Domestic work, care, and gender-based violence: Towards a non-carceral approach to migrant domestic workers’ rights
Green square with stylised light yellow writing & graphics that say Francesca on migrant domestic workers’ rights
By Francesca Humi
The conversation on migrant domestic workers’ rights is dominated by a focus on modern-day slavery and anti-trafficking. The more progressive approaches to migrant domestic workers’ rights often come from the migrant justice movement, however, it has yet to become a key abolitionist issue. But what would it mean to consider the exploitation and abuse many domestic workers face as a particular form of gender-based violence? More importantly, what can abolitionists learn from domestic worker organising and community responses to harm?
Migrant domestic workers’ rights and the “New Abolitionist” framework
On Sundays, at a social centre in East London, members of the United Domestic Workers’ Association (UDWA) gather over a shared meal to offer each other support – ranging from sourcing clothes for new rescues to sharing contacts of trustworthy solicitors. I join them for some of their meetings to help organise workshops or field questions about navigating British immigration policy, in particular the Overseas Domestic Worker visa, through which many of them arrived in the UK. This visa, which was drastically changed by Theresa May in 2012, ties individual workers to their employers without the right to switch to a different visa once in-country, sponsor their family to join them here, or apply for leave to remain (unless they can successfully claim asylum). Under this system, workers are treated like accessories to their employers’ lifestyle – brought across borders, sometimes without their knowledge or consent, to provide domestic work. Once in the UK, workers report exploitative working conditions and high rates of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse – including withheld wages, lack of food, and no time off. Some are able to escape and rebuild their lives with the help of organisations like the Voice of Domestic Workers, Kalayaan, Waling Waling, and UDWA (formerly Filipino Domestic Workers Association), the latter with whom I have been organising and volunteering with for several years.
The current mainstream approach to exploitation migrant domestic workers face has broadly fallen within the modern-day slavery and human trafficking industrial complex, made up of Government-appointed advisors, agencies, and taskforces, which include the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, and Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, as well as specialised charities, funders, and law firms. This approach compares conditions faced by migrant domestic workers to the slave trade, as a way of getting the maximum number of people onside. These organisations and institutions do not necessarily specialise in supporting migrant domestic workers, but rather have absorbed this issue under the umbrella cause of modern-day slavery, erasing the particular racial, labour, and gendered-dynamics at play – including what it would mean to consider it as a particular form of gender-based violence. Emily Kenway describes this “New Abolitionist” framework (referring to the 19th movement for the abolition of slavery in Europe and North American) in her book, The Truth about Modern Slavery. The modern slavery approach to labour exploitation became national policy through the establishment of the NRM through the UK Government’s ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings in 2009 and the creation of the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. The NRM is an independent body dedicated to determining whether someone has been a victim of modern-day slavery or human trafficking. It has been widely criticised for its lack of support to survivors, but it is also incredibly detrimental to survivors. I saw first-hand how this approach re-traumatised migrant domestic workers: the state’s focus on proof and documentation, because of its criminal justice approach, placed the burden on workers to recount their experiences, in great detail and with little aftercare. In 2022, I supported a worker who had decided to go through the NRM so that she could start her journey towards regularisation, after being undocumented for nearly five years. She was told she would have to give evidence to police as her experiences with her previous employers were considered a criminal offense. The prospect of talking to police terrified her: her employers had threatened her with reporting her to the police throughout her time with them. Just taking a call from the police made her panic. I coached her to help her prepare for the police interview and pushed for her to have an interpreter present. I accompanied her to the interview: she recounted in detail the story I had watched her recount so many times before, tears streaming down her face. The cop took notes, handed her tissues, and at the end thanked us for our time. We went for lunch to decompress and made arrangements for her to have a session with a therapist at Kanlungan. A few months later, the police called her and told her they wouldn’t be pursuing the case any further, as her employer was no longer in the UK (as we had explained since the beginning). The whole ordeal was pointless.
This “New Abolitionist” approach places domestic workers’ rights outside of the realm of worker solidarity–it focuses on extreme cases of exploitation (how could anyone frame their own issues with work on the same spectrum?) by rogue employers, framed as exceptionally evil or abusive, and therefore requiring individualised criminal punishment to prevent further abuse. There is also a racist dimension to this characterisation, with ‘New Abolitionists’ keen to highlight the similarities of the visa to the kefala system, therefore painting this exploitation as fundamentally “un-British”. This framework upholds individual narratives of exploited workers, often Filipino women, as innocent and powerless victims of evil bosses, thereby obscuring any systemic or structural analysis of work or border regimes. This enables the likes of Princess Eugenie and Theresa May to style themselves as anti-modern-day slavery champions – despite the latter being the architect of the abusive system migrant domestic workers find themselves trapped in today, and the former a member of an institution that profited from and helped establish the transatlantic slave trade.
The carceral approach put forward by the ‘modern-day slavery industrial complex’ focuses on punishing the perpetrator rather than being centred on what migrant domestic workers actually want and need for a life of safety and dignity: the right to work and settle in the UK, with the possibility of sponsoring their family to come join them–none of which they can do under the Overseas Domestic Worker visa. In short, domestic workers want to be treated like any other (migrant) worker. This points to another problem with the current approach: it fails to consider domestic workers as workers and the abuse they experience as symptomatic of severe labour exploitation under capitalism. Punishing employers (who often claim diplomatic immunity) does not empower workers, nor does it create systemic change; however unionising, collective bargaining, and material improvements to working conditions can. The modern-day slavery framing of the worker as a victim and the employer as abuser erases the labour relations that have produced the exploitation. This framing hasn’t initiated a wider conversation about the rights of migrant domestic workers from a gender-based violence perspective either.
The displacement of housework
“Domestic work is work” is a popular slogan and rallying call for domestic workers, echoing the call for wages for housework movement in the 1970s by feminists including Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James. In her formative 1974 manifesto, Wages Against Housework, Silvia Federici wrote about how housework has become a “feminine attribute”, through a “peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services” rendering her into a “servant”. For Federici, wages for housework offer a way to resist capitalism’s normalisation of housework as women’s ‘duty’. But when a household outsources its housework to someone who is waged, this worker becomes, in a sense, the surrogate housewife who does the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. The domestic worker releases the wife or mother from expectations of housework. Rather than waged housework shifting gender relations, the burden of reproductive labour is merely displaced onto another woman – often a poorly paid, racialised migrant woman, who society does not value. Housework remains a woman’s domain, whose outsourcing frees up time and energy for households, in particular for women in white collar jobs. It also helps maintain romantic relationships and nuclear families: a friend once told me her and her boyfriend employ a cleaner so she doesn’t have to get upset about him leaving dirty dishes or not doing his laundry – displacing the potential for conflict onto the worker, instead of the partner. The frustrations and resentment from unequal domestic work can be pushed onto another person, instead of working things out within the relationship. The housewife surrogacy of the domestic worker can become even more obvious and extreme when they “live-in” with their employers, often referred to as being “part of the family.”
This “housewife surrogacy” frame also offers a useful lens through which to understand the abuse and exploitation some domestic workers are subject to in their workplace. The domestic setting of their work, coupled with its economic and cultural devaluation as “women’s work”, produce a form of gender-based violence, which I propose can be understood of as a form of domestic abuse. Workers I supported as a caseworker, and who I now organise with, have told me about their harrowing experiences: forced to sleep in the corridor or in the same bed as the children they care for, only allowed to eat leftovers, not having any time off, working nearly 20 hours a day, and being subject to verbal, physical, and sexual violence. Some have also shared with me about how guilty they felt running away and the feeling of responsibility they had for the child under their care – maybe they could stay for their sake. A friend, who has been a domestic worker and community organiser for nearly 20 years, told me about how they take this into account when conducting a rescue operation. They ask the worker if there is a child in the house and tell them they can only leave if there is someone else in the house who can care for the child after they make their break. Hearing this was a poignant reminder of the unequal balance in care. Even when fleeing, workers are actively weighing their duty towards their employers and children as caregivers. The workers give the children, who are not responsible for the abuse but may be used as pawns by their parents to keep a worker trapped, more consideration about their wellbeing and safety than employers ever give to the worker. This is particularly painful considering many of these women work abroad to support their children through remittances – caring for other people’s children in order to care for their own back home.
Domestic workers’ experiences of cruelty at the hands of their employers echoed the experiences of survivors of domestic violence who my colleagues and I also supported when I was a caseworker. In both scenarios, gender, race, and immigration status all interacted to produce a particular form of gendered violence, based on racist expectations of subservience and perpetual sweet disposition. This additional emotional labour was expected of both Filipino domestic workers and partners/spouses, which the women were highly aware of, further blurring the line between workplace and domestic violence.
Care work and mutual aid
The Victorian nature of these attributes, e.g. obedience, patience, and a mild temper – reveal the long history of domestic work as an essential component of social reproduction in Britain: from the great houses of the landed gentry and bourgeois classes reliant on its house staff in both the metropole and colonies, which often relied on black and brown women for housework, to the liberation of middle and upper class women from housework to pursue white collar careers. Today, it is shaped by the privatisation and neoliberalism of Thatcherism and the austerity of the 2010s, which destroyed the social safety net that many of us would have relied on for care. Domestic workers are also used as a way of courting international capital, as the sponsorship model of the ODW visa encourages wealthy visitors to bring their domestic workers to the UK, as an essential accessory to their lifestyle. The approach to care we find ourselves in today is privatised, outsourced, and fundamentally dehumanised, creating a false dichotomy between those who receive care and those who provide it. This capitalist vision of care ignores the fact that many people who would be classified as “in need” of care are care providers themselves: for example, disabled people are more likely to be unpaid carers in England and Wales.
Yet domestic workers frequently find creative and material ways to fight back. For example, the mutual aid domestic workers provide each other is in direct resistance to this often gendered dichotomy of care recipient vs. care giver. Back at the UDWA meeting, we discuss upcoming plans, whilst tucking into food cooked by members. There’s a karaoke night and Christmas party to plan, but also a group of newly rescued workers who urgently need mental health support, immigration advice, clothing, and temporary safe accommodation, which members will arrange. I often joke that there is a Filipino autonomous state (more than half of migrant domestic workers in the UK are from the Philippines) operating in London: Filipino migrants are able to operate as a community with minimal engagement with state institutions or support, by necessity, due to how undocumented migrants are illegalised by immigration policy and cut off from services, and by choice, as the community knows best what it needs. Their relentless work and commitment to each other is the most literal embodiment of the slogan “we keep us safe” that I’ve encountered across my organising. The UDWA members, who often join the group after having been rescued by older members, sustain the group’s work by rescuing and supporting new arrivals. Some stay active in UDWA for years, whilst other pass through temporarily until they’re back on their feet. The workers can be both carers and cared for, their care for each other rooted in a deep sense of worker solidarity and shared lived experience.
It is urgent for domestic work and the struggle for domestic workers rights to be understood from an abolitionist perspective. The experiences of migrant domestic workers with the immigration and carceral systems remind us that the state will not side with workers or survivors of abuse. We must also think critically about care work, learning from the decades of experience of domestic workers. Migrant domestic worker organising breaks down the boundary between care-giver and care-recipient created by capitalist labour relations, showing us that providing care for each other is both a duty and a capacity we share. It demonstrates a real alternative to the state as welfare provider and arbiter of justice we all as abolitionists can learn from.
Francesca writes on migration and border violence — rooted in her work in the Filipino migrant community. She organises with United Domestic Workers Association and leads Kanlungan’s participation in the Covid-19 Inquiry to ensure the experiences and views of Filipino migrants during the pandemic are heard.
Francesca is writing her first book, a feminist history of Filipino migration to Britain, drawing on oral history interviews with Filipino nurses, carers, domestic workers, and spouses. More info here: https://www.filipinooralhistoryproject.uk/