Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life ― International Perspectives

This timely and innovative book delivers a comprehensive analysis of the non-recognition of the right to a family life of migrant live-in domestic and care workers in Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, the Philippines, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, and Ukraine. Combining legal, sociological and social policy perspectives, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to international and national legal frameworks, the political economy of globalised reproductive labour, and the experience and coping strategies of migrant domestic and care workers. Highlighting constructed, ideological and imagined responses to life away from home, it offers theoretical, empirical and international perspectives on the right to a family life. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, it focuses in particular on the voices of migrant domestic workers and their positioning as active subjects with agency to articulate their needs and claims.

Maria Kontos is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Social Research, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and is a lecturer at the same university. She has published on migration and integration policy, migration and gender, welfare policy and care, with publications including Self-Employment of Women and Minorities; Women in New Migrations; Paradoxes of Integration.

Glenda Tibe Bonifacio is an associate professor in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Lethbrige, Canada. She is the author of Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities, and editor of Feminism and Migration: Cross-cultural Engagements.