Decent work for domestic workers (ILO Convention 189) represented an important attempt at the global scale to assert the rights of domestic workers, a hitherto often invisible group of women. Domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are women, do much of the social reproduction work for wealthier ‘adult earner’ families, often for low pay and under harsh conditions. Nearly one-fifth of domestic workers are migrants, often with insecure status in the destination country. The Asia-Pacific region hosts the largest share (nearly 25%) of migrant domestic workers and a substantial portion of the migration occurs on an intra-regional basis. This paper will examine how the ILO, UN Women, migrants’ civil society organisations and domestic workers’ unions have ‘vernacularised’ decent work for domestic workers, with a particular focus on the Philippines, one of the major sending countries, and Hong Kong, an important country of destination. There is also an intimate connection between those organising Filipinas in Hong Kong and those fighting for their rights in the Philippines.

Rianne Mahon is a distinguished research professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Carleton. She has published on industrial policy, labour market restructuring, childcare politics, and the redesign of welfare regimes at the local, national and global scales. Mahon has co-edited numerous books including After 08: Social Policy and the Global Financial Crisis (with G. Boychuk and S. McBride), Achieving the Social Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges (with S. Horton and S. Dalby), and co-authored Advanced Introduction to Social Policy (with Daniel Béland). She also co-edits Social Politics, a peer-reviewed academic journal. Her current work focuses on the ‘gendering’ of global governance, with a particular focus on migrant domestic workers.

This lecture is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series.