A global perspective on care work.
Across the globe families depend on the labor of migrant women to clean their homes and care for their loved ones. They include Salvadoran and Mexican women who clean homes in the United States; Polish and Ukrainian women caring for the elderly in Italy; Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepalese women caring for families in East and West Asia; Ethiopian and Kenyan women cleaning homes in West Asia; and Filipino women cleaning and caring for families in more than 160 countries.
Host countries offer domestic workers partial citizenship and few legal protections.
The majority of these migrant workers are from Southeast Asia (an estimated count of 1.8 million Indonesian and 1.4 million Filipino domestic workers are employed outside of their country). Their work varies across nations; those in Israel and Taiwan mostly do elder care work, those in Canada and Denmark primarily provide child care, and workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and countries in West Asia including Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and among others Qatar do what they describe as the “all around work” of cooking, caring and cleaning households. In return, host countries offer these workers partial citizenship and few legal protections.
Governments acknowledge their citizenry’s dependence on the household labor of foreign women by allotting a “servant visa” or a “caregiver visa” to qualified households. Countries that offer such visas include Gulf Cooperative Council member states such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates; the Scandinavian nation of Denmark; other European countries including Italy and Spain; Israel; and various destinations in Asia including Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong. By granting migrants legal status through a domestic worker visa, states do not just open a market for the labor of domestic work but they also recognize the market dependence of their citizens on such labor.
However, recognizing market dependence does not translate into the recognition of the labor rights of care workers. We see this most visibly in the situation of Filipino migrant domestic workers, whose experiences may vastly differ across destinations (for instance, wage rates in Canada are at least five times more than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia) but still share certain key characteristics. In every destination, the legal residency of domestic workers is contingent on the sponsorship of an employer. Said another way: domestic workers can only legally reside and work in the host society if they are continuously employed by a resident-sponsor.
Migrant domestic workers are not free workers who can make decisions about their participation in the labor market. Instead, they are bound to work only for their sponsor. This is the case across East and West Asia but also in Western countries, including domestic workers employed under the Live In Caregivers Programme in Canada, granted a B-1 visa in the United States, and those granted a permesso di soggiorno in Italy. Notably, only in Italy are they allowed to work for someone else besides their sponsor. The bound status of domestic workers puts them in a relationship of unequal dependency on their employer-sponsor; some would argue it places them in a position of indentured service. This would be true if they are unable to change jobs.
Recognizing market dependence does not translate into the recognition of the labor rights of care workers.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most domestic workers across the globe. Again with the exception of Italy, nation-states often make it very hard for the migrant domestic worker to change jobs. For example, in Singapore, agencies charge domestic workers a penalty the equivalent of two months’ wages if they change employers; in the United Arab Emirates, they cannot change employers without the permission of the employer, who has no incentive to let them go (this would mean losing the approximately $3,000 USD paid to an agency for the placement of a domestic worker in their home); in Denmark, au pairs can only change employers twice; in Canada, they have to work for an employer for two continuous years to qualify for permanent residency and must complete this requirement within a four-year period, which discourages domestic workers from changing employers. In the United States, “unskilled” temporary migrant workers, including domestic workers following their ex-pat employers with a B-1 visa, cannot change employers. Further aggravating their relationship of unequal dependency on employers is the live-in clause: only Italy and Canada do not require domestic workers to live with their employers.
The terms of citizenship for migrant domestic workers render them mere household dependents in practically all destinations across the globe. Their legal status as household dependents ironically agrees with the view of domestic workers as “one of the family,” described by feminist sociologists including Mary Romero and Judith Rollins as a controlling mechanism used by employers to solicit uncompensated labor from domestic workers. Because in a legal sense domestic workers are not free but dependents of their sponsors, we should not be surprised that migrant domestic workers face limited labor rights across the globe. Most countries do not offer labor protection to their domestic workers, resulting in fairly low standards of employment including the denial of privacy, absence of a minimum wage, and exclusion from overtime pay. In Asia, only Hong Kong and Malaysia grant labor protection to migrant domestic workers, guaranteeing them a minimum wage and a weekly rest day. Canada, Denmark, and Italy do offer some labor protections for migrant workers but one could neither attribute this to, nor assume the existence of, a universal Western doctrine of human rights because some destinations in the West limit the rights of domestic workers. This would, for instance, be the case in the United States, where caregivers of the elderly remain exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, denying them access to minimum wage and overtime pay.
To varying degrees, migrant domestic workers across the globe face exclusionary incorporation as partial citizens. Their partial citizenship is due to intersecting forces of race, gender, and nation that underlie the continued relegation of domestic work to women’s unpaid labor in the household. The struggle to view paid domestic work as “real work” stunts the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers in various countries of destination across the globe.
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Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She has authored multiple books, including Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes, and, most recently, a second edition of Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work.
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