In Canada, temporary residency applies to those who are not Canadian citizens but are legally in Canada for a temporary purpose, including international students, foreign workers, and tourists.
A domestic worker is a person who works within the scope of a residence. The term "domestic service" applies to the equivalent occupational category. In traditional English contexts, such a person was said to be "in service". Domestic workers perform a variety of household services for an individual(s), from providing cleaning and household maintenance, or cooking, laundry and ironing, or care for children and elderly dependents, and other household errands.
A migrant worker is a person who migrates within a home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have the intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work.
An overseas Filipino is a person of full or partial Filipino origin—i.e. people who trace back their ancestry to the Philippines but living or residing outside the country. This term generally applies to both people of Filipino ancestry and citizens abroad. As of 2019, there were over 12 million Filipinos overseas.
Filipinos constitute the largest ethnic minority in Hong Kong, numbering approximately 130,000, many of whom work as foreign domestic helpers. The Eastern District has the highest concentration of Filipino residents in Hong Kong, with 3.24% of the district's population being of Filipino descent.
Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) is a term often used to refer to Filipino migrant workers, people with Filipino citizenship who reside in another country for a limited period of employment.
Migrant domestic workers are, according to the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 189 and the International Organization for Migration, any persons "moving to another country or region to better their material or social conditions and improve the prospect for themselves or their family," engaged in a work relationship performing "in or for a household or households." Domestic work itself can cover a "wide range of tasks and services that vary from country to country and that can be different depending on the age, gender, ethnic background and migration status of the workers concerned." These particular workers have been identified by some academics as situated within "the rapid growth of paid domestic labor, the feminization of transnational migration, and the development of new public spheres." Prominent discussions on the topic include the status of these workers, reasons behind the pursue in this labour, recruitment and employment practices in the field, and various measures being undertaken to change the conditions of domestic work among migrants.
There are many Spanish people of Filipino ancestry, consisting of the descendants of early migrants from the Philippines to Spain, as well as more recent migrants. Over 150,000 Filipinos are estimated to live in Spain, including 37,000 expatriates from the Philippines living in Spain who do not hold Spanish citizenship.
A professional live-in caregiver provides personal care and assistance to individuals, including those suffering from chronic illness, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia, within the home setting. Typical duties of a live-in caregiver include meal planning and preparation, assistance with grooming, dressing and toileting, medication management, laundry and light housekeeping, and transportation/escorts to doctor’s appointments or social engagements. Professional live-in caregivers are often provided by an outside agency, which may also coordinate their services with the client’s preferred in-home health agency and other medical providers.
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China is a destination and transit territory for men and women trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor.
Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at USC. She previously taught at Brown University, the University of California, Davis and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research has been featured in NPR's "The World", Bloomberg News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, de Volkskrant, and the American Prospect. Parreñas has written five monographs, co-edited three anthologies, and published a number of peer-reviewed articles.
Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others. It is often differentiated from other forms of work because it is considered to be intrinsically motivated, meaning that people are motivated to pursue care work for reasons other than financial compensation. Another factor that is often used to differentiate caring labor from other types of work is the motivating factor. This perspective defines care labor as labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward. Regardless of motivation, care work includes care activities done for pay as well as those done without remuneration.
Women migrant workers from developing countries engage in paid employment in countries where they are not citizens. While women have traditionally been considered companions to their husbands in the migratory process, most adult migrant women today are employed in their own right. In 2017, of the 168 million migrant workers, over 68 million were women. The increase in proportion of women migrant workers since the early twentieth century is often referred to as the "feminization of migration".
Reproductive labor or work is often associated with care giving and domestic housework roles including cleaning, cooking, child care, and the unpaid domestic labor force. The term has taken on a role in feminist philosophy and discourse as a way of calling attention to how women in particular are assigned to the domestic sphere, where the labor is reproductive and thus uncompensated and unrecognized in a capitalist system. These theories have evolved as a parallel of histories focusing on the entrance of women into the labor force in the 1970s, providing an intersectionalist approach that recognizes that women have been a part of the labor force since before their incorporation into mainstream industry if reproductive labor is considered. Some Marxist anthropologists and economists such as George Caffentzis have gone as far as to suggest that reproductive labor creates value in a similar way to the way in which productive labor creates value, by increasing the value of labor power.
As the number of foreign domestic workers continues to increase around the world, social movements to protect them have begun. The increase in social movements can be attributed to the rise of globalization, increased flows of migratory workers, and issues arising from the neoliberal management of workers. Repeated complaints and demands by pro-labor movements typically revolving around issues such as minimum wage and insurance coverage can be seen. These demands usually move away from a narrative of labor disputes and begin to encompass a human-rights perspective.
A global care chain is a globalized labor market for workers who provide care-intensive labor, such as childcare, eldercare and healthcare. The term was coined by the feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild. The movement of these workers is an important topic for research and policy development since the number of international migrants around the world has grown substantially since the 1990s.
Almost half of international migrants are women, generally travelling as either migrant workers or refugees. Women migrant workers migrate from developing countries to high-income countries to engage in paid employment, typically in gendered professions such as domestic work. Because their work disproportionately takes place in private homes, they are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Wages earned are largely sent home to the originating country to support the cost of living of the family left behind.
Felicita "Fely" Villasin was a Philippine-born activist most notable in her part in the anti-Marcos movement and domestic workers' rights advocacy.
Pura Velasco is a Philippine-born activist and advocate for caregivers based in Canada.
Juana Tejada was a caregiver who inspired a grassroots campaign to lobby for reforms to the Canadian live-in caregiver program.
