Publication of issue 27 'Care Work, Intimate Labour, Migration, and Exploitation'

Guest Editors: Shih Joo Tan, Lubna Jebin, and Marie Segrave

Editor: Borislav Gerasimov

 

Over the past decade, there has been growing international policy attention to care work and the need to recognise, value, and redistribute it. There has also been wide recognition that care workers—most of whom are women, and many of whom are migrants or from socially disadvantaged groups—are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. This vulnerability is linked to the often hidden nature of care work in private homes, as well as to its persistent undervaluation as a natural extension of women’s unpaid household responsibilities. With growing ageing populations across many countries, reliance on paid care work will only increase in the coming years, which compels us to critically examine the systems and policies that enable the exploitation of care workers.

The new Special Issue of Anti-Trafficking Review thus comes at an important moment. It analyses aspects of domestic/care work and intimate labour across diverse geographical and social contexts and highlights both the conditions that enable exploitation and the strategies workers use to navigate and resist them. The issue also points to potential policy approaches for promoting decent work and protecting care workers’ rights.

Three articles document the experiences of migrant domestic workers from different perspectives and geographical contexts. Lubna Jebin and JaneMaree Maher examine the ways in which economic security is entangled with Bangladeshi women’s paid domestic work in Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with 18 returnees, they argue that economic violence is the most significant form of violation of the women’s rights and that it sustains other forms of violence. At the same time, they highlight the everyday acts of resistance through which the women pursue their economic goals. Runa Lazzarino, Eleonore Kofman, and Sobia Kapadia turn our attention to a little-studied South–South migration corridor. Drawing on data from seven Filipina migrant domestic workers in Pakistan, they show how the women’s lives are shaped by migration regimes and the informal nature of their work, but also by the high prestige and status they enjoy in comparison with local domestic workers. Isla Mairi Wilson and Yuniar Paramita Sari examine the conditions that give rise to abuse of migrant domestic workers from a different perspective: that of employers. Their surveys and interviews with employers of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong reveal the characteristics and attitudes associated with aggressive and exploitative behaviour, as well as how racialised perceptions and restrictive migration regimes are translated into everyday practices of subordination.

The article by Anakha Ajith examines how agency-mediated live-in eldercare work in Kerala, India, is shaped by caste, gender, class, migration-related care deficits, and weak regulation. Drawing on interviews with caregivers, care recipients, and nursing agency owners, the article describes the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse experienced by caregivers, as well as the strategies they use to resist it. Similarly, the article by Isotta Rossoni and Begoña Aramayona explores how intimacy, exploitation, and agency are negotiated by migrant domestic workers and migrant sex workers in Spain, Italy, and Malta. The authors analyse domestic work and sex work as interrelated forms of intimate labour and identify both convergences and divergences in workers’ lived experiences, particularly in relation to boundaries of care, control, and commodification. The article by Athena Michalakea and Anastasia Rousaki analyses surrogacy in Greece as a form of reproductive labour. Using a materialist and Marxist feminist framework grounded in Social Reproduction Theory, the authors demonstrate how Greek surrogacy law operates as an ideological apparatus that depoliticises surrogates’ labour and privileges the needs of intended parents. They call for a change in the country’s approach to surrogacy that would recognise and protect surrogates as workers.

In the Short Articles section, Sifat Aiman analyses the ‘dual abandonment’ experienced by migrant domestic workers in conflict zones. Using Galtung’s framework of structural violence, she argues that armed conflicts do not create this violence but rather expose the gendered structural violence already embedded in care labour and migration governance. Jonathan Blagbrough and Tsion Degu then turn our attention to child domestic work. Drawing on lessons from an NGO project in Ethiopia, they call for a relational approach to child domestic work that pays closer attention to household hierarchies, everyday care practices, and the role of employers and employers’ children in shaping the lives of child domestic workers.

The issue concludes with Sonja Dolinsek’s review of Ella Parry-Davies’s book Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work. Dolinsek praises the book for bringing together performance, domestic work, unfree labour, and researcher reflexivity to examine trafficking, coercion, and constrained labour, while also taking seriously the forms of agency, representation, and self-fashioning through which workers navigate the world.

Taken together, the articles in this Special Issue highlight how the intimate nature of domestic and care work, its persistent association with ‘women’s work’, and weak labour and migration regulations shape the continued undervaluation and exploitation of care workers. They also contribute to a growing conversation about the need for an integrated approach to understanding and responding to the multidimensional forms of violence that affect women care workers’ lives.

View the new issue at: https://antitraffickingreview.org/index.php/atrjournal/issue/view/38