UC Berkeley

Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) make up a global market of 12 million temporary migrant laborers, famous among scholars for being one of the most vulnerable populations of workers worldwide. Most often recruited from poor villages, these women work solely for one household in wealthier societies with no time off for several years at a time, largely invisible to the outside world. Despite decades of advocacy on their behalf, MDWs remain vulnerable to extensive abuse, including debt traps, overworking, and even assault. This dissertation examines the many systemic causes of abuse for these workers. I investigate how deeply held biases regarding gender, race, and poverty hold these women hostage before they even begin work. I explore a complicated market that lives on opacity and poor communication as its lifeblood. I expose how a political system, rather than taking responsibility for its citizens and workers, delegates its power to the private sector, effectively cutting off appeal to law and, in many cases, rights. Finally, I expound on the various tactics that these vulnerable women use to defend themselves and make their lives bearable — and that result in a different kind of empowerment than most scholars recognize.

There are many home nationalities and host societies for MDWs, but Indonesian MDWs in the Asia-Pacific region specifically have been poignantly described as “modern-day slaves.” To date, however, most scholars have focused on Filipinas, who in past studies have proven to be better educated and more politically aware than most other migrants. Research on other nationalities exists, but is far more limited. I find this gap in the literature untenable, as the experiences of Filipinas almost certainly cannot translate wholesale to the experiences of other MDW nationalities. Indonesians, for example, remain aware of their rights less than half as often as Filipinas, have a less experienced sending state/government defending them, and endure substantially higher rates of fee overcharging, wage underpayment, and human rights violations. Yet, even as the number of Indonesian domestic workers swells worldwide, no research contrasts the disparate situations of MDW nationalities in various host states.

My dissertation asks why abuse and exploitation persist so stubbornly in this market despite decades of advocacy. To achieve a solid cross-section of the “maid trade,” I focus on two of the most popular sending countries — the Philippines and Indonesia — and two of the most well-regarded receiving societies — Taiwan and Hong Kong. My results draw on 15 months of participant observation in sending and host states; document analyses of thousands of webpages; two surveys of MDWs; and 245 in-depth interviews across domestic workers, employers, employment agencies, activists, and governments to address this critical question. I dissect the myriad social dynamics at play in MDWs’ lives, including crippling poverty, demeaning racial stereotypes, rampant misinformation, political power struggles, and inconsistent legal enforcement. For each nationality and in each host state, these social forces impact one another differently, giving Indonesians a divergent lived experience from their Filipina counterparts in each host society — most often to the detriment of the Indonesians.

I begin by showing how MDWs are bound by structures of unfreedom, living their lives under the constant threat of arbitrary interference. Cross-cultural gender norms and competition for power and resources among the more powerful actors (employers, agencies, governments, etc.) set the stage for exploitative practices from the outset. Those in power complicate the system of migration and employment for their own ends (monetary or otherwise). The resulting uncertainty and vulnerability MDWs face severely restrict their options. When they do formally complain or resist, they are likelier to suffer job loss and harassment than justice.

I then analyze three of the primary large-scale forces holding these women in their bind: economics, race/racialization, and politics. To begin, profit in the maid trade is founded on opacity and non-transparency. Agencies rely on domestic workers’ and employers’ ignorance to charge excess fees and minimize hassle for themselves — so much so that this market would be transformed without opacity. Said opacity renders most domestic workers unable to resist exploitation and abuse, and it also spreads many false stereotypes and misinformation to employers and even governments, leading them to exploit these workers even further.

The fine-grained racialization of each nationality has also slotted domestic workers into certain roles, magnifying and naturalizing the power dynamic of the employer-employee relationship. In the Asia-Pacific maid trade, each nationality is made into a race, causing international political dynamics to become embodied in the home. Given the lower economic and political standing of these two Southeast Asian countries, domestic workers are yet again expected to submit to the “superior” race of their (mostly Chinese) employers.

Lastly, governments on both sides struggle to claim true sovereignty over these women, as their work dictates that they are the full responsibility of both/neither state. Thus, officials and laws have left the enforcement of workers’ rights vague and open to change. The power to decide what happens in different cases of abuse is largely restricted to the states, which will often sacrifice these women’s rights to avoid political conflict. Arguably, state interventions by countries involved in domestic worker migration create structures and patterns that facilitate abuse, in particular by undermining consistent recourse for abuse and exploitation.

These three facets of the maid trade make for a perfect trifecta of oppression and vulnerability. In my research, I found that the MDWs were acutely aware of the extent to which the system is rigged against them. Consequently, many of these women knew that the classical ideals of resistance and “empowerment” could not apply to them. Instead, they sought a different kind of empowerment all their own — a defensive empowerment, one that endured less-than-ideal conditions specifically so as to not draw the ire of people and forces that could make their lives even more miserable. While counter-intuitive to many academic audiences, these women had the foresight to know that in their position of relative powerlessness, the surest chance for success was to not try to fight. Rather than trying to claim more control from institutions that were more powerful, they maintained what little control they had so that these institutions would interfere in their lives and work as little as possible.

By linking the vast literatures on immigration and state power with an empirical, comparative case study, my research intervenes in long-standing academic debates on the role of states in the lives of migrant workers. In dissecting the intersectionality of how the large-scale forces in the maid trade become real and tangible, I adjudicate between prior research that has either stressed domestic workers’ individual agency, or the macro-structures oppressing them. The key to understanding the persistence of exploitation and abuse, I argue, is finding where the large-scale institutional systems manifest in the day-to-day lives of domestic workers, employers, and even authority figures.