alex mackenzie laing 44317148

"Under contemporary globalization, [the sexual division of labour] has undergirded the ‘global care chain’, wherein women from poor countries migrate to richer countries to care for children and the elderly.

Moghadam, V. M. (2021) What was globalization?, p. 700

That elder-care institutions and private households should be staffed by women from poor countries at low wages is but part of the logic (or ideology) of contemporary capitalism."

I chose this quotation for its definition of the global care chain, a chain experienced and carried out by many Filipina women who migrate to Hong Kong and Canada to work as caregivers. This is how my grandmother came from Dumaguete to Chicago in the 1950s to work as a nurse.

Was the global care chain driven by tension in core countries between desire for women to enter the workforce, and capitalist pressure to either entirely maintain or entirely abandon the gendered work of child-rearing?

If "the relationship between man and woman mirrors that of bourgeois and proletarian" (Moghadam 2021), does that imply educated Western women (the actors and beneficiaries of second-wave feminism) have formed an aristocracy of labour?

Q.

I grew up in a household with two white-collar working lawyer parents. Edna, the woman who raised me, had previously been a domestic worker in Hong Kong. She spoke rarely about how her previous host family had mistreated her. She spent years separated from her children until she was able to bring them to Canada.

Would my childhood and my relationship to my parents have changed if they hadn't had to choose between raising me and their careers?

In 2017, 300 of Hong Kong's domestic workers organised under United Filipinas of Hong Kong and marched for better working conditions.

They had wanted to march on International Women's Day, but May 8th fell on a Wednesday that year. They instead gave up their one day off of the week and marched the previous Sunday.

Conditions and labour rights for domestic workers in Hong Kong are infamously poor. However, specific points of contention are familiar to caregivers working in Canada: pressure to live in-house, residency status tied to your employer family's attitude, dehumanization, vulnerability to immigration scams, minimal support from their home country.

Under globalization, "the goal of women’s empowerment [can] hardly be expected to encompass all women" (Moghadam 2021); "highly-educated and professional women" can choose not to face the issue of reproductive labour, and instead offload it as a paid service.