Overview

Drawing on original empirical research from Singapore and Hong Kong, Gendered Labour, Everyday Security and Migration interrogates women migrant domestic workers’ experiences of work and workplace exploitation. It examines the ways in which these women negotiate everyday security and safe work against the backdrop of affective employment relations and institutional structures of labour and migration law. It challenges the current emphasis on the language of exploitation and legal approaches to identifying, understanding and rectifying poor employment conditions for women migrant domestic workers. This book addresses the limited research literature that examines the extent to which regulatory or criminal justice responses are relevant to, and utilised by, women migrant domestic workers in their everyday negotiation of safe work and offers a unique contribution to the field. An accessible and compelling read, it will be of interest to researchers from across the fields of criminology, sociology, labour migration studies and women’s studies.

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9781032168067

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Reviews

Tan’s book offers remarkable insights about domestic work, gender, and exploitation. Drawing on richly textured narratives that center the perspectives of female domestic workers, her analysis reveals how gender dynamics are amplified when employment takes place in private homes, profoundly impacting the very meaning of safety and security. Highly recommended! Nancy A. Wonders, Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northern Arizona University The book Gendered Labour, Everyday Security and Migration: An Examination of Domestic Work and Domestic Workers' Experiences in Singapore and Hong Kong brings to light some of the most hidden and vulnerable voices in the contemporary globalised economy. After completing this book, the reader will be familiar not only with the precariousness of women migrant workers. The book paints a complex picture of women’s everyday life that includes challenges, exploitation, surveillance, abuse, as well as women’s struggles, agency, belonging, resistance, and fight for safe and sustainable living and working conditions. Regardless of your knowledge and expertise on the topic, each of the stories presented in the book and the richness of data and analysis will make you think. Ideally placed to study these issues, Dr Shih Joo Tan’s first book is a call for action for the policymakers, the international community, and all of us. Associate Professor Sanja Milivojevic, Bristol Digital Futures Institute/School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol Shih Joo Tan’s evocative research with live-in domestic migrant workers in Hong Kong and Singapore generates a powerful argument for thinking beyond conceptions of exploitation defined in purely legal terms. By showing how domestic workers negotiate the contours of a peculiarly intimate workplace that is steeped in affective relations between migrant women and the families that house and employ them, Tan demonstrates how binary paradigms of exploitation/lack of exploitation may miss the most important features shaping domestic workers’ everyday experiences. Gendered Labour, Everyday Security and Migration sets out an alternative vision of workplace safety, informed by inter-personal relationships, that places close attention to the concerns and aspirations of domestic migrant workers themselves. In so doing it not only enriches the labour exploitation scholarship but also expands the field of intervention for those seeking to safeguard the wellbeing of women involved in this work. Professor Leanne Weber, Professor of Criminology, Australian National University, Canberra Law School A unique, comparative insight into the lives of female domestic workers based in Singapore and Hong Kong, this book gives voice the everyday living and working conditions of these workers. Clearly and sensitively written it offers an alternative view on what a safe working environment might comprise for these women. Essential reading for anyone working in the field of labour relations, feminism and abuse more generally. Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, Liverpool conjoint Chair of Criminology, Monash

Author Information

Shih Joo Tan is a Postdoctoral Researcher with Monash University’s Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, Australia. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on gender violence, women’s migration and temporary labour exploitation, and the intersections of temporary migration and family violence.

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