entertainment industry, health services, and
especially domestic service.[2]
Migrant domestic workers in Asia
originate from the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and
Vietnam, and they migrate to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia.
The introduction of migrant domestic workers in this region is a
practice that exacerbates the privatization of care encouraging people
to continue to define housework and care work as a woman's calling and a
family duty. This practice thereby excuses the lack of care work done by
the state or by men. One critical difference with this new practice is
that women who can afford migrant domestic workers oversee the hiring of
domestic work instead of doing the work themselves, thereby creating
even more levels of hierarchy and exploitation. As I will argue in this
essay, we should recognize care as an essential social right and public
responsibility, rather than reducing it to a "parochial concern of
women"[3]
or the devalued work of powerless minorities.
In East Asia, as in many other areas of the world, because most
states have not established comprehensive welfare programs, the family
is assumed to be the primary institution that guards the economic and
social well-being of individual people. Policymakers praise and
encourage three-generation cohabitation as a time-honored solution to
childcare and eldercare. For example, in Japan and South Korea, grown
children living with parents receive benefits like income tax reduction,
preferential treatments of housing funds, and privileged entry into
public housing.[4]
This romanticized image of family unity, however,
obscures power inequalities along gendered and generational divides. The
privatization of care in connection with the principle of familism
exacerbates women's subordination to the patriarchal family. For
instance, while sons are expected to guard the welfare of aging parents,
in fact, daughter-in-laws are burdened with the physical labor of
eldercare.
Live-in migrant domestic workers enable many ethnic Chinese
households in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to maintain the socially
perceived ideals of in-home care for children and the elderly. By
recruiting migrant women as substitute mothers for their children and
fictive relatives for their aging parents, employed women are able to
mitigate their motherly guilt and avoid the stigma of consigning elders
to nursing homes. This is a global solution to the local norms of
familism and filial piety. Ironically, the idyllic picture of carework
done within the family is staged against the sober backdrop of migrant
domestic workers separated from their own children and families for
extensive periods of time.
In my work I use the metaphor of migrant domestic workers as global
Cinderellas[5]
to illuminate the complexity and paradoxes in their
migratory trajectories: their relationship with employers is a
combination of physical intimacy and social distance, and the impact of
their migration is a juxtaposition of emancipation and oppression.
Migrant women work overseas to escape poverty and stress at home; they
also embark on the journey to expand life horizons and to explore
modernity. After crossing national borders, they are nevertheless
confined within the four walls of their employers' households. At work
they act with deference; only during days off are they able to dress and
act as they wish. Although migrant women may partially achieve the goal
of upward mobility in their material lives back home, Cinderella's happy
ending remains a fairy tale for many who remain trapped in the flow
determined by patterns of international migration.
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