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Domestic workers face increased risk for sexual harassment and assault in the workplace but are often reluctant to disclose abuse or seek retribution. We report on a study looking at migrant domestic workers’ responses to sexual violence, reasons behind their responses, and factors enhancing or diminishing vulnerability to abuse. We carried out qualitative, in-depth, individual and group interviews with 15 female domestic workers from the Philippines and Sri Lanka working in the Republic of Cyprus. Descriptive thematic analysis was used to analyse data using QSR NVivo 10.0. Sexual violence against migrant domestic workers was reported to be rampant, particularly among women living with their employer. Perpetrators took advantage of women’s precarious legal, social, and economic circumstances to coerce women into a sexual relationship. All participants reported taking action to stop attacks despite the significant barriers they faced: racism and discrimination, social isolation, and hostile legal, labour, and immigration systems. Fear of losing their job, being deported, and facing racism and discrimination from the police were the biggest barriers to seeking retribution. Access to informational, e.g., legal, practical, and emotional support, facilitated positive outcomes following abuse, such as finding a new employer. Systemic racism, hostile labour and immigration systems, and lack of support increase risk of sexual violence and place barriers against accessing safe working spaces, protection, and justice. Women need to be informed of the risks involved in domestic work and empowered to identify abuse and access help and support when needed.

The massive spurt in rural labor migration has led to urbanization in contemporary India. While research on gendered migration of informal labor focuses on male-outmigration and views women as “pas...

Sexual harassment against female migrant domestic workers is a public health problem, which remains hidden and largely underreported. The current paper presents the results of a qualitative research study on sexually victimized migrant domestic workers in four European countries (Austria, Cyprus, Greece, and Sweden). The study aimed at exploring the profile and experiences of victimised individuals. Data were gathered via 66 semi-structured interviews with victimised female migrant domestic workers. Key findings of the current study indicate that the victims: (a) were usually undocumented and had low local language skills; (b) identified domestic work as the only way into the labour market; (c) suffered primarily psychological, economic, and social consequences; (d) had poor social support networks; (e) were poorly connected to governmental support services. This is the first study to explore this hidden problem via direct contact with victims. Addressing barriers of migrants’ social integration seems important. Better regulation and monitoring of this low-skilled occupation could minimise risks for vulnerable employees.

Female Indonesian migrant domestic workers (DMWs) often get a negative predicate both in Indonesia and in destination countries. For example, DMWs in Singapore are treated unequally by Singaporean society, in Indonesia, as well, their work is seen as a lowly job. They can be categorized as a marginal group. Marginals are marginalized people whose rights are ruled out by people that have power. Hence, they find it difficult to adapt to their environment and they are always suppressed. The circumstances lead to the feeling of alienation for DMWs. The alienation they have experienced is often ignored as a reality of the life of migrant workers. This study takes the object of poetry by Female Indonesian DMWs in Singapore. It explores how marginalization and alienation are expressed in literary work by female domestic migrant workers. This study, also analyzes how the expression of literary work can be functioned as a medium to voice alienation and to overcome its problem. This research used textual analysis, including the application of semiotics and narratology to see the marginalization and alienation faced by the migrant workers which are represented through a literary work. As complementary data, virtual interviews with the author of poetry was conducted.

Economic migrant women often experience oppressive living and working conditions in the receiving societies. Activism is a liberatory behavior these women may employ to transform such situations. This study explores the activism experience of female migrant domestic workers from Latin America settled in southern Spain, in terms of its psychosocial benefits and costs. A purposeful sample of eleven activist migrant women engaged in a grassroots organization of domestic workers and eight members of social organizations supporting their activities were interviewed in-depth individually. After a qualitative content analysis approach to the data, the study presents activism as a community engagement behavior with benefits such as the strengthening of social ties, sense of community, opportunities for sharing stories of oppression, and psychological empowerment. Activism also emerged as a demanding activity requiring high investments in time by activists and producing interpersonal conflicts, hopelessness, and burnout in some cases. Such costs may pose limits to its potential to produce well-being and liberation, implying challenges for research, intervention, and activism sustainability.

The public space plays a crucial role in providing adequate infrastructure for vulnerable social groups in the context of high-density urban Asia. In this study, a well-known elevated pedestrian network in Hong Kong emerges as a revelatory case for the comparative analysis of the pattern of stationary uses before and after the COVID-19 pandemic out-break. Findings reveal a significant decrease (-20 %) in the total number of users and a shift in the pattern of activities, comprising a significant shrinkage of socially oriented uses and a vast increase of individual behaviors. This study advocates a responsive policymaking that considers the peculiar post-outbreak needs of migrant workers in Hong Kong and in high-density urban Asia Keywords: Covid-19; public space; migrant domestic workers; behavioural mapping eISSN 2514-751X © 2020 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians / Africans / Arabians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ajebs.v5i17.374

This ethnographic study draws from my research on the three main care practices Latin American domestic workers experience in Barcelona: caring as part of their jobs, caring for their families from afar, and caring for each other. Stemming from grounded theory, I will argue that one of the main pressures they suffer daily is social isolation and loneliness. Starting from a brief analysis of how migrant domestic workers bear the burden of care individually – firstly, as part of their jobs and, secondly, as part of their gender duty when being mothers from afar – this paper will trace a third dimension of care seen in collective practices to cope with social isolation. The last section of the empirical overview will focus on the daily navigation of the concepts of self-care, activism, and feminism by Latin American domestic workers. These concepts were encountered in fieldwork by my research participants and given a new meaning when developing their own versions of them based on collective values more present in their home cultures.

This article examines Baby Ruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen to explore representations that unsettle heteronormative ideas around Filipina domestic workers’ bodies and labor. First, I analyze t...

Migrant domestic work is performed in precariously (im)mobile working conditions that mark the subaltern body in a state of constant lived experience with and in strife. In Singapore, the structural context of hire amplifies conditions of servitude, indebtedness, and subalternity that have implications for mental health. This study documents mental health narratives by migrant domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, registering how mental health is negotiated amid dissension in the performance of precarious labor. While functional employment structures enabled and empowered well-being, dysfunctional structures disrupted mental health meanings, creating layers of constant contention for domestic workers to broker, limiting opportunities for mental health and well-being. Narratives gathered indicate systemic mental health precarities tied to workplace dysfunctions.

Steady demand for migrant domestic workers from developing countries continues to normalize an intriguing form of geographically dispersed families from which the mothers migrate and become the breadwinners. Despite the distance, migrant mothers remain committed to the preservation of intimacy by utilizing communication media to perform and “display” family practices. Using polymedia and displaying family as theoretical frameworks, this ethnographic study examines how smartphones shape family practices among migrant mothers. Through participant observation and in-depth interviews with 30 Indonesian mothers in Hong Kong, it illustrates how smartphones transform the configuration of mothering practices and power structures underpinning family interaction in the process of mediated family display. Smartphones, as polymedia, enable migrant mothers to assert authority over the display of maternal roles, relationships, and rituals, both materially and discursively. Given that their relationships are experienced almost exclusively via smartphone communication, directing the communication effectively means defining the shape and characteristics of the family. The findings problematize the depiction of migrant mothers as victims of communication technologies, highlighting their authorial privilege when displaying family. This article also presents a critical reflection on mediated family practices by illustrating cases of failed display.

In both historical and contemporary studies of contract mobile labour, little attention has been granted to ageing migrant bodies from a life-course perspective. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with older migrant domestic workers in Singapore, this article investigates how, in the context of restrictive regimes of mobility shaping temporary labour migration, age crucially factors into the (im)mobility of migrant domestic workers. Growing older and approaching retirement marks a point of perceived bodily immobility as states and employers deem migrants’ ageing bodies as too frail and no longer productive, thus indu-cing mandatory returns to their countries of origin. The paper traces how the ageing bodies of ‘temporary’ migrants are discursively constructed by neoliberal regimes of mobile labour; the implications on migrants’ present and future mobilities; and how migrants contest such characterisations of their bodies and attempts at controlling their mobilities at different scales. In considering the later-life implications of long years of work abroad in precarious and low-wage conditions, we see how age becomes important to our intersectional analyses of racialised (im)mobile labour across multi-ple historical and comparative contexts, and to our understandings of how inequalities are (re)produced over time.

Persistent economic inequality between men and women, combined with differences in gender expectations and growing inequalities among women globally, has resulted in families “outsourcing” childcare by employing migrant domestic workers (MDWs). While studies have addressed the intimacy and complexity of “mothering” in such contexts, the agentic position of child-recipients of such care have seldom been explored. This article increases our understanding of care-relationships by examining their triangularity among children, MDWs, and mothers in Hong Kong. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people who grew up with MDWs, alongside interviews with MDWs themselves, this article describes processes through which care work transforms into what Lynch describes as “love labor” in these relational contexts. In these contexts, commodified care from MDWs can develop, through a process of mutual trilateral negotiations, into intimate love-laboring relationships that, in turn, reflect larger dynamics of familial transformation that are endemic to “global cities.”

Women migrants’ position in the global labour market is constrained by gender and racial divisions of labour, and the work they are offered is often insecure, low-paid and concentrated in feminised sectors of the economy, such as domestic work. It is not only women who predominantly perform domestic work, but also women of a certain race, ethnicity, socio-economic class and nationality. This article adopts an intersectional rights-based lens to examine how selected policies and regulations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka are discriminating against, and creating conditions for the systematic exploitation of, women migrant domestic workers positioned at the intersection of multiple converging identities.

This article explores tensions in the ways in which non-governmental activism, as represented by trade unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), frames the concerns of migrant domestic work...

In this article, we examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor conditions of domestic workers in the epicenter of the United States. We focus our analysis on the symbolic categorization of domestic work as “essential labor.” While domestic workers are lauded as heroes in public discourse, we argue that this symbolic recognition does not extend to material remuneration. Instead, we find that labor conditions better fit their categorization as expendable essential workers, meaning those whose essential labor is magnified during the pandemic but whose work remains materially undervalued. Data used in this article draw from observations of more than 30 hours of virtual town hall meetings on the pandemic hosted by migrant domestic worker advocacy groups in Los Angeles and New York.

COVID-19 is expected to impact the low-income groups' use of public space and related quality of life beyond the current pandemic outbreak. To what extent may the current pandemic affect the use of public space once some restrictions will be lifted? This study focuses on the migrant domestic workers’ spatio-temporal changes in the patterns of public space use during social distancing relaxation period in Hong Kong. The findings highlight increase of individual leisure activities, decrease of density around informal food-production and of gathering group, comparatively to the pre-pandemic situation. Keywords: Covid-19, public space, migrant domestic workers, behavioural mapping eISSN: 2398-4287© 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ebpj.v5i15.2461.

The ISIS group’s declaration in 2014, has inspired female extremists from various countries to join the terrorist group. At the end of 2016, two women were arrested by the Indonesian police for planning terror attacks in two different places. Both are former migrant domestic workers who returned from Hong Kong. This article investigates why women join terrorist groups, why male-dominated terrorist groups recruit women and what makes female migrant domestic workers who return to Indonesia as extremists willing to make a significant contribution to the terrorism movement in Indonesia. This research’s data collection technique is qualitative data collection, and document-based research through literature studies. This article utilizes Quintan Wiktorowicz’s three radicalisation concept phases: cognitive opening, religious seeking and socialisation. This study found that at least four reasons women become extremists, namely personal complaints, influence from family, relatives or lovers, ideological perceptions, and media use, facilitate the radicalisation process. Furthermore, strategic interests seem to be the answer to why terror groups involve women to achieve their goals. The acceptance of terrorist groups to involve women can be the reason why women migrant domestic workers are willing to make an immense contribution to terrorist groups. Their enthusiasm, financial capacity and international experience are expected to strengthen the terror movement in Indonesia. Both create a “mutually reinforcing” relationship that benefits both parties. Further research is needed with a sample of ordinary female extremists outside migrant domestic workers as a comparison to examine women’s motivations and group decisions to include these women in terrorist activities.

Exodus of migrant workers from different cities in India has brought the issues of migrant workers into light. The discourse in the public domain mainly focusses on male workers where women are more portrayed as mothers. Gender studies scholars (Mazumdar et al. 2013) have always raised concerns on the overemphasis of the social angle of women’s migration. This paper brings forth how migrant workers, all women, had organised their productive-reproductive continuum in Delhi and Gurugram as construction workers and domestic workers. They had come to the National Capital Region (NCR) in search of livelihoods. Their work continuum is discussed in the backdrop of the economic distress that led to migration, the working conditions (wages and leaves) and social security provisions (maternity benefits and childcare) they were entitled to as workers in the cities. The objective of the paper is to understand the structures that influenced the organisation of productive-reproductive continuum of migrant informal sector women workers and also to demonstrate the processes of multiple marginalisation.

After the 2008 financial crisis, migrants were particularly affected by restrictive migratory policies as well as welfare state budgetary cuts in family allowances, pension rights and unemployment benefits. In this context, this contribution looks into the experiences of Andean migrants that have moved onwards from another EU state to Belgium while trying to counteract these policies. The author argues that depending on their gender, class and ethnic locations Andean migrants are able to construct different sets of global social protection arrangements that allow them to protect themselves and their family members in various countries across Europe and Latin America. Data draws from a multi-sited ethnography conducted during 20 months in Belgium, Colombia and Peru with 85 participants that included the Andean migrants themselves as well as their family members. The analysis contributes to the literature on onward Intra-European migration as well as studies on transnational social protection.

Response to the ATR debate proposition ‘It is worth undermining the anti-trafficking cause in order to more directly challenge the systems producing everyday abuses within the global economy.’

Gender-based violence (GBV) is becoming a major topic of criminological concern. This article examines the factors contributing to the abuse of female Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) by their employers in two Middle Eastern countries, Lebanon and Bahrain. It pinpoints the law as the structure that maintains the slavery-like conditions that facilitate the systematic violence towards MDWs in Bahrain and Lebanon. It also looks at how processes of criminalisation cement MDWs in their precarious positions, subject to un-investigated femicide. Therefore, this article proposes to view femicide as a state of existence resulting from a wider societal structure as opposed to a single act condensed in time and space. The article adopts an intersectional approach to GBV, which draws attention to the states’ role in facilitating the exploitation of MDWs. It also calls for the inclusion of MDWs in the Lebanese and Bahraini labour laws. By acknowledging the multi-dimensional abuse which ultimately results in the death of MDWs, the article concludes that the governments of the receiving and sending countries must do more to protect their most marginalised subjects. Moreover, criminologists should include MDWs as a criminalised group in more of their academic endeavours.

This essay draws on multi-sited, performance art-led research with Filipinx migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. It explores a dichotomy at work in the portrayal of some workers as bagong bayani or ‘modern heroes’—a phrase coined by then Philippine president Corazon Aquino—and as ‘modern slaves’, a term more recently associated with the humanitarian and state processing of survivors of human trafficking and labour abuse. Simultaneously victimising and venerating workers, I argue that both terms spectacularise experiences of migrant domestic work, untethering it from lived, material conditions. In so doing, the everyday nature of exploitation and abuse encountered by many migrant domestic workers is obscured, as well as the everyday expertise that enables them to evade, de-escalate, and survive it. Through making collaborative soundwalks with migrant domestic workers—a creative form similar to site-specific audio guides—my research identifies ways in which performance methodologies can be attentive to the specific temporalities of their lived experiences and to their decisions about self-representation.

Our review starts by considering the regional development of East and Southeast Asia. We then address major trends related to international migration within the region. First, we focus on labor migration, which has been a dominant type of migration in the region in the last four decades. We highlight consequences such as development in the destination area, remittances, and children who are left behind. Second, we highlight recent developments in research related to migrant domestic helpers. In this review, we argue that most studies about migrants in East and Southeast Asia are descriptive in nature, because limited data are available for detailed analysis. Consequently, there has been little opportunity or effort to theorize the migration patterns in the region. Our review suggests the need to move beyond case studies and descriptive reports and to step up efforts to make theoretical contributions to international migration in East and Southeast Asia.

This article analyses spaces for seeking redress for the harms experienced by migrant care workers and those left behind, working with the concept of depletion through social reproduction. While ‘global care chains’ also highlights the tolls exacted, depletion through social reproduction adds the important quasi-legal concept of ‘harm’, explicitly inviting reflection on spaces for redress and claims-making. Nation-states clearly constitute important spaces for seeking redress but migrants are left as ‘partial citizens’, protected by neither receiving nations nor their own governments. Accordingly, this article focuses on spaces for claiming rights at the global and regional (Asia-Pacific) scales, as well as the networks of international organisations, civil society organisations and trade unions that can use these spaces to claim redress.

This article focuses on contemporary smartphone culture and activism performed by female Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. There are around 330.000 migrant workers in Hong Kong, and wherein 150.000 originated from Indonesia. Most of the Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong work in the domestic sectors: housemaid, babysitter, and career. They are obliged to live with their employer and start working from five mornings until late at night for six days a week. The smartphone is their primary medium in keeping a connection with friends and families back home and reduces social isolation. Interestingly, Indonesian migrant workers also use smartphones for activism to support migrant workers’ rights issues. Despite the isolation issues and the social limitations experienced by the Indonesian migrant workers’, this article aims to explore the following questions: how is smartphone culture developed in Indonesian migrant workers’ communication activities in Hong Kong? How is the smartphone, in particular, used as the medium for activism? Using the netnography method, this research explores the smartphone culture and activism performed by Indonesian migrant workers’ in their online routine. Smartphone usage has become an interesting phenomenon where this device has changed the cultural habits and further forms a new cultural pattern. Social media platforms and chat applications on smartphones have facilitated Indonesian migrant workers’ more comprehensive access to information. It is found that social media access is essential for Indonesian migrant workers to ease loneliness and further used as their medium of existence in the virtual world. Furthermore, they also create virtual identities through social media, share experiences and views through online platforms, and organize protests or other forms of activism. Sulistyaningsih’s case is a clear example of how communication access was crucial for Indonesian migrant workers at a time of danger. The diverse forms of communication technology have allowed them to create compelling messages. This activity provides evidence that Indonesian migrant workers still can be creative despite their long working hours.

Articulating that domestic workers in Singapore are marked by their subalternity, erased from the hegemonic discursive spaces in spite of their visibility as objects in the neoliberal economy, this manuscript draws on the culture-centered approach to conceptualize listening as a structurally transformative anchor to theorizing mental health. The narratives offered by workers reveal critical insights into the way structure functions to create conditions of mental health suffering in the performance of precarious domestic work, intricately tied to the erasure of voice. The material violence on the bodies of workers relates to the everyday challenges to mental health. A lack of access to infrastructures of information and communication add to the conditions of marginality. In listening to these storied descriptions of suffering in precariousness, we hear voices revealing limited alternatives to mental health care in poor working conditions, with workers entrapped in a cycle of stress, worry, and fear.

This article summarizes key findings from our research on Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates to reflect on their implications for policy. To illustrate the patterns we have observed, the article traces the migration biographies of two women, one from West Java and one from the Philippines, and it then asks what their experiences reveal about the policy landscape. We find, in concert with a large body of literature on social policy for migrants, that in many cases the policies that currently exist—and the gaps in these policies—are themselves central to producing the problems that migrant domestic workers face. Thus, we focus not on what states or international organizations can do in terms of policy improvements per se, but more generally on how the policy context is part and parcel of the broader social world that affects migrant workers’ welfare over the course of their migration biographies.

In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employme...

This article identifies and examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers, meaning the course of action they undertake to secure continuous employment. Mobility pathways refer not only...

There has been a rising trend of labor migration globally. Given their alien status within the legal framework of the host countries, migrant domestic workers (MDWs) are especially vulnerable to poor employment conditions that may affect their health status, yet there is still a lack of quantitative evidence in this population hitherto. Using randomly sampled data from a cross-sectional survey of 2,017 live-in female MDWs in Hong Kong, a setting with a high concentration of MDWs, this study examined the association of employment conditions with physical and mental health among the MDWs. We observed poorer physical and mental health status among the MDWs when compared with the general population in Hong Kong. Our findings suggest that employment conditions, including household size, working on the rest day, and housing type, and age were associated with physical health, while employment conditions, including not ever receiving wages on time, frequency of financial remittances, paying the employment agency, having a private room, fulfillment of work-related needs, physical abuse, and discrimination, and sociodemographic characteristics, including age and duration of migration, were associated with mental health. Social support in general did not confound these associations, but religious activities and daily contact with friends were also associated with mental health. Our findings have important implications in designing interventions and policies to improve the physical and mental well-being of this vulnerable migrant population.

Informal social support from family and friends has often been highlighted as the key form of support for migrants under different forms of transnational movement, particularly for female migrants. Drawing on the findings from qualitative and quantitative studies on Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, this article applies the intersectionality framework to explore how migrant domestic workers approach different forms of support systems based on their multiple identities of gender, ethnicity, and religion. A clear distinction on help-seeking behavior is drawn between approaching formal and informal support systems with migrant domestic workers directly approaching formal support when the problem is employment related but turning to informal support when having emotional needs. Such distinction is found to be related to migrant domestic workers’ perceptions toward gender role and religious practices under transnational movements.

Previous studies on workplace aggression and violence have limited their scope to the conventional formal workplace environment. Few have explored the possibility that an increasing number of people, especially females, who work in more informal settings may also face work-related aggression. Our research on a random sample of 2,017 migrant domestic female workers from the Philippines and Indonesia who work in Hong Kong focuses on a nonconventional workplace, the employer’s home, and examines how conditions specific to the home-based working environment are related to workers’ experiences of abuse. Findings suggest that both the working conditions (e.g., types of people served) and the workplace environment (e.g., the size of the home) are related to experiences of abusive behavior performed by employers in the domestic work setting. The findings extend our understanding of the concept of workplace and highlight new factors contributing to aggression and violence against workers when boundaries between work and home are blurred.

This article presents a portrayal of Filipino and Indonesian female domestic workers’ life courses in migration, using the life history calendar data from the 2017 survey of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Applying sequence analysis, we first analyzed migration trajectory features such as individual migration trajectories, duration spent in each state, and longitudinal diversity of state distributions. We found that Indonesian domestic workers, compared with their Filipino counterparts, are more diverse in their migration histories, indicating involvements in serial migration. We also conducted a cluster analysis of the domestic workers’ migratory trajectories. The analysis yielded three meaningful clusters/types of migrant workers—those moved late in life, those who participated in serial migration, and those migrated directly from their home country to Hong Kong. Finally, we investigated the effect of a complex migration history on job satisfaction and the characteristics of membership in the three ideal-typical migration types among the domestic workers older than 39 years.

Migrant domestic workers provide essential services to the families they live with, but they are not considered a part of the family. As a group, they are not well-integrated into the society and often suffer from social isolation. In this article, we explore the potential health buffering effects of their personal network, in terms of family and friendship ties in both the local community and their home country. Existing literature provides inconsistent evidence on who and what matters more, with regard to the nature, strength, and geographic locations of individual personal networks. Using data from the Survey of Migrant domestic Workers in Hong Kong (2017), we find that family ties are extremely important. The presence of family members in Hong Kong as well as daily contact with family, regardless of location, are associated with better self-reported health. Only daily contact with friends in Hong Kong, not with friends in other countries, promotes better health. We also find evidence that the protective effects of family and friends networks depend on each other. Those foreign domestic workers with families in Hong Kong but also maintain daily contact with friends have the best self-reported health among all.

Although migrant women from neighboring Southeast Asian countries fill crucial care gaps in Singapore households as live-in domestic workers, their social protection remains uneven, uncertain, and indeterminate. Framed as unskilled work shunned by citizens and characterized by isolation in the privatized sphere of the home, domestic work has invariably become low-status, low-visibility, and low-pay work performed by foreign women engaged on private contracts. The access of migrant domestic workers in Singapore to social protection has thus triggered concern among international organizations, governments, and civil society. Using data derived from a survey of Indonesian domestic workers, interviews with key stakeholders, and archival research, this article adopts a transnational social protection research agenda by mapping how institutionalized practices that aim to reduce the vulnerabilities of migrant domestic workers in Singapore have shifted in the past decade. We begin by addressing the circumscribed impact of international conventions and origin government policies. Following our premise that the social support and protection of migrant domestic workers still depend largely on the host society, we focus on two interrelated developments in Singapore. First, we examine the reach of immigration, labor, and criminal law in recent “maid abuse” cases to reveal how criminal law in particular has broadened to account for the specific vulnerability of domestic workers and, relatedly, the culpability of errant employers. Second, we consider how civil society’s campaign for a “mandatory” rest day offers insight into both the success and limitations of developing transnational advocacy for domestic workers in Singapore.

The movement of migrant domestic workers constitutes an important aspect of migration flows in Asia. We identify and outline three major research gaps in this area: (1) their unique working environment and the consequences of working under these conditions, (2) formal and informal sources of support, and (3) policies implemented by local government in response to the working environment of migrant domestic workers. We discuss how the articles in this special issue address these major gaps in migration research.

In contrast to the dominant masculinised discourses on global cities, this project explores the feminised and private spheres of global cities—‘domestic work’ in London. Domestic work is of particu...

There has been a surge of recent interest in the migration industries that facilitate the movement of migrants, particularly that of low-waged laborers engaged in temporary contracts abroad. This article extends this research to include migration brokers working in destination contexts, thus drawing analytical attention to the arrival infrastructures that incorporate migrants into host societies. Based on ethnographic research involving the employment agents who recruit women migrating from Indonesia to work as migrant domestic workers in Singapore, we use the concept of “translation” as a broad theoretical metaphor to understand how brokers actively fashion knowledge between various actors, scales, interfaces, and entities. First, we argue that through the interpretation of language, brokers continually modulate meaning in the encounters between potential employers and employees at the agency shopfront, reproducing particular dynamics of power between employers and workers while coperforming the hirability of the migrant worker. Second, we show how brokers operate within the discretionary space between multiple sets of regulations in order to selectively inscribe the text of policy into migrant workers’ lives. By interrogating the process of translation and clarifying the latitude migration brokers have in shaping the working and living conditions of international labor migrants, the article contributes to the growing conceptual literature on how labor-market intermediaries contour migration markets.

In Singapore, migrant domestic workers are not allowed by law to become pregnant. However, when it comes to their romantic relationships, the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable are less define...

This dissertation studies how the Indonesian state facilitates the migration of its female citizens for employment as domestic workers in Hong Kong. Applying the research perspective of ethnographic migration and border regime analysis, I scrutinize the multiplicity of state and non-state practices in one of Asia���s major ���labor brokerage��� countries. Building on a 12-month multi-sited ethnography in Indonesia and Hong Kong, the study sheds light on the desired and lived subjectivities of the workers and asks how these negotiate visions of national development and official expectations brought forward to them. Informed by Foucauldian, postcolonial, and feminist perspectives, I carve out how a variety of actors are invested in making Indonesia���s migrant domestic workers more respectable. I introduce the concept of respectability and situate official notions of the ���ideal migrant��� in aspirations to modernize Indonesian brokerage on the one hand and in discourses that circle around national dignity on the other. I discuss respectability in light of the tensions inherent in labor brokerage. I show that in their subjective practices, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong challenge official strivings for respectability, thus engaging in everyday politics from below that have repercussions on the Indonesian society. The dissertation extends earlier studies that highlight the role of gendered morality in disciplining migrant labor force. In addition, it incorporates notions of progressiveness and class distinction and points out that negotiations over migrants��� subjectivities are indicative of fundamental contestations over the self-conceptions of labor brokerage states. By examining a sending state in the Global South, it provides a global view and productively connects research on transnational migration in Asia with ethnographic migration and border regime analyses, which have hitherto mainly focused on European and North American border regimes. The dissertation gives insights in how transnational labor migration shapes the modes in which questions of (national) belonging and visions of societal well-being are negotiated in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

Migrant domestic workers in Singapore are situated in a highly hierarchical environment, requiring them to live and work in the same place. This spatial situation leads to a lack of space and time for the female workers which challenges their psychosocial well-being. We ask how the women, nevertheless, develop psychosocial well-being, based on their recognition and subjective embodied positioning, analytically grasped through the concept of ontological (in)security. Based on qualitative interviews, we show how the workers perceive and produce ontological (in)security through spatial dimensions of visibility and belonging. These dimensions are subjectively embodied in multiple places and networks. On behalf of multiple visibilities and belongings outside the domestic realm, domestic care workers in Singapore are able to actively produce ontological security and strengthen their psychosocial well-being. The results show the relevance of implementing regulations for the women to have more possibilities in choosing their whereabouts.

Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong remain vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Obtaining accurate information is essential for MDWs as it helps them understand their predicament and protect themselves. Therefore, this study delves into the MDWs’ health literacy by scrutinizing how they acquire, verify, and respond to pandemic-related information. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 Indonesian MDWs, recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The data were examined using a constant comparative approach in grounded theory. The findings reveal that the participants engaged in information seeking and scanning to obtain health crisis information, mainly through their friends, family members, and community organizations. The participants also verified the information using their judgment or by consulting other actors, such as local organizations and media outlets. The messages they obtained informed the means to protect themselves, which motivated them to adopt preventive measures. However, some also engaged in maladaptive coping, such as taking ineffective preventive actions. The participants also disseminated health crisis information throughout their social circle. This study concluded that MDWs performed four health information behaviors during the pandemic, namely information acquisition, authentication, sharing, and adoption of preventive measures. However, their information practices may change at different stages of the pandemic.