Mobilities and moralities of domestic work in Indonesian cities

Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde, 2019

Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities

In the informal sector of metropolitan India, the participation of women domestic workers is steadily increasing. Women participate in domestic work to protect family interests and solve economic crises. Employers compel maximum work from domestic workers with the bare minimum of hospitality. If we consider domestic work on a global scale, it is a solution to the problem of women in the economic system. Domestic work is unorganized, unrewarding, and unrecognized for domestic workers. Women are migrating to domestic work in greater numbers every day, but there is a crucial need to consider their living conditions. Normally, most of the migrant population lives in slums. Migrants in domestic work and women are now a predominant research area for social sciences. This research aims to examine the lifeworld of women domestic workers.

2018

Comparative studies in Society and History, 2003

Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2020

This thesis analyzes female urban practices, their mobility patterns and their urban perception emphasizing domestic labour. Regarding conventional wisdom which domestic labour relates to the private sphere, female domestic labour has been considered as “invisible”; however, this thesis investigates female domestic workers’ visibility in the public sphere and spatiality in the city because female domestic labour may be seen as the most suitable site to observe all new forms of class and production of spaces. Considering Turkey’s on-going economic, political structure and cultural/political attitude toward women, discussing female domestic workers and their daily practices across the city have ever been so noteworthy. Drawing on qualitative research in Ankara, Turkey through in-depth interviews, this thesis will attempt to investigate urban and spatial practices of women in domestic labour by tracking their daily mobilities. By following 32 women’s urban and daily mobility patterns, their urban stories will be narrated and examined.

COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a post-pandemic world, 2022

While extensive and far-reaching, the COVID-19 pandemic did not impact all nations-or all people-equally. Within Singapore, a country that was lauded, at least initially, for its exemplary approach to controlling the pandemic (Teo 2020), the ways in which the virus ultimately spread through the city-state exposed existing inequalities and injustices in its migrant worker populations, with construction workers' dormitories becoming the epicentre of the nation's outbreaks. This chapter engages directly with these injustices to demonstrate how migrant domestic workers were impacted by the global pandemic, particularly by the 'circuit-breaker' measures enforced by the Singaporean state. 1 As such, it argues three core points. First, that many domestic workers were subjected to increased surveillance and bodily control during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the home space becoming the centre of this. Second, that many migrant workers experienced a removal of their rights and increased immobility. Finally, this chapter argues that, for many domestic workers, there was very little change to their circumstances, with the notion of the 'new normal' requiring further interrogation. Indeed, this chapter ultimately suggests that the experiences of populations who ordinarily experience prolonged confinement need further consideration if we are to achieve more just and equitable futures for all post-COVID-19. Significantly, this chapter was written while I was living under restrictions in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, the interviews and informal conversations on which it is based were conducted online with domestic workers, activists, and NGO workers/volunteers with whom I had existing relationships following prolonged ethnographic fieldwork between June 2016 and December 2017. Knowing How to cite this book chapter:

Asia Pacific Social Science Review, 2015

The Informal Economy Revisited, 2020

Global Labour Journal, 2019

In the last two decades, there has been a deluge of writing across social science disciplines on the issue of paid domestic work. This change was much needed as, for a long time, at the level of both theory and labour politics there has been a dearth of engagement with this occupation due to its peculiar nature: in domestic work, the "employer" is not a profit-making firm but a private household, and the workplace is not a factory or public site but an upper-class or middle-class home. This change can also be attributed to the fact that under neo-liberal capitalism paid domestic work, among other precarious occupations, is one of the activities that has significantly increased in size. As domestic workers-who are overwhelmingly women-in different parts of the world go on making history by gaining labour rights for themselves, one is forced to ask: how have some of the most marginalised workers managed to achieve what, at one point, seemed impossible. Jennifer N. Fish's Domestic Workers of the World Unite: A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights is a timely intervention in this regard. A sociologist with more than a decade-long association with domestic workers' movements, Fish presents a rich analysis of the making of what she calls the "global domestic workers' movement" and the movement's success in gaining recognition for domestic workers in the form of International Labour Organization (ILO) convention C189 on domestic work. Primarily drawing on the "life narratives of domestic workers" across the world, the key question the book engages with is "how workers at the grassroot level used a formal UN system to codify an identity and secure their labour rights" (p. 8). The question of how the workers used a formal body like the United Nations to win a legitimate and legal identity for themselves is a critical one because domestic workers were never considered "workers"-be it in the national labour laws of different countries or the organised labour movements. The story of the global domestic workers' movement is presented through seven chapters. The first two chapters trace the history of the domestic workers' movement from both global and national standpoints. By virtue of working behind closed doors of homes, domestic workers have been seen as difficult to organise. Fish powerfully captures the personal moments of individual domestic workers in which they questioned the invisibility they were subjected to and decided to transform it by organising workers in their local areas. It is these "small" efforts by women domestic workers themselves in different parts of the world that eventually culminated in a "global movement". Chapter Three shows how these impossible-to-organise workers and the groups representing them managed to find innovative ways to organise and represent themselves before the ILO. Getting a fair representation of the workers' voices on their prospective rights was key, as the conditions and standards of domestic work were different in different countries. In other words, one could not speak of one homogeneous experience. Furthermore, the obstacles in