The Neoliberal State and the domestic workers' movement in New York City

• Published in: Canadian woman studies 2003-04, Vol.22 (3/4), p.79
• Main Author: Gupta, Monisha Das
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children; Colonialism; Domestic service; Immigrant women; Immigrants; Immigration; Labor law; Laws & regulations; Migrant workers; Occupations; Older people; Parents & parenting; Rights; Social change; Women
• ISSN: 0713-3235

This paper examines the claim that the U.S. takes a "laissez-faire" approach to the immigration of domestic workers compared to Canada, Hong Kong, or Singapore which formally regulate the entry of domestic workers and the terms of their residence in those countries ([Hondagneu-Sotelo]). The American approach, according to Hondagneu-Sotelo, "represents an opportunity [for domestic workers] to seek better job conditions" (22). However, to read the lack of a coherent set of policies that specifically govern immigrant domestic workers as the absence of the U.S. state from the enterprise of importing women to do domestic work would be to overlook the multiple ways in which the U.S. neoliberal state brokers and profits from the trafficking of impoverished and displaced "Third World" women to "First World" spaces (see [Grace Chang] 2000, 1997). In the process of brokering, the American state cheapens these women's labour to address the crisis in carework it creates by retreating from its welfare commitments. That women make as little as $200 per month for 18-hour days seven days a week speaks to the intensity of their exploitation. The beneficiaries of the state's attempts at providing super-affordable careworkers are those middle-class households made up of productive, contributing, and consuming "citizens," among them South Asian immigrants who are able to execute their state-assigned role as hardworking and successful model minorities on the backs of grossly underpaid South Asian domestics.(1) Neither the presence of South Asian domestic workers nor these women's pioneering organizing efforts has been documented or analyzed in scholarship about South Asian immigrants to the U.S., even though it is a signi-ficant development both in terms of non-traditional labour organizing and making visible class disparities within a community that is considered to be evenly affluent. This research is part of a larger project mapping South Asian social change policies in the U.S. (Das Gupta). The entry of South Asian women as domestic workers in the U.S. is relatively new, compared to the presence of Filipina, Caribbean, and Mexican women whose countries of origin have been historically enmeshed in relations of subordination forged by U.S. colonialism and neocolonialism. South Asian domestic workers in New York City are recruited locally and from their homelands through methods that seem to depend on individual networks and market forces of supply and demand. These methods o