Love’s Labor’s Cost: The family life of migrant domestic workers

carina chen

Floridith Sanchez’s mother, Maria, has been a migrant domestic worker for more than two decades. During her first five years abroad, her employers watched her closely and allowed her only minimal contact with her children in the Philippines. Unaware of their mother’s predicament, Floridith and her siblings felt abandoned. “I felt like she did not think she had a family here in the Philippines. Sometimes she would not send money, and I would think that she is just having a good time out there,” Floridith told me. “She would not remember our birthdays. She would not call us. I was so mad at her.”

At the time, in the early 1990s, Maria was working in the United Arab Emirates, where her employers refused to give her a day off and restricted her to one phone call home every three months. Internet usage was limited then, but even today many employers deny domestic workers access to computers and email. It wasn’t until Maria took a new job in Taiwan in 1996—which came with a cell phone and one day off per week—that the family resumed regular communication. These weekly phone conversations improved Maria’s relationship with her children. Floridith learned of the difficulties of her mother’s life as a caretaker of an elderly couple: changing their bedpans, checking on them at night, and the physical strain of lifting them. She began to empathize. “My mom told me that she still works even when she is sick,” recalled Floridith, who is now in her 30s. “That makes me cry out of pity.”

Transnational mothering is a fact of life in migrant communities across the globe. Too often, migrant domestic workers leave their own children behind, even as they help to raise their employers’. Nannies and housecleaners arrive in Asia and the Middle East as contract workers, and in the U.S., they typically lack work papers. Their finances are precarious at best, and they rarely have a right to sponsor their children to join them. Often, attending to the intimate lives of another’s family while thousands of miles from one’s own is an emotionally wrenching experience. “Domestic work is depressing,” said Ruby Mercado, a single mother and domestic worker in Italy with two daughters in the Philippines. “You especially miss your children. I do not like taking care of other children when I could not take care of my own. It hurts too much.”

In the Philippines, local nonprofit organizations estimate that 10 million children—more than a quarter of the country’s young people—have at least one parent working overseas. The nation is second only to Indonesia in exporting domestic labor: Some 1.4 million Filipinos leave to cook, clean, and provide child and elder care, primarily for households in Asia and the Middle East. Aunts, grandmothers, and sometimes fathers do the day-to-day work of parenting back home. Worldwide, there are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). Nearly three-quarters are women.

Domestic work often exists beyond the activities covered by labor law, and this has the effect of further complicating transnational parenting. Seen as “women’s work,” an unskilled pursuit a notch below “real” labor, it has largely escaped regulation. In the United States, domestic laborers were excluded from the protections of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act as a concession to Southern lawmakers, who objected to laborers in a profession dominated at the time by African-American women receiving the same guarantees as white men. While seven U.S. states have recently adopted legislation guaranteeing domestic laborers a minimum wage, overtime pay, and protection from harassment, few migrants are willing to pursue legal remedies for fear of drawing scrutiny to their immigration status.

In 2011, the ILO introduced a treaty to protect domestic laborers, but as with all U.N. conventions, compliance is voluntary, and only 24 countries have ratified it. (The United States is not among them.) In...