Narrating the New World Domestic Order

Abstract

A few decades ago, no one predicted that we would see a resurgence of paid domestic work, and that this resurgence would not only be played out on global scale, but that it would depend on mechanisms of globalization and international migration. Most observers confidently declared that nails were in coffin of paid domestic work. Not only have we seen a resurgence of private paid domestic work in United States, England, in Europe and Canada - the old industrialized North, but also in more newly industrialized, or post-industrial nations of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan; in oil rich nations of Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates (Israel has come on line as well). Particular parts of globe have emerged as places producing migrant domestic workers. We have witnessed internal and international migration of female domestic workers in and from Latin America, Asia, South Asia, and now formerly Soviet Eastern European countries. Not only as paid domestic work not gone away, we see that today it relies on global migration of women, among whom are many women who leave their families to do work.