Domestica. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
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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 paradox. In the United States today, these jobs remain effectively unregulated by formal rules and contracts. Consequently, even today they often resemble relations of servitude that prevailed in earlier, precapitalist feudal societies. These contemporary work arrangements contradict American democratic ideals and modern contractual notions of employment. Doméstica reveals how these fundamental tensions in American social life are played out in private homes, between the women who do the work and those who employ them.
Paid domestic work is widely recognized as part of the informal “shadow” or “under the table” economy. Although wage and hour regulations do cover the job, scarcely anyone, employee or employer, knows about them. Government regulations remain ineffective, and there are no employee handbooks, unions, or management guidelines to help set wages or job duties or to stipulate how the work should be performed. The jobs are done in isolated, private, widely dispersed households, and typically involve negotiations between two individuals—usually women from radically different backgrounds. Yet despite this laissez-faire context, there are striking regularities in wages, hours, benefits, tasks, and directions; in disputes that arise; and in modes of recruitment, hiring, and firing. In this book, I identify many of these patterns. Relying on primary information gathered in the mid- to late 1990s from more than two hundred people in Los Angeles (in-depth interviews with 68 individuals, a survey of 153 Latina domestic workers, and ethnographic observations in various settings), I examine how the practices and concerns of both employers and employees shape how paid domestic work occurs today.
There are many lived dramas in America today, and among the least visible and most deeply felt are those that unfold behind carefully