How social movements analyse - and mobilise on - female migrant domestic labour (Germany)

"Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour"... This is the title of a study published by Bridget Anderson in 2000 on the ethnification of paid domestic work — a phenomenon due to challenge leftist feminist theory and practice over the next few years and requiring new alliances with other social movements. One of the objectives of political education activities as carried out by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is to promote the process of discussion and (self) organization between different political players in this field, among migrant women, supporters, trade unions, between feminist, anti-racist and groupings critical of capitalism . The World Social Forum held again, for the third time, in Porto Alegre in January 2003 could be another step in this direction.

Globalization: Informalization and migration movements

The term "globalization" is commonly used to describe the worldwide interrelationship and mutual dependency of capitalist processes by the orientation of production on the world market, technological developments, the removal of national state welfare systems, an adjustment of consumer patterns and cultural practices, the explosive development of communication structures and international migration movements. In short: a worldwide development in which national economies increasingly rest on informalization, globalization and migration while all areas of life have made considerable progress towards economization. Globalization is not a new phenomenon and has repercussions reaching into the most intimate of areas: private homes. The consequences of this development to people’s working and living conditions vary a good deal. The south and east of the world have witnessed massive upheavals in their economic, cultural and gender structures over the past few decades, while the north and west have modernized and adjusted to new structures. The boundaries between them have become permeable as a result of technologization, flexibilization and monopolization of economic transactions as well as of changes in the political balances of power triggered due to the collapse of the socialist system. In addition to the Free Export Zones, which have been in existence predominantly in Asia and Latin America since the 1960s, it is today, above all, the informal employment sector where human rights and in particular women’s rights are trampled underfoot across the world, including in western industrialized nations (cf. Wichterich 1998).

Migration movements have been and continue to be influenced and set off by multinational companies, national governments, free trade agreements, international organizations, such as the IMF, and neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes. In the global cities, the satisfaction of the need for temporary and lowly paid service workers is indispensable for the functioning of the global market place (cf. Sassen 2000). Worldwide, more than half of all migrants and three quarters of all refugees are women. There are plenty of reasons for that: 70 percent of the poor are female although they often hold several jobs, they own little or no land, are responsible for the food security of their children, are more likely to be subjected to physical and sexual violence in extreme situations, such as armed conflict. Their own survival and that of their families is secured by what has been called "labour migration". But we should not forget to mention that women also migrate to increase their cultural and social capital, in a capacity as intellectuals and experts (cf. Hernandez 2003).

New and old losers

Women are "piece workers in the export industry zones, migrants bringing back foreign currency, prostitutes or mail-order brides traded in the international body and marriage markets as well as unpaid shock absorbers when social benefits are cut and structural changes decreed“ (Wichterich 1998: 252). What is new is that gender roles become more flexible while cementing at the same time age-old gender-specific designations and labour divisions: over the past few decades, employment has been feminized, i.e. an increase of women who want and have to enter the employment process plus a growing number of men whose employment biography resembles the typically females precarious earning situation . For a couple of years now this obvious gender bias has been more persistently subjected to analysis critical of globalization starting off by linking class, gender and racist processes. The thesis of female losers in the process of globalization does not reflect the fact that women across the globe are employment profiteers in quantitative terms — though above all in the low-income sector, in self-employment etc., so that, in qualitative terms, they are among the losers; that thesis must include men as well and cannot be maintained any longer without a more accurate definition of the social and ethnic origins of those it aims to cover.

Beyond such a discussion, we need to have a closer look at the conditions generating these losers and winners. This requires to point out that the demand for a redistribution of unpaid work increasingly falls into oblivion, that instead certain women, when fired, become in a kind of natural way the first victims and managers of the crisis, by "feminizing" duties formerly taken over by the state, such as child care, nursing care for seniors or preventive health care. The sector of paid and unpaid informal labour – characterized by a close proximity to private homes, invisibility and uncertainty – is growing on a world scale as a result. This is where mostly women work, at worse conditions than their male colleagues and often without an opportunity for change (cf. Altvater/Mahnkopf 2002, p. 121 et seq). However, whether women depend on a job in an again more strongly gender-segmented labour market or whether women are able to buy the status of a genderless, flexible employee and "entrepreneur in her own right" (cf. Pühl/Schultz 2001) by delegating their reproductive “duties“ to other, predominantly illegalized, non-resident women depends on their ethnic and social origin. This is an indication that it is time for social movements and political players to reconsider their national partial and identity policies and discuss coalitions of interests in a new light.

»South American female, reliable and experienced, is seeking work as babysitter and/or domestic, no sex» (magazine zitty 1/2003)

Female employment is on the rise in Germany, too: it continues to do so in west Germany while it remains to be a matter of course in the east. Former leftist demands for autonomy and self-determination of women through gainful employment have been gradually incorporated in a neo-liberal labour market concept and re-interpreted. The need to pull through in the labour market in view of growing requirements for flexibility with constant or shrinking state support, the value appreciation of "gainful employment" for people’s own physical and psychological survival result in the need to individualize care and reproductive work more strongly and push it out of sight.

The lack of male orientation toward domestic work, the subsided political discussion in this respect, alternative family models as well as the fact that people offer their labour outside of any pay agreements and social standards — all these are reasons which explain why the employment of all types of domestics has grown. In east Germany, their number has nearly trebled between 1992 and 1997. In 2000, approx. 4 million households (7.6 percent regularly, another 4 percent occasionally) employed what is called "moving spirits“. (Schupp 2002: 60). Since employees usually work in several homes on an hourly basis, it can be assumed that there are 2 to 2.4 million female domestic workers in Germany (Gather/Meissner 2002: 136, foot note 2). Only a little under 6 percent of them, or 40,000 people (op. cit.: 51, table 1), have employment that puts them under the scope of the national insurance system, 75 percent of those working in this informal sector are migrants — women with documents or those 1.7 million or so assumed to be living in the country without a legal residence status. The number will grow in the next few years due to what can be expected to be a repressive EU immigration policy. This is where gender and racial discrimination interlink in a new manner: migrant labour is feminized and service works are ethnified.

In Germany, in contrast to other European countries such as Italy, Spain or France, terms like regulations, qualifying date rules or amnesty legislation, are foreign words . Migrant women take over jobs and fill gaps which the German state has ceased to fill or has never done so in the first place. The availability of labour is maintained by state politics, as one can see, for example, when looking at the ordinance concerning exceptions with regard to the recruitment of nursing care personnel from future EU accession candidates adopted in February 2002 (cf. Heubach 2002: 169). Other forms of migration and migrants are illegalized “but taken into consideration in structural terms as “support structure”” (Hess 2002: 115).

Although their social standing in their countries of origin, their motives to migrate, their age and family status vary greatly, job opportunities for women are rather similar: cleaning, cooking, babysitting, petsitting, nursing care for senior citizens, sex. As a result, they move about in the "dual no-man’s land of intimacy and illegality“ (Gather et al 2002:10). Employment terms are characterized by extremely poor pay (often depending on the country of origin), part-time work, isolation, "boundlessness“, often heavy physical and unhealthy work, moralization of employment, the risk of sexual abuse, lack of health insurance, often a lack or unenforceability of labour rights, such as protection against wrongful dismissal, payment of wages, protection of mothers etc.

Ambivalences of a policy with and by domestic workers in Germany

Jobs, housing opportunities, advice and medical help are provided within the various communities informally. For a long time, there was hardly any self-organization, lobbying and public awareness work in Germany to speak of, and nowhere else in Europe are conditions that poor. The reasons for this are varied. On the one hand, trade union policies continue to focus on white male skilled workers, so there is no tradition and no structure to deal with migrant or precarious employees. On the other, well educated migrant women in particular consider their work often just as "transitional employment" and tend to conceal it. As a result of having several jobs partially involving long travelling times, domestic workers are extremely short of time. Some of them, such as Polish women working in Berlin, commute between their home and their workplace and therefore do not live in Germany permanently. Then there is the fear of attracting attention and being deported as a result, which prevents many from organizing to improve their working conditions. After a European-wide network of Migrant Domestic Workers and their support organizations was set up in 1998, Respect-Deutschland came into being two years later. Their objectives are, apart from public awareness activities, campaigning for the rights of female domestic workers and their protection against violence, the exchange of experience and the provision of information material. They see themselves as a network in which domestic workers, women of self-organized groups of migrants, advisory centres and support groups cooperate (cf. Respect 2000).

Deregulation — a problem or an opportunity?

One question which is decisive for the political strategy is whether the deregulation of the workplace "home" is to be seen as a problem or an opportunity. On the one hand, women are hardly protected from arbitrariness on the part of their employers, on the other however, from intervention by the authorities due to the privacy of their workplace. Problems are similar when discussing legalization as a political objective. Attaining this objective involves the risk that standardized control systems could be developed as a result of which mass deportations are to be expected. This rather suggests to focus not on obtaining residence permits for, realistically speaking, only few migrants but on fighting to improve their labour rights and enforce them. The enforcement of pay claims irrespective of residence status has been successful in a number of cases in Berlin, for example (cf. Respect 2000: 23 et seq).

Reproducing attributions?

Another issue is that, when politically handling the differentiation of people into those without and with identity papers, the risk arises that the idea that "people can be illegal" is reproduced. Moreover, women are limited to that employment area, and the demand to recognize their professional degrees ceases to be urgent. Things are similar with regard to the creation of a low-income sector and the formalization of domestic work as a career. On the one hand, the professionalization of what appeared to be naturally existing skills calls into question a typically female form of socialization, and it strengthens, on the other, the overall trend in society to locate human resources in even the most marginalized social position. We must be similarly critically when using terms such as "human trafficking“ and "domestic slavery“, since this makes women lump-sum victims, criminalizes them and, under the slogan "Carry out raids to save domestic slaves", legitimize criminal prosecution and migration-political restrictions (cf. Schultz 2001).

Green cards for domestic workers?

The risk involved in the demand for a green card for domestic workers is, on the one hand, the continuation and cementation of the racist and sexist segregation of the labour market and, on the other, revives the debate on "usefulness" in Germany’s migration politics when putting forward the argument that there is high demand for such labour. The residence status would then be tied to the interests of the employer, the logic of economic usefulness would stand in the foreground. Also the demand to link residence to an employment contract in the intention of specifically improving living and working conditions of domestic workers comes to nothing since employment contracts are a rare thing. The risk of becoming personally dependent on the employer should not be underestimated (cf. Natasha Pearce, Kalaayan, http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/arbeitsver/index.htm).

Strategies for the future (1). Yes to a legalization campaign!

In view of the fact that Germany’s migration policies make the residence status of refugees dependent on their usefulness, their willingness to cooperate and their behaviour, more and more voices can be heard demanding a legalization campaign. Initiated by Kanak Attak , the campaign to support the right to legalization does not aim to appeal to the state to create legislation but to fight for rights in accordance with the actual living conditions of migrants, not a one-issue movement with a cut-off date, but a struggle for legalization on various levels, for the right to stay and to vote, for self-defence etc. The campaign’s proposal opposes a strategy of integration, which it sees as the new battle cry of the federal government and the response of the state to infighting between migrants. The term has been accepted even within the German Left in civil society terms and is closely associated with dispensing sympathies if certain demands are fulfilled — in the meaning of "assimilate but stay exotic". It sees as its centrepiece the "autonomy of migration“ (Bojadzijev et al 2003: 34), the fact that boundaries today are crossed countless times, that subversive practices, social and economic networks exist, civil rights are exercised outside of citizenship. A policy by and with female domestic workers could therefore be, in the context of this campaign and based on the real existence of the employees, to enforce legalization irrespective of an employment relationship and, vice versa, working rights irrespective of residential rights as well as residential rights irrespective of marriage. Further discussion is required to determine where alliances with other institutions, such as the trades unions but also other social movements, are necessary. One thing is certain: This autonomy of migration is in contradiction with sections of the anti-globalization Left who see the nation and social welfare state as the alternative to neo-liberal globalization.

Strategies for the future (2). Feminist critique of the economy and more!

Since policies in the field of paid domestic work always come up against the contradiction to define it exclusively as a female labour market, a feminist critique of the economy, which radically criticizes the organization of the reproduction sector, more urgent than ever before. The current two lines of arguments used in feminist discussions, on the one hand, the "coincidence of two structural crises“ of the illegalized migrant and working women, and, on the other, the new "international division of labour among women“ are strongly moralistic and remain on the analytical level of individuals without putting the issue of redistributing unpaid activities on the agenda. Domestic work – be it paid or not – must be questioned. The discussion about domestic work started back in the 1970s, later continued to look at the issue of a basic income and existence pay, had hardly any influence on the discussion on the crisis of the employment society, which has been going on since the 1980s. What we had instead was also here "a kind of hostile takeover of feminist concepts and demands“ (Haug 2000: 69).

Our aim should be to hold and enlarge this discussion, in view of a culture of patriarchal dominance for which non-payment of reproductive and care work in a wider sense and the lowly paid "quasi-domestic" duties is a matter of course, in the context of leftist terms owing to a movement that is critical of globalization but largely still blind to gender and reproduction issues. The terms of reference for such an alliance should be human, women’s and employment rights. It is not sufficient, however, to extend the term "labour" from a feminist angle but in addition it needs to be included — supplemented by the critique of the mutual link-up between wage and gainful employment, gainful employment and residence status — in the catalogue of political demands put forward by those critical of globalization.

Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2006

http://www.rosalux.de/cms/index.php?id=4719

More material

The following activities are referred to on the Foundation’s website, though unfortunately nearly all of them in German:

• Conference Justice or Barbarism (5-6 Oct 2000), Workshop Not a man, not a woman but the opposite — gender movements, http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/Barbarei/Podium62.htm

• Seminar Employment Relationships of the Future. Trades Unions – Migration – Women I (25-26 Nov 2000), contribution, among others, by Natasha Pearce (Kalaayan), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/arbeitsver/index.htm

• Workshop Division of Labour among Women –Migrant Women in Private Households (24 Mar 2001), contributions, among others, by Respect-Berlin, Petra Müller (DGB Berlin-Brandenburg), Bridget Anderson (Warwick University), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/migrantinnen/anderson.htm

• Seminar Alliances of Labour? Trades Unions – Migration – Women II (3 Nov 2001), contributions, among others, by Renate Heubach (ZAPO), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/arbeit2/heubach.htm and Frank Düvell (Antirassismusbüro Bremen), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/arbeit2/thesen.htm

• Working meeting Respect: Right to Work and Residence for Domestic Workers! But How? (1-3 Feb 2002), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/respect/index.htm

• Seminar Employment Relationships in the Context of Diaspora, Exile, Migration — Views on Employment Relationships and Political Rights of Minorized Women (5-7 Apr 2002), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/femigra1/bericht.htm

• Seminar Migrant Women in the World of Labour (29 May 2002), http://www.rosalux.de/Einzel/migrantinnen_2/index.htm

It is often impossible to clearly differentiate between refugees and migrants since refugees are always part of migration movements. Unfortunately, it is not possible here to deal with social and cultural repercussions of migration movements in the countries of origin and destination, such as transnational family networks, global care chains etc.

The high rate of female employment in the Free Export Zones has strongly gone down again. Today, nearly as many men as women are employed there under the same poor terms. In the industrialized countries, the informalization of jobs formerly socially secured and held by men, gains more and more ground. Nevertheless, wages for women are still below those paid to men. The "comparative advantage of women in the labour markets" is in fact "the gender-specific devaluation and underpayment as well as the persistent assumption of a male breadwinner behind the employed woman“ (Wichterich 2000: 25).

On the advantages and disadvantages of such regulations see Respect 2000 and/or "Ambivalences of a policy with and by domestic workers in Germany“ further down.

The background to this discussion is a framework resolution of the EU Commission, which envisages to extend the term of human trafficking to also cover "sexual exploitation“ and "exploitation of labour“, i.e. employment relationships in private homes. Until now women organizations have used the term of female trafficking very pragmatically thus producing distortions (cf. Schultz 2001).

More information on the group and the proposal for a campaign under http.//www.kanak-attak.de

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