Men and Domestic Labor: a Missing Link in the Global Care Chain

Men and Masculinities 13(1) 126-149 ª The Author(s) 2010 Men and Domestic Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1097184X10382884 Labor: A Missing Link in http://jmm.sagepub.com the Global Care Chain Majella Kilkey1 Abstract This article develops Manalansan’s critique that the concept of global care chains, while feminizing scholarship on the relationship between migration and globalization, has been less successful at gendering it, in part because it largely ignores men. The article responds to this gap by focusing on male domestic workers. The focus is such, however, that a new dimension to the emerging research agenda on male domestic workers is suggested. Thus, it is argued that in addition to examining how men are implicated in the global redistribution of stereotypically female tasks of domestic labor, we need to broaden our conceptualization of social reproduction to interrogate the ways in which stereotypically male areas of domestic work, such as gardening and household repair and maintenance, are embedded in global care chains. The argument is based on a review of the existing literature, as well as find- ings emerging from the author and colleague’s on-going exploration in the United Kingdom, using quantitative and qualitative research methods, of the scale, charac- teristics, dynamics, and drivers of the commoditization of specifically male tasks of social reproduction and their displacement onto migrant men. Keywords fathering, gender, global care chains, male domestic work, migration 1 Department of Social Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom Corresponding Author: Majella Kilkey, Department of Social Sciences, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX United Kingdom Email: [email protected] 126 Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at Masarykova Univerzita on May 2, 2015 Kilkey 127 Introduction Research over the last decade has documented the return, or in some cases the rediscovery, of paid domestic labor in various parts of the Global North.1 Paid work in the domestic sphere often goes undeclared (Pfau-Effinger 2009), and so it is difficult to know its scale with any accuracy. Estimates suggest, however, that in many countries, the numbers working in the sector are now significant. In the United Kingdom, for example, an estimated two million domestic workers are employed in British households (Cox 2006, 3). Moreover, evidence from family expenditure data indicates that both in absolute terms and relative to income and expenditure, U.K. households’ spending on domestic services has also been increasing (National Statistics 2007). The data suggest that in absolute terms, expenditure on ‘‘household services’’ increased from £11.90 per week in 1984 to £27.10 in 2006.2 As a percentage of weekly gross income, such expenditure increased from 3 to 4.4 percent in the same period, and as a percentage of household expenditure, from 5 to 6 percent. The growth in paid domestic labor is part of the broader process of the commoditization of social reproduction, which has accompanied the displacement of the male breadwinner family model by the dual worker model in some societies (Crompton 2006; Lewis 2001). This commoditization has been most pronounced where the public provision of care has been minimal (Kofman 2006), and/or in retrenchment (Misra, Woodring, and Merz 2006), and has occurred in the context of little or no realignment in the sexual division of domestic labor (Aliaga 2006; Coltrane 2000; Gershuny and Sullivan 2003; Lader, Short, and Gershuny 2006). Much of the research points to the increasing reliance on migrant domestic workers (Lutz 2007). The concept of global care chains—‘‘a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’’ (Hochschild 2000, 131)—has been developed to capture the transnational character of this growth in paid domestic labor (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hochschild 2000). The concept of global care chains and the related body of work on the growth of the international market in domestic workers have contributed in important ways to a range of research agendas. In bringing social reproductive labor into the analytical frame, they have made critical contributions to our understandings of globalization and migration processes.3 They reveal for example, that households as well as states and markets, are embedded in globalization processes, that social reproductive work is part of the international economy, and that the distribution of nonmaterial resources is a feature of globalization too (Yeates 2005). In terms of migration, the work illuminates further the feminized contours of international migration and challenges the tendency dominant in economic, particularly neoclassical, models of migration to construct migrants as independent and nonrelational.4 It also directs us toward household- and individual-level impacts of migration and considers these in relation to home-state citizens as well as migrants, and in social and emotional, as well as economic, terms. Collectively, such contributions advance our 127 Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at Masarykova Univerzita on May 2, 2015 128 Men and Masculinities 13(1) understandings of the ways in which gender in particular is an important constitutive element of globalization and migration (Mahler and Pessar 2006). There have, however, also been appeals for a greater contextualization of the concept of global care chains, as well as a broadening of its application. Williams (2005, 3; see also Kofman 2006; Lutz 2008b; Williams and Gavanas 2008) has argued that analysis of the pattern of migrant domestic labor needs to be sensitive to cross-national variations in first, ‘‘care regimes’’—‘‘the extent and nature of public and market care provision, women’s employment and policies facilitating work and care;’’ second, ‘‘migration regimes’’—‘‘immigration policies, forms of regula- tion, and paths and histories of emigration and immigration;’’ and third, ‘‘care cul- tures’’—‘‘dominant national and local cultural discourses on what constitutes appropriate child care, or elder/disabled support ... [which] may also be constituted through differences and inequalities of class, ethnicity and location.’’ Additionally, Yeates (2004, 379) in a wide-ranging critique suggests that the concept could also usefully be broadened to embrace the full diversity of migrant care workers, in respect of first, skill and occupational hierarchies (so, semiskilled and skilled, as well as unskilled); second, locations of work (so institutional, as well as domestic); and third, types of care (e.g., health and education). The aim of this article is to contribute to the task of contextualizing and broadening the concept of global care chains by focusing on male domestic workers.5 Despite bringing gender center stage to analyses of globalization and migration processes, Manalansan (2006) has identified problems with the ways in which global care chain and related research use the concept of gender. More specifically, he argues that the work tends to subscribe to ‘‘normative universalizing notions of gender scripts and domesticity’’ (241), in which married mothers are assumed to be the only possible and logical links in the care chain. Manalansan uses Rhacel Parrenãs’ (2001) highly acclaimed study of Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles—Servants of Globalisation—to illustrate his claim. He correctly observes that while significant proportions of Parrenãs’ research samples were other than married women with children, their stories remain untold and their role within the global care chain unanalyzed.6 While Parrenãs’ focus is understandable, given her prime concern with how care of children in particular has become a commodity to be redistributed (unequally) across the globe, it is difficult to deny the fact than men, and an analysis of their positions with the international division of social reproductive labor, have been obscured as a result.7 This article seeks to contribute to the task of addressing that omission. In doing so, it is argued that not only is it important, as the other contributions to this special issue do, to examine how men are implicated in the global redistribution of stereotypically female tasks of social reproduction—the care and cleaning jobs that have constituted the focus of global care chain research—but that there is also merit in interrogating the ways in which stereotypically male areas of domestic work, such as gardening and household repair and maintenance, are embedded in global care chains. With reference to mainly, but not exclusively, the European and particularly 128 Downloaded from jmm.sagepub.com at Masarykova Univerzita on May 2, 2015 Kilkey 129 the U.K. context, the article focuses on migrant men as workers in the international domestic economy, adopting the broader conceptualization of domestic labor, and contextualizing the examination with reference to both men’s historical and cross- cultural presence within domestic service, as well as contemporary migration processes, patterns, and policies. The article also highlights the need to incorporate men as consumers within the international division of domestic labor, by investigating the meanings attached to home-state men’s outsourcing of stereotypically male domestic tasks. Such enquiry, it is suggested, has the potential to reveal the ways in which men are connected in the relationship between migration, globalization, and social reproduction,

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