After two years of planning with her husband how the
household would be managed without her, 34-year-old Arini (name changed) has
finally managed make the trip from her remote village in West Java all the way
to Singapore to work as a domestic worker or maid. There are many like her from Indonesia
working as domestic workers in other countries including Saudi Arabia, Singapore,
Taiwan and Malaysia. The numbers are
vast, nearly five million by one estimate, and they seem to be growing. Like many others, Arini migrated through an
agent who found her a job and paid the costs of her migration up front, costs
that she must repay by working without any salary for the first eight months of
her assignment.
Across the globe in Ethiopia, the story is somewhat
different for Abeba (name changed) who ran away from her village in the drought-prone
Amhara region at the age of 15. First she went to the nearest town, worked
there as a cleaner until she had saved enough to try her luck in Addis Ababa.
Her plan was to save money to migrate to Djibouti or the Middle East where thousands
of women and girls have migrated to work as maids. Abeba first got a job in
Addis Ababa working for a distant relative but left after they refused to pay
her. She found another job through an agent, in a house where she was groped
and harassed until she left. In the city she had to live by her wits, continually
searching for a place to live and a job that was safe and fair, where she could
work and save. The work was hard and payment was poor; sometimes she did not
even get paid. She eventually saved enough to pay an agent to migrate to
Djibouti.
Both Arini and Abeba are working as domestic workers. ILO
research shows that the 53 million domestic workers worldwide are predominantly
female and from poor and socially excluded communities. The working conditions are tough – limits on
personal freedom, long working hours and being unable to leave because of debt-bondage.
The ILO identifies domestic work as one of the sectors that is most likely to
involve forced labour and slavery. The
public discourse on slavery and domestic work imagine domestic workers with
almost no agency; their minds are controlled and their bodies are enslaved and
the conclusion seems to be that they must be rescued from this awful fate.
But a look at the process from the perspective of migrant
girls and women tells another story altogether. Arini wanted to migrate so that
her family could enjoy the material comforts that her migrant neighbours have. She
wanted her daughter to attend the best school and to make sure that her family
did not want for anything. This was a choice she and her husband made together
to raise their standard of living. Like many others, she comes from a
subsistence farming household where incomes are not enough to provide for the
family all year round and where material and educational aspirations have been
fuelled and enabled by a history of migration. They hope that migration will
enable them to escape the endless hard work and poverty associated with
subsistence agriculture.
Abeba’s decision to leave the village, a place and a
cultural context that she perceived as dead-end and degrading, was clearly a
voluntary act; an example of agency in the face of limited choices. She ran away from home because her family
wanted her to marry at 15. Having been forced to leave school at 12 to work on
the family’s failing farm, and with a marriage to a local man arranged for her,
she could see how her future would be, and she didn’t like what she saw. To
her, life in the city meant freedom, offering her choices of how she lived,
dressed, ate and where she worked, despite its many risks. Living in this way was
preferable to having her destiny sealed by her parents.
The risks are clearly numerous for such migrants, but for
many poor people, migration offers the opportunity to earn more that they would
at home and the ability to invest in businesses, land, material security and
education. For many women migration also offers them a rare opportunity to earn
money of their own, achieve independence and take control over their lives.
This is often overlooked in the international debate on migrant domestic
workers. The importance of jobs such as domestic work to the social mobility,
development and freedom of poor women is hidden under the preoccupation with
ideal (and important) employment conditions.
Migration and employment in sectors such as domestic work
are sometimes labelled as slavery and forced labour. However, they remain among the most
important pathways of social mobility for many poor women and can be considerably
less degrading than other alternatives.
Priya Deshingkar is the Research Director of the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium.
