Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life International Perspectives

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine. Combining legal, sociological and social policy perspectives, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to international and national legal frameworks, the political economy of globalised reproductive labour, and the experience and coping strategies of migrant domestic and care workers. Highlighting constructed, ideological and imagined responses to life away from home, it offers theoretical, empirical and international perspectives on the right to a family life. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, it focuses in particular on the voices of migrant domestic workers and their positioning as active subjects with agency to articulate their needs and claims.

Maria Kontos is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Social Research, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and is a lecturer at the same university. She has published on migration and integration policy, migration and gender, welfare policy and care, with publications including Self-Employment of Women and Minorities; Women in New Migrations; Paradoxes of Integration.

Glenda Tibe Bonifacio is an associate professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Lethbrige, Canada. She is the author of Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities, and editor of Feminism and Migration: Cross-cultural Engagements.

1. Introduction: Domestic and Care Work of Migrant Women and the Right to Family life; Maria Kontos; Glenda Tibe Bonifacio
I. FRAMING LEGALITIES, EMPLOYMENT, AND FAMILY RIGHTS
2. Transnational Domestic Work and Right to Family Life in International and European Law; Dorothee Frings
3. Au pair Arrangement in Norway and Transnational Organization of Care; Mariya Bikova
4. License to Care? Migrant Domestic Workers in Spanish Employment and Family Policy; Elin Peterson
5. Invisibility, Exploitation and Paternalism: Migrant Latina Domestic Workers and Rights to Family Life in Barcelona, Spain; Gabriela Poblet Denti
II. PUBLIC DISCOURSE, FAMILY SEPARATION AND REUNIFICATION
6. Growing Up with Migration: Shifting Roles and Responsibilities of Transnational Families of Ukrainian Careworkers in Italy; Olena Fedyuk
7. Family Rights in a Migratory Context: Whose Family Comes First?; Magdalena Díaz Gorfinkiel
8. Live-in Caregivers in Canada: Servitude for Promisory Citizenship and Family Rights; Glenda Tibe Bonifacio
III. REMOTE MOTHERING, SURVIVAL STRATEGIES, AND MOBILIZATION
9. Reinventing Intimacy and Identity: Filipina Domestic Workers' Strategies for Coping with Family Separation in Dubai; Julia Lausch
10. Renegotiating Family and Work Arrangements: Paraguayan and Peruvian Domestic Workers in Argentina; Aranzazu Recalde
11. In the Grips of Work/Family Imbalance: Local and Migrant Domestic Workers in Slovenia; Majda Hrženjak; Mojca Pajnik
12. Transnational Family as Resource for Political Mobilization; Valerie Francisco
IV. THE METAPHOR OF 'FAMILY MEMBER'
13. Struggling to Make Time for Family: Work and Family Life of Korean-Chinese Institutional Care Workers in South Korea; Seong-gee Um
14. Being a Member of the Family? Meanings and Implications in Paid Migrant Domestic and Care Work in Madrid; Marianne Dobner; Simone Tappert
15. 'Weekend families' of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon; Amrita Pande
16. Right to Family Life and Reciprocity of Care: Prospects for Care of Aging Migrant Carers; Maria Kontos
Epilogue: The Meaning of Rights to Family Life; Glenda Tibe Bonifacio; Maria Kontos