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Bringing globalisation home: the global outsourcing of domestic labour to live-in maids and caregivers is reconstituting family, home and work. Pei-Chia Lan talks to some Filipino, Vietnamese and Indonesian domestic workers about their experiences working for newly rich Taiwanese employers.

Article Excerpt
The household order in developed economies is increasingly built on outsourcing domestic duties to cheap labour forces in the form of live-in maids and caregivers. Domestic employment challenges the straightforward divisions between workplace and home, public and private, and local and global. A 'private' home becomes a 'public' workplace for migrant domestic workers, who are outsiders in the family and even aliens in the host society.

Talking to migrant domestic workers from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, and their newly rich Taiwanese employers, gives an insight into how both parties have to re-define the meanings of intimacy and privacy in facing the situation of 'globalisation at home'. The boundaries of 'family' and 'home' are shifting, elastic frames that are contingently defined and constructed in everyday situations.

Negotiating Food and Status

Sociologists often talk about fear of differences in contemporary societies: the privileged choose to live in gated communities that protect them from the 'dangerous' others. Things get more complicated for employers who recruit outsiders to keep their family life in order. Employers who are concerned with the sanitary condition or moral reliability of migrant workers often adopt measures of segregation and management to prevent them from 'contaminating' the household. Some ask foreign maids to use a separate set of utensils or do their own laundry separately from the family's clothes. One employer even asked a worker to drink water from a separate bottle and use a separate bathroom.

Employers negotiate the boundaries of family to accommodate the intimate presence of migrant employees. Female employers, in particular, are in charge of the invisible work of constructing flexible family boundaries. As feminist sociologist Marjorie DeVault has noted, women use food to organise family members and to 'construct a family' in daily meals. Food management in domestic employment involves, first of all, what to eat and whom it is for. Status distinctions between employers and maids are displayed by a hierarchical distribution of various kinds of food--expensive versus cheap, meat versus vegetable, subsistence meals versus snacks, and fresh food versus leftovers.

Some Taiwanese employers bring home the leftovers for the domestic workers after a meal at a restaurant. They perceive this as a well-intended gesture: 'We think she would like to taste this', although many workers do not appreciate it. This is an example of what Judith Rollins, in her book Between...

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