intervenes in the recruitment and maintenance of migrant domestic workers, the situation is different. To be sure, abuses abound and paid domestic workers still suffer the indignities described in this book; but laws and regulations do not tie migrant domestic workers to their jobs, as they do in societies like Kuwait or Taiwan. Moreover, there are labor-protection laws on the books, and legal and community advocates working for enforcement of those rules. We know that, for domestic workers and agricultural workers, who were historically excluded from these pacts, the reach of these laws has been limited. Labor activists, legislators, and domestic workers themselves, however, continue to push for change, as they did in 2006, when they tried to change California legislation to allow overtime labor protections for live-in domestic workers and for personal attendants. Latina immigrant domestic workers in the United States hold a range of legal statuses, from those who are undocumented to those who are naturalized U.S. citizens. To be sure, these women were marching in the streets during the Spring 2006 national mobilizations for immigrant legal rights. Unlike their global peers working on temporary contract programs, many immigrant domestic workers in the United States already live with their own families in immigrant communities in American cities, but a massive legalization program would allow them to further improve their labor prospects and better support their families.
Some Latina immigrant workers, in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States, do face almost unimaginable forms of abuse and exploitation, but many of them can and do express their dissatisfaction by exiting their bad jobs and finding others. To be sure, financial considerations, legal status, local labor markets, and social networks can either enable or deter new job searches. In the United States today, the most brutal forms of exploitation in domestic work that we see are to be found between co-ethnic, co-national immigrants and employers. These are instances in which immigrant domestic workers are brought here and enslaved by employers from their own countries. The victims of this type of abuse often include child maids, girls as young as ten or twelve, who are kept in extreme isolation and servitude, and subjected to routine beatings and threats. Interestingly, as various media stories have shown, many of the offending employers have been associated with some of the premier international institutions of globalization, such as the World Bank and the United Nations. In such cases, as employees of foreign nationals or of American citizens with permanent residency abroad, the domestic workers may enter with special visas. Once again, the power of the state exerts itself against migrant domestic workers.
While the social trends that create the international flow of migrant domestic workers are diverse, the result is the same: families in the wealthy nations get women from poor nations to do the dirty domestic work, while families from the poor nations lose their mothers and wives. Is this simply a continuation of imperialism? As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild (2002:11) have astutely noted, rich nations increasingly assume “a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family—pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean or find his socks.” The poor nations, like the traditional woman, remain mired in domestic work and subservience. As for the migrant female domestic workers, who is left at home to do the care for them? This is a big moral question, one with social, political, and economic consequences, to which researchers and policy makers are now devoting more attention.
Meanwhile, it is important to listen to the voices and experiences of the domestic workers themselves. Not all immigrant domestic workers are exploited. In fact, many of them remind us that they are valuable contributors to two societies, the one they left behind and the one in which they work. They value their jobs, and when employers and society offer them social recognition and fair labor conditions, they take satisfaction from their work and their earnings. This, after all, is what these women are looking for as they navigate the globe: dignity, respect, and the opportunity to improve their own lives and those of their family members.
South Pasadena
August 2006
SOME SOURCES ON MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS AROUND THE GLOBE
Andall, Jacqueline. 2000. Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service: The Politics of Black Women in Italy. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.
Anderson, Bridget. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London: Zed Books.
Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Gamburd, Michele. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestic Workers and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ozeyegin, Gul. 2001. Untidy Gender: Domestic Service in Turkey. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Poniatowski, Birgit, and Carolina Jimenez. 2005. Report on workshop on “Gender and Migration: Domestic Workers from Asia and Latin America,” United Nations University, October 19-20.
Oishi, Nana. 2005. Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Zimmerman, Mary K., Jacquelyn S. Litt, and Christine E. Bose, eds. 2006. Global Dimensions of Gender and Carework. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Preface to the First Edition
Can we conceive of a Los Angeles where there is, as the title of a short film puts it, “A Day without a Mexican”?1 In fact, as I learned while chatting with domestic workers at parks and bus stops, this is an exercise regularly indulged in by Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan women who work in middle-class and upper-middle-class homes throughout Los Angeles. “If we called a three-day strike,” nannies say to their peers, “How many days would it take before we shut it all down?” Not only would households fall into a state of chaos, but professionals, managers, and office workers of all sorts would find themselves unable to perform their own jobs. Latina domestic workers debate this scenario with humor—some arguing that it might take two days, others chiming in with four. They know that in their job, a general strike is unlikely. Yet their strident humor is bolstered by the resurgence of militant unionism among Latino immigrant janitors and hotel and restaurant employees and by collective organizing among gardeners, day laborers, and drywallers in California. Significantly, their running dialogue speaks to a shared recognition of their own indispensability. In their own conversations, they reclaim what their job experiences often deny them: social recognition and dignity.
Latina immigrant labor, and specifically the work of housecleaners and nanny/housekeepers, constitutes a bedrock of our contemporary U.S. culture and economy, yet the work and the women who do it remain invisible and disregarded. Paid domestic work enjoyed a short-lived flurry of media attention in the early 1990s, when the transgressions of Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood (and several other political nominees and elected officials) came to light, but the public gaze was fleeting.2 Moreover, attention focused neither on the quality of the jobs nor on the women who do the work but on their employers, who had failed to pay employment taxes.
Private paid domestic work, in which one individual cleans and cares for another individual or family, poses an enormous
