Domestic Workers In Singapore Research Articles

Love Gain: The Transformation of Intimacy among Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore

Previous scholarship on the transformation of intimacy among foreign domestic workers has focused mainly on the care/love drain on the children left behind in workers’ countries of origin. It has neglected the ways in which individual domestic workers struggle to gain love and care in destination countries. Among foreign domestic workers who have extended their stays partly because of their bonds with boyfriends, partners, or even “husbands” working in Singapore, the care drain widely observed among the families of foreign domestic workers in their home countries can be coupled not only with monetary gain but also in some instances with a gain in love and care for the foreign domestic workers themselves. A decade of participant observation and qualitative interviews, conducted mainly with domestic workers, also indicated that intimacies are also shaped by Singaporean policies on foreign domestic workers and by the strong economic demand from their families back home.

The Use of Mobile Phone and Internet in Transnational Mothering Among Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

The present study investigates the use of ICTs, particularly mobile phone and internet, among female migrant domestic workers in Singapore for transnational mothering. Through survey and interviews or focus group discussions to 11 Filipino and 11 Indonesian domestic workers, we found that ICTs played a critical role in their child rearing practices. Despite the distance, ICTs enabled them to be closely involved in their children’s routines, get updates about their studies, and even set rules and ensure that they are observed. ICTs were able to partially alleviate their worries about their children, build and maintain intimacies through jokes and frequent communication. While mobile phone was still most preferred for its convenience and voice function, new technologies, such as Facebook and video chat, played a complementary role to, rather than replacing, mobile phone. Facebook allowed them to check on their children’s friends, while video chat combined the benefits of simultaneously talking to and seeing their children. However, ICTs were no substitute to physical presence in which their limited abilities to bridge time and space was magnified when their children fell sick or felt sad. Barriers to the use of ICTs still exist, most commonly in the form of infrastructural barriers in their home countries and employers’ restrictions. Considering the importance of ICT use in connecting with their families and children, governments should push for greater access to ICTs for domestic workers, not only in providing mobile phone handsets, but more importantly, in ensuring the rights to contact their families regularly.

The Politics of Mirrored Metaphors: Flor Contemplacion and The Maid

The article investigates the disjunctive mirroring of images and representations through films that evoke the larger socioeconomic and political relations between Singapore and the Philippines. The two films analyzed are about related plights of Filipina domestic workers in Singapore, whose body, labor, and travel provide the nexus for illumination of the cultural politics of representation of the self and other. The sense of self and identity in film alludes to the larger polity in which Philippine and Singaporean self-representations quote and implicate the other. What then becomes interestingly poised is that the representations do not necessarily dialogue, more so ending in a failure of engagement. Partly coded in myth making, the representation of the self in films and binational polity is distinguished from the authority of the other, initially foregrounding then later abjecting the conditions in which the other can render visible the self. The article calls for an abandoning of essentialism, vulgarities, and cultural misrepresentation for a genuine dialogue to ensue.

The ‘other’ looks back: racial distancing and racial alignment in migrant domestic workers' stereotypes about white and Chinese employers

While the racial and ethnic stereotyping practised by the employers of migrant domestic workers has received significant scholarly attention, these workers' racial essentializations of their employers have been largely ignored. Drawing upon interviews with Filipino migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong, I present findings concerning the racial stereotypes these workers hold about white and Chinese employers. This stereotyping involves both racial distancing from local Chinese employers and racial alignment with expatriate white employers. This two-track racial project is a defensive tactic that allows Filipino workers to redefine themselves as occupying a higher position in the global racial order (as they see it) on cultural grounds. However, it also makes them complicit in naturalizing legacy stereotypes that valorize whites as morally and culturally superior. In addition, it encourages them to privilege the West as an idealized destination where they fantasize they will enjoy comfortable working conditions from local white employers.

Performances across Time and Space: Drama in the Global Households of Filipina Transmigrant Workers

AbstractThe separation of transnational domestic workers from their kinship households and their inclusion into new ones is a conflict situation that creates social drama. Contradictions in their positions in these two global households highlight this drama, for example, in their contrasting roles as breadwinners in one household and as domestic workers in the other, as transnational mothers and live‐in caregivers, and as international migrants and domestically confined workers. In this article, I employ Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach, particularly “contrived” and “real” performances, to examine the everyday performances of migrant workers across time and space, that is, vis‐à‐vis their contradictory roles as breadwinners in their left‐behind kinship households in the Philippines and as “maids” in their co‐residential global households in Singapore, over a period of time. I offer the time‐performance continuum loop as a context explaining the variations of domestic workers’ performances. This model captures the initial years of employment as overwhelming the migrants with hardships and poor performances whereas long‐term employment as equipping them with mastery in their performances. My research draws from conventional ethnographic fieldwork among Filipina domestic workers in Singapore, supplemented by a virtual ethnography in an online forum among Singapore employers.

Identity Management among Indonesian and Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

AbstractThis study examines how the identities of migrant domestic workers are likely to be endangered and how these individuals struggle to reconstitute them. It is largely based on an interview and observational study with Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. Inspired by the sociological discussion of Goffman and Ishikawa, the study reveals how each migrant domestic worker manages her identity in her specific social context. This study shows that domestic workers contrive tactics to negotiate their situations, given that domestic work is considered a low prestige occupation and workers tend to be divested of the usual “identity kit” to make up their identity front. Specifically, to compensate for their discredited status, domestic workers attempt to reconstitute their damaged identity, obtain a new identity kit, recall previous social and family roles, or anticipate a future identity. They also attempt to acquire new skills and increase their value, so they can identify themselves as more than “just a maid.” They obtain additional roles in an attempt to change how they feel about themselves, to alter the meaning of being a domestic worker, and to redefine their relationships with others either by individual struggles or through collective activities. This study also points out a possible pitfall of identity management among the actors. The mechanism of identity politics might lead to an erosion of value, alienation from other domestic workers, and a strengthening of conventional stereotypes and generalizations regarding ethnicity, nationality, and gender. In this context, how non‐governmental organizations play a role in mitigating the pitfalls of identity management among domestic workers is also examined.

Managing Female Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore: Economic Pragmatism, Coercive Legal Regulation, or Human Rights?

Singapore's immigration discourse is deeply influenced by its need to “right-size” its population. As a society that has and remains in need of immigration, contemporary immigration and globalization have rigorously challenged the conventional thinking and understanding of citizenship, as well as notions of who belongs and who does not. Nevertheless, international marriages and pervasive in-and out-migration for purposes of employment, study, and family, conspire to make more pronounced the decoupling of citizenship and residence in Singapore. This transnational dimension sits uncomfortably with the policy makers' desire for, and the imperatives of, state sovereignty, control, and jurisdiction.Although one quarter of people living in Singapore are foreigners, concerns of human rights and justice are largely peripheral, if not absent from the immigration discourse. This is seen most clearly in employment issues pertaining to foreign female domestic workers (FDWs), most of who come from other parts of Southeast Asia. ‘Rights talk’ is largely absent even as activists seek to engage the key stakeholders through the subtle promotion of rights for such workers.The government, however, has resisted framing the FDW issues as one of rights but instead has focused on promotional efforts that seek to enhance the regulatory framework. This dovetails with the reality that immigration law also functions as quasi-family law in which the freedom of FDWs and other foreign menial workers to marry Singapore citizens and permanent residents are severely restricted. As such, the immigration regime's selectivity functions as a draconian gatekeeper. Justice and human rights are but tangential concerns.

Strategies of Resistance among Filipina and Indonesian Domestic Workers in Singapore

This paper presents the analysis of interviews with Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore regarding their strategies of resistance in response to exploitation and coercion by employment agencies, employers, the Singaporean public, and kin and family members in their home countries. Many strategies identified in previous studies about domestic workers' resistance/negotiation elsewhere might not be applicable in Singapore because of greater surveillance and stricter regulations there. Various strategies noted in this study are likely to be more subtle and inconspicuous. Although these women are rendered victims by the global economic system, they have developed various strategies to protect themselves. This study also discusses the relative and fluid position of vulnerability among domestic workers of different nationalities.

GENDER AND THE REMITTANCE PROCESS

This study explores and suggests a methodological approach to the gender dimensions of remittances. It argues that remittances should be seen as a social process and examined in relation to (i) the sending side, (ii) the recipient side and (iii) gendered use of remittances by the households. Focusing on Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, and migrant households in Central Java, it explores the gender dimensions of remittance-sending, receiving, control and use, and their development implications. Despite their lower incomes, female domestic workers remit a greater share of their earnings than their male counterparts; they tend to remit to their mothers and sisters rather than to fathers, brothers and husbands. Close to half of the recipients exercise discretion over the use of remittances; female recipients tend to use remittances to invest in human capital and male recipients, in physical capital.

MIGRANT WORKERS AND THE MANY STATES OF PROTEST IN HONG KONG

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”

Civil Society Action and the Creation of “Transformative” Spaces for Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

Civil Society Action and the Creation of “Transformative” Spaces for Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore

Transient Workers Count Too? The Intersection of Citizenship and Gender in Singapore´ s Civil Society

In November 2002, a group of Singaporean activists established a group called The Working Committee 2 (TWC2) to advocate for the rights of foreign domestic workers in Singapore. By limiting both its lifespan and the scope of its activities, the TWC2 avoided the requirement that all NGOs formally register under the Singapore Registrar of Societies. At the end of its year-long campaign, however, the group signalled its intention to continue with its advocacy work. The new TWC2 (row called Transient Workers Count Too) was registered in August 2004. For some commentators, the TWC2 represents a new phase in the People's Action Party's (PAP) engagement with Singapore's civil society experiment and a loosening up of the OB markers (boundaries marking politically acceptable activism). An examination of the TWC2's experience, however, shows that the opportunities for Singaporean activists to address the politically fraught issues of citizenship and gender remain little changed, Nonetheless, the TWC2's success in raising the profile of foreign domestic workers has brought about some significant improvements in the regulatory regime governing the conditions of maid employment.

Errata Corrige

The title of the article of Avanti Iyer, Theresa W. Devasahayam and Brenda S.A. Yeoh in APMJ, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2004, p.11, should have read “A Clean Bill of Health?: Filipinas as Domestic Workers in Singapore.” We apologize for the error.

A Clean Bill of Health: Filipinas as Domestic Workers in Singapore

This paper describes foreign domestic workers' (FDWs) vulnerability in Singapore. Due to the lack of regulatory laws mandating employers to pay health care costs and FDW ineligibility for national plans given their transient contract labor status, FDWs depend on employer generosity to provide for this need. Presently, the state's interest only includes particular aspects of FDW “health.” The argument here is that the discourse of perceiving FDWs as sexual ‘bodies' and transmitters of other infectious diseases is a metaphor for how the state perceives them — useful to Singapore for economic gains as long as they do not bring on costs.

What the Papers Say

This article explores the case of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipino domestic worker in Singapore who was sentenced to death in 1995 for the supposed murder of a young boy. The totally different versions of the case presented by the media, especially the Singapore and Philippine presses, are explored. Violence against overseas domestic workers has long been acknowledged in sociological research. However, previous media analyses of the Contemplacion case have not addressed such violence. Here, negotiation of gender discourse in media meanings of violence with respect to the Contemplacion case is presented, thereby bringing a different approach to media and cultural analysis of the case, and contributing more generally to the dearth of media analyses of gender and violence. The article endeavors to show how media and nationalist discourses are inextricably interwoven and felt politically in the lives of Contemplacion, the other individuals involved, other overseas domestic contract workers in Singapore and their employers, and media audiences.

Negotiating Public Space: Strategies and Styles of Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Singapore

This paper investigates migrant domestic workers as a marginalised group in Singapore's urban landscape by examining the ways in which their social maps are structured and negotiated in relation to public space. It argues that the phenomenon of the 'divided city' evident in capitalist societies which reflects and reinforces the sexual division of labour in general is even more salient in the lived experiences of migrant female domestic workers who must contend not simply with the spatial expressions of patriarchy, but also with racialisation and other means of segregation. However, it is clear that these women are not entirely passive recipients of dominant practices and ideas, but are capable of different styles and strategies in the use, colonisation and even contestation of public domains.

Foreign domestic workers in Singapore.

"This paper discusses the regulatory and economic context of Filipina migration into domestic waged labor in Singapore. It places this migration in the history of female rural-urban migration as well as the history of domestic labor in Singapore. Finally, it raises the question as to why domestic waged labor has persisted in the global capitalist economy."

Victims in the Shadow of the Law: A Critique of the Model of Legal Protection

The twentieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act marked the end of an era of uncertain progress. Despite dramatic victories in constitutional litigation and the visibility of group-based struggles, civil rights strategies had limited success in initiating major economic and social change.' The limited progress has prompted a new sense of realism among groups who experience discrimination-a sense of how little the situation has changed even though overt prejudice may be less prevalent. The modest progress of the civil rights movement has not made "rights-focused" struggles unattractive, however; in fact, there is a proliferation of civil rights strategies

Masculine Cities and Feminine Suburbs: Polarized Ideas, Contradictory Realities

"Cities" and "suburbs," "men" and "women," are names of categories that encompass individual entities which are, in many ways, as different from each other as they are similar. Yet, because the commonalities that do exist are, for various reasons, important to us, we find the labels meaningful. In this paper, I will try to deal with three related uses of the words "women," "men," "suburbs," and "cities." First, they are symbols that our culture has construed as polar opposites: the city against the suburb, men against women. We have gone on to link the city with men, the suburbs with women. Next, they are both symbols and actual events in the lives of contemporary Americans who talk about themselves. Finally, they are the subjects of statistical descriptions of the distribution of people of various racial and socioeconomic groups in different residential locations, household types, and jobs. The pictures that emerge from each type of data-the cultural, the introspective self-report, and the demographic-have a certain apparent consistency. Yet, taken together, contradictions between symbols, lived experience, and demographic description become obvious.