Migrant domestic workers
Open-knowledge reference entry
Migrant domestic workers are (according to the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 189 and the International Organization for Migration) any persons "moving to another country or region to better their material or social conditions and improve the prospect for themselves or their family," engaged in a work relationship performing "in or for a household or households."
Domestic work itself encompasses an array of tasks and services that vary depending on country, age, gender, ethnic background and migration status of the workers involved.
Prominent discussions on the topic include the status of workers, reasons behind the pursue in this labour, recruitment and employment practices in the field, and various measures being undertaken to change the conditions of domestic work among migrants.
Migrant domestic workers in the world
The status of migrant domestic workers is unique in the field of labor, due to the site of their employment: the home. The domestic sphere, by definition, "is imagined as a place for private individuals, not political or indeed market actors." Due to their embeddedness in what can be considered the "private sphere", some analysts have gone so far as to equate domestic laborers with members of the employers’ families, a dynamic made all the more complex by these workers' status as migrants. Historically, they have not been regarded as the same form of labor as manufacturers or doctors. From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1980s, for instance, "most ILO Conventions explicitly excluded domestic workers from the protections afforded by most employment Conventions."
The lack of knowledge concerning the composition of this workforce has been attributed to this historical lack of attention and advocacy. Current estimates place the number of domestics anywhere between 53 and 100 million. The ILO, in 2010, projected the following distribution of domestic workers throughout the world:
Source: Domestic workers across the world: Global and regional statistics and the extent of legal protection, International Labour Organization. Geneva.
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This entry incorporates text from “Migrant domestic workers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.