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Servants of globalization : women, migration, and domestic work

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  • Date:
    Issued
    2014
    Summary:

    Servants of Globalization is a poignant and often troubling study of migrant Filipina domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the mothering and caretaking work of the global economy in countries throughout the world. It specifically focuses on the emergence of parallel lives among such workers in the cities of Rome and Los Angeles, two main destinations for Filipina migration. The book is largely based on interviews with domestic workers, but the book also powerfully portrays the larger economic picture as domestic workers from developing countries increasingly come to perform the menial labor of the global economy. This is often done at great cost to the relations with their own split-apart families. The experiences of migrant Filipina domestic workers are also shown to entail a feeling of exclusion from their host society, a downward mobility from their professional jobs in the Philippines, and an encounter with both solidarity and competition from other migrant workers in their communities.

    Contents:
    • Introduction: Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers in Rome and Los Angeles
    • 1. The Dislocations of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers
    • 2. The Philippines and the Outflow of Labor
    • 3. The International Division of Reproductive Labor
    • 4. The Transnational Family: A Postindustrial Household Structure with Preindustrial Values
    • 5. Intergenerational and Gender Relations in Transnational Families
    • 6. Contradictory Class Mobility: The Politics of Domestic Work in Globalization
    • 7. The Dislocation of Nonbelonging: Domestic Workers in the Filipino Migrant Communities of Rome and Los Angeles
    • Conclusion: Servants of Globalization: Different Settings, Parallel Lives.
    Original Publisher: Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2001
    Language(s): English