Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor

Abstract

This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: (1) middle-class women in receiving nations, (2) migrant domestic workers, and (3) Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor suggests that reproduction activities, as they have been increasingly commodified, have to be situated in the context of the global market economy. This division of labor is a structural process that determines the migration of Filipina domestic workers. As such, this article also uses in-depth interviews to examine and enumerate the contradictions that migrant Filipina domestic workers experience in their family and work lives as a result of “being in the middle” of this division of labor.

Potential, Risk, and Return in Transnational Indian Gestational Surrogacy

“…When women are pressured or required to leave their homes to live in designated surrogate housing during pregnancy as surrogates, a structural situation is created that parallels what Colen (1995) has called "stratified reproduction" and that Parreñas (2000) has called the "international transfer of caretaking" (569) in the context of transnational care and domestic labor migration where women leave their children to invest that care work into the households of families with greater financial resources.…”

Analysing inequality and disadvantage from a capability perspective

“…Leading scholars on intersectionality insist on the need to challenge domination and inequality but, unlike the feminist tradition, not solely or necessarily as gendered subjects but as 'women whose lives are affected by their location in multiple hierarchies' (Zinn and Dill 1996, p. 321). Drawing on Hochschild's (1983) seminal masterwork, studies focusing on child-and eldercare in Western societies have reconsidered issues of equality/inequality in relation to the ever growing delegation of carework to women from poor countries of subsaharan Africa, Asia and Latin America (Duffy 2007;Glenn 2000Glenn , 2010Ibos 2013;Parreñas 2000). While some women, mostly white, delegate a part of the domestic work in order to recover a job and gain autonomy vis-à-vis their husband or men in general, other women, mostly non-white, leave their young children and elder parents to care for others in occidental countries.…”

Living the Chilean dream? Bolivian migrants’ incorporation in the space of economic citizenship

“…Work such as that on 'global care chains' (e.g. Hochschild, 2000;Parreñas, 2000;Yeates, 2012) and the 'migrant division of labour' (Wills et al, 2010; see also Datta et al, 2009;McDowell, 2008) has been crucial in cataloguing and conceptualising the ways in which migrants are gendered and racialised into certain labour niches.…”