#migrant domestic work

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Responsibility for public health was now understood to be a task for government, not just for working-class women who – until then – had been the only ones concerned with the cleanliness of slum houses, the only ones asking for clean water and working drains.

One such working-class woman was Kitty Wilkinson, an Irish migrant in Liverpool who had been a cotton mill worker and a domestic servant. She opened up her laundry business to her poor neighbours for a penny a week, allowing them to use her boiler and bleach to disinfect their clothes during the 1832 cholera epidemic. She became known as the 'saint of the slums' and campaigned for public bathhouses for the poor.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[srother]

Chapter out now: "Multi-Level #Migrant Civil Society Activism in Southeast Asia" - Full handbook open access

The “Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society” in #SoutheastAsia has just been published. These handbooks usually provide a very comprehensive overview of the field – but on the downside tend to be very pricey (175 pounds for the printed version in this case). Therefore it is great, that the whole book can be downloaded for free, including my article on “Multi-Level Migrant Civil Society…

[gothhabiba]

I think that the (often useful) broadness of the term "disabled" can serve to obscure certain realities if you let it. in response to conversations about disability and labour, people point out that disabled people do in fact work—including in highly marginalised and hyperexploited forms of labour, such as migrant farm work or migrant domestic work—and that, in fact, these forms of labour disable people.

however it is still true that there are disabled people who are, if you will, "too" disabled to do this kind of work, who are completely dependent on networks of support for the basic necessities of survival, and who, without these networks, will be left to die painfully of thirst. when people talk about disabled people who are shut out of, not only the wage contract, but of any form of labour at all—these are in fact real people who exist... & the fact that some disabled people are capable of (being exploited for) labor doesn't change that

[handweavers]

this shit makes me so angry because i deal with assholes like this all the time in ASIA where i live as an ASIAN (not a US AMERICAN!!) who treat their maids and domestic workers like absolute garbage, the amount of abuse that happens is insane and you think you're somehow exempt from fucked up class relations and being clueless about how poor people in your own country are treated because you're not a Yankee? are you seriously stupid? i despise people like you more than anything, people who should know better and don't because you have Zero class awareness and you think that you know everything simply due to your nationality when you know damn well you are not treated the same as others in your own country let alone elsewhere in the world due to your economic status.

I've seen Indian women Related to me abuse their Indonesian maids in Malaysia as though it was their God given right and lost my shit at them, reported them to local orgs that help abused maids find safer work, told everyone what I saw, cut them out of my life, made clear to them that they are absolute scum of the earth and that the only thing separating them from their maid is the Money they have. You are probably no better than those women, treating human beings like property and thinking yourself the most oppressed person alive simply because you're from the global majority and that any critique of your Lifestyle is simply because the person Doesn't Get It because they're American. "This is US centric I am an expat when I am a Malaysian and live in Dubai" I'm from your country and I know exactly the context of this Lifestyle and I am telling you that you are a cunt. Your Class status shields you from the greatest harm the global south faces, you will never face the danger those labelled "migrant workers" face but you parade yourself online like you are the expert because you hold an Asian passport and you have travelled everywhere. all that money and no brain or compassion and a biggest victim complex. and you will continue to play victim because the westerners are watching but i see you and I know your heart is rotten. fuck all of you for real

[beardedmrbean]

Justice Minister Paul Van Tigchelt (Open VLD) is under fire for comments he made about migrants and their contribution to the Belgian economy.

Featuring as a guest on the podcast 'Talks With Charly', Van Tigchelt was asked about his views on whether it was possible to prevent migrants from entering Belgium, to which he replied: "Of course not. Something like that is impossible, unnecessary and undesirable."

He went on to emphasise the economic role migrants play here. "Who takes care of our care? Who will lay my water pipe? Who cleans my windows at home?"

Podcast host Charly Badibanga then took offence to the insinuation that migrants only contribute to Belgium via low-skilled work, and the Justice Minister quickly sought to nuance his comments. "Sorry for expressing myself incorrectly, but take away migration and our economy will come to a standstill."

He added that figures such as directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah and former football players Marouane Fellaini and Vincent Kompany are a testament to the "wealth" that migration has brought to Belgium.

'Stereotypical'

Van Tigchelt's comments demonstrated a "stereotypical" view of work performed by migrants but was not off the mark regarding the economic impact of reduced migration, says Eva Van Belle, a migration and labour expert at VUB.

"It is difficult to predict the impact a migration policy change would have on the economy, but what we do know is that the rate of migration we have today is good for growth," she told The Brussels Times. "There is a positive fiscal effect too, as migrants contribute more to public finances than what they cost. If we stopped migration, this positive effect would disappear."

The perception that a high proportion of migrants work in low-skilled positions is due to the fact that Belgium lacks any clear strategy to attract high-skilled individuals. In addition, a cinched domestic labour market coupled with discrimination faced by people from migrant backgrounds pushes many of them to unskilled positions. Nevertheless, migrants make up significant portions of professional sectors too, such as IT, healthcare and consulting.

Migration is an enormous topic for political parties ahead of federal elections on 9 June. Van Tigchelt's liberal party Open VLD wants to increase controls at EU borders and make family reunification conditions much more stringent. The party calls for more humane conditions for asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their application despite overseeing a worsening reception crisis since being in government.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

(GOAL REACHED) Emergency commissions/donations

Alright, I really hate to do this because I was convinced I was gonna be financially stable by this point, but something really bad just came out of left field, so.. here's the situation:

My husband moved from Mexico to live with me here in Colombia back in January

We got married in February, with the intention for him to apply for a migrant Visa

We were unable to apply for the Visa right away because we were saving up for the procedure. We ended up applying for it back at the start of June

His Visa application just got rejected, citing two reasons: we were supposed to provide photographic evidence that we're living together and sharing domestic responsibilities (which we weren't aware of), and by the time we applied he had already overstayed a bit over the time he could legally stay as a tourist

We can request an extension on his stay and apply for a Visa again, however, before we can do that we NEED to pay a fine for the time he overstayed. Otherwise the only option we have is to let him get deported back to Mexico, which would make him unable to enter the country for the next three years.

We have 60 days to pay for the fine, which is 2 million Colombian pesos. As of today's (June 29th 2023) exchange rate, that equals a little over 479 USD.

I know I've been kinda slow with music commissions due to being busy with my day job, but the situation being what it is, I'm gonna have to pick up the pace and also very politely ask for donations if you're able to.

Music commissions:

Previous work and examples:

I’ve previously done commissioned work for the D&D twitch show Dice and Dynamics by @fish-mouth and the RPG Maker game Those Infernal Girls by @zeddy-bear. I'm also one of the two members of the technical death metal band Beyond Flesh.

Some examples of my previous work:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Prices:

Base price: $5 (1 minute of music, 2 instrument tracks + 1 percussion track)

Extra instrument track: $2.50

Extra minute of music: $2.50

Commission slots (this section will be periodically updated as I get/ finish commissions):

SLOT 1: TAKEN (work in progress)

SLOT 2: TAKEN (on queue)

SLOT 3: Free

SLOT 4: Free

Donations:

Please don't feel obligated to donate, but if you're willing and able to do it, I would be very thankful

paypal.me/imsobadatnicknames

Other ways to support:

Here's my linktree which has links to all my past projects including music and TTRPG content. Most of them are Pay What You Want.

My husband also has art commissions open over at @uxrabbit

GOAL: $484 / $479

[gatheringbones]

[“Though Seattle has its own ugly history of redlining, which deserves far more attention than it currently receives, the process of segregation started much earlier, with the founding of the city itself in the mid-nineteenth century, and did not involve the federal government. At that time, white settlers removed the Duwamish people and segregated them in the southern fringes of the city, eager to take their lands but also to make them available as workers. Settlers even blocked efforts by the federal government to create a reservation for the Duwamish on their ancestral homelands because it would interfere with the city’s access to a steady labor supply. Seattle did not have reliable land-based transportation until the late nineteenth century, and even then water remained a primary mode of transportation, making the Duwamish and other Coast Salish peoples a valuable source of labor.

Marked as a disorderly slum, the south end became a container for all of the city’s racialized and marginalized populations, which, in turn, served to further mark them as undesirable and unworthy for inclusion into urban society. This included Asian migrants, who were also restricted south of Yesler Way, and single male laborers, whose deviation from normative family life also made them racially suspect in the eyes of the settler elites. Seattle’s urban landscape developed around this north-south orientation, with the north as a “residence district” for white families and the south as a stigmatized slum district for the city’s heterogeneous workforce.

This example reveals the colonial roots of racial segregation, as well as the function of racial segregation in forming the urban and regional economy. The south end was not a stable district with a racially defined population, but one that constantly changed according to the needs of the broader economy and the kinds of workers available at that particular moment. In this way, Seattle shares historical commonalities with Vancouver, Melbourne, and other cities across the Anglophone Pacific world that developed in the mid-nineteenth century around resource-based economies reliant upon Indigenous lands and the mass influx of Asian and European labor. In these contexts, segregation occurred as part of a colonial project to remove the Indigenous inhabitants and establish the city as a pure space of white domestic life.

As Asian and European migrants, many of them single men, arrived to work in extractive economies, spaces such as reserves and slums served to contain Indigenous and racially mixed populations and mark them as unruly, troublesome, and antithetical to modern urban life. As sociologist Renisa Mawani has discussed in the case of Vancouver, settlers relied upon a racially mixed workforce to build the economy but also feared the possibility of the interracial solidarities and alliances this mixing could generate. She calls this the “deep paradox” of a colonial society rooted in both capitalist accumulation and racial purity. In Seattle, the north-south spatial orientation served to smooth over this tension between, on one hand, racial heterogeneity as demanded by capitalist accumulation and the ever-expanding search for labor and, on the other, racial purity as envisioned by white settlers. It allowed settlers to maintain an exclusionary white district while also accommodating an Indigenous and racially mixed labor force.”]

megan asaka, from seattle from the margins: exclusion, erasure, and the making of a pacific coast city, 2022

[phoenixyfriend]

I've only recently become something that could be considered an actual political blogger, but I've been talking econ for a while and I think this video is a good, fairly quick breakdown of the economic impact on Israel:

They touch on:

Shrinking workforce due to calling up reservists

Shrinking construction sector as that workforce is largely West Bank Palestinians who commute into Israel for work

Attempting to shore up the construction sector with migrant workers from India

The impact of adjusted investment credit ratings and debt outlooks from Moody's

Domestic POVs on the economy and right wing government

International impact on the tourism industry and diamond trade

I think a lot of people underestimate or don't quite understand all the various factors that go into 'pressuring Israel' in this situation, and it's sometimes hard to explain how things like BDS work, or why economic aid from the US that is earmarked for Non-Military but doesn't come with consequences for military actions would still be a bad idea: they could just move the budget around.

I'm not sure exactly how this might help people with arguing to their representatives or protesting, but I still believe it's important to be aware of the macroeconomics of a war. Knowing the direct impacts like death and destruction in Gaza is important on a humanitarian level, but knowing the indirect impacts on the economy helps with figuring out how to enforce a change.

[nenelonomh]

human resource management pt.2

i've begun posting my notes in tumblr post format to revise for my exam tomorrow (this was written on 27-05-24, i'm probably going to schedule though to avoid spamming). here's the second hrm topics post!

part 1 | part 3 | part 4

in the last post, we looked at demographic change, employee welfare, and flexi-time. this time we will focus on the gig economy and immigration.

the gig economy is characterised by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs. for example, freelance, delivery drivers, taxi services, contract services, and other flexible work opportunities. a huge example of this is uber - which is an app that offers various 'rides' to assist people to reach their destinations.

businesses can use gig workers by hiring them as independent contractors, in the place of full-time employees. this is a cheaper alternative for the business, as it saves on employee benefits and rids the need for training employees.

however, gig work limits workers' potential for career development, lacks job security and secure income, and the worker misses out on employee benefits.

compliance with labour laws and regulations can be complex when managing gig workers. companies must understand legal requirements and adapt their hrm policies to address gig workforce management.

immigration refers to the action of moving to live in a different location with intentions to stay in the area. this is not the same as labour mobility, since immigration is the movement of people for non-work-related reasons.

one advantage of immigration on businesses includes the filling of job positions that domestic workers cannot be placed in. also, the company may benefit from new points of view - and gain a niche marketing opportunity.

negatives of this topic are that migrant workers may be unfamiliar with federal laws and regulations, and the workers may be more unproductive than the local employees. therefore, a business may need to invest more time into the foreign employee.

///

again, hope this post was fun to read! it's definitely more fun to post than read over my notes.

❤️ nene

image source: pinterest

[padawan-historian]

Local histories are essential to rediscovering our ancestral idenities and cultural landscapes, re-examing how communities navigated the gendered, racial, and class systems and structures of our world, and reclaiming our futurepasts | today we're taking a trip to Worcester Massachusetts' historic neighborhood of Beaver Brook where indigenous, diaspora, and immigrant folks across colorlines and countries lived and labored together.

(1) Thomas A. Dillon, a Virginia-born coachman, and his wife Margaret Dillon, a domestic servant and native of Newton, Massachusetts, sit in their home located at 4 Dewey Street with their children Thomas, Margaret, and Mary (1904)

(2) James J. Johnson an afroindigenous Nipmuc, hailing from Narragansett, Rhode Island, and his partner Jennie Bradley Johnson, a Black migrant from Charleston, South Carolina, pose with their young daughters Jennie and May. James worked as a coachman while Jennie worked as a laundress. Mr. Johnson passed away shortly after this photograph was taken (1900)

(3) Little Susie Idella and Harry Clinton Morris were the children of Sandy Morris, a New Orleans native, and Susie Arkless Morris, a Nipmuc community member. These two were the great-great-grandchildren of Sampson Hazard, a Revolutionary War veteran (1901)

(4) An elderly relative of Mrs. Louden posed among flowers (1901)

(5) Betty and Willis Coles were Virginia migrants who arrived in Massachusetts in the 1890s. Willis, worked as a day laborer and later became a pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts (1902)

(6) This group may have been entertainers at an Old Home Days celebration, a popular event at the turn of the century held to commemorate the area’s rural past (1906)

Sources: "Beaver Brook Neighbors" (Alex Q. Arbuckle, 2018) | Clark University and Worcester Art Museum

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95. After a week of setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the predawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests. As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops pushes the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.” This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for. As polls show Trump in a dead heat nationally with President Joe Biden, and poised to win at least some of the battleground states where Biden was victorious in 2020, the presumptive GOP nominee is making no secret of his scheme for what he calls “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.” The audacious goal of tracking down and deporting all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living and working within the United States is, experts agree, all but impossible. But even the forced removal of hundreds of thousands, or one million, would require a massive internal military operation on a scale not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. [...] What’s changed in 2024? Everything. Despite the Hannibal Lecter-ized outward chaos of Trump’s rallies, behind the scenes, Team Trump is focused and determined not only to name the most rabid Trump loyalists to key political posts but also todramatically strip civil service protections andremove recalcitrant midlevel government employees. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to be on board with whatever Trump wants. [...] It was somewhat amazing to watch the furious debate online and on cable news this week over the weird incident in which small text about a “unified Reich” found its way into a Trump promo video the ex-and-wannabe president posted on Truth Social. The perplexing part, for me, is that this was discussed as some kind of Sherlock-Holmes-magnifying-glass a-ha moment, revealing Trump’s secret plan for Nazi-style rule. Folks, he is screaming his plan out loud at his rallies! The Trump deportation scheme is really Trump’s blueprint for dictatorship.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on how Donald Trump's proposed deportation plan is a pretext for a fascist MAGA dictatorship (05.23.2024).

Will Bunch nails it in this Philly Inquirer column on how Donald Trump's fascistic plan for mass deportations is a speed-run for a MAGA dictatorship.

[dailyanarchistposts]

If we stop, the world stops

Millions of women around the world participated in events for International Women’s Day (IWD) on March the 8th. The most militant action was in the growth of the ‘Women’s Strike’, with 5.3 million people on strike in Spain. In Britain, the interest in the tactics of the strike on IWD is relatively new, yet still 7,000 women pledged to strike. In addition, links were made to grass roots unions such as the Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIUW) with support for their pickets for a Living Wage. Sex workers also co-ordinated their own actions for decriminalisation and trans women held an action over the problems of access to NHS services.

The organisers in Britain made it clear that the strike should focus on demands for working class women, including those who often face the most exploitation and discrimination, like migrants, sex workers, trans women. It is not just a strike about traditional work but also about ‘invisible labour’, such as care, domestic and emotional labour, and against male violence. The historical origins of the day make it clear that the purpose is not to have more women politicians or company directors (see box). Instead it is focused on the majority of women who are at the bottom of the pile, both in the workplace and in the home. According to one organiser of the Women’s Strike in Britain: “We are instead taking action – action against our exploitation under capitalism, where the domestic and emotional work we do for little or no pay is made invisible, while austerity measures force us into a more and more vulnerable position. This is feminism for the 99%”.

It was in Spain, however, that the strike was the most successful. This was partially because of the support it got from the mainstream unions. However, it is clear that they were forced into support as a result of the massive upsurge from the grass roots organisations. According to one source (thefreeonline.wordpress.com): “An important feature of this strike is that it has been promoted and organised from the bottom up, and not the other way around. That is to say, the initiative of the strike has been born first in the streets, in the neighbourhoods and districts and has developed in open assemblies. It has not been a proposal of the unions, but of the feminist movement.” The mainstream unions only called for a 2 hour strike whereas unions such as the CGT and the anarchist CNT called for 24 hour stoppages.

Despite calls for the strike to be based on working class women, it is uncertain to what extent many women could actually participate, given that they are the ones in the most precarious position. In Spain, headlines were given to women in media and other professional jobs. In Britain, the strike was most successful in the universities, with 61 universities taking part. However, the link to CAIWU and sex workers showed that there certainly was support outside the universities.

If women are to truly win all the demands put forward on the day then we must go beyond demands for equality in the system and call for both the end of capitalism and patriarchy. So how is this going to happen? The strike in Spain may have been very successful in terms of numbers on the streets but what will it achieve in terms of winning demands? Politicians and even bosses may pay lip service to the aims of IWD but they are unlikely to do anything about it. In the end, using the success of March the 8th, women and men must continue to organise at the grass roots level and build up a movement that lasts much longer than a day. The linking up of a number of groups on the 8th provides a good basis on which to move forward.

Origins of International Women’s Day

March 8 is International Women’s Day. This date commemorates March 8, 1909, when 129 employees of a cotton textile factory in New York were killed when their own owner set fire to the factory while all of them were inside making a protest demanding labour rights. In addition, the colour of feminism is violet because, it is said, the smoke that came from that fire was violet, like the fabrics that were there that day. At an International Congress of Socialist Women in 1910, Clara Zetkin proposed this date as the International Women’s Day in honour of the cotton workers.

[humanrightsupdates]

Bangladeshi Protesters in Maldives Face Arrest, Deportation

Government Should Respect Migrant Workers’ Right to Peaceful Protest

Maldivian authorities say they plan to arrest and deport Bangladeshi nationals involved in organizing a peaceful protest in the southern atoll of G.Dh. Thinadhoo.

The July 25 protest was held, like many others across the region, after a recent crackdown by security forces on student protests in Bangladesh, with more than 200 people killed and thousands injured in the clashes that followed.

Minister of Homeland Security and Technology Ali Ihusaan accused the protesters of breaching a visa condition prohibiting migrants from engaging in any “political activities.” This condition violates the right to peaceful assembly under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the Maldives is a party. The Human Rights Committee, the international expert body that provides authoritative interpretations of the covenant, has stated: “Everyone has the right of peaceful assembly: citizens and non-citizens alike,” including foreign nationals, documented and undocumented migrants, and asylum seekers.

Rights groups have called on the Maldives’ government to revoke the decision to arrest and deport Bangladeshi nationals involved in the protest and “uphold constitutional and international human rights conventions.”

The Maldives has the highest proportion of foreign migrant laborers in South Asia, primarily from Bangladesh and India, including tens of thousands of undocumented migrants. Migrant workers in the Maldives face a range of entrenched abuses from employers, including deceptive recruitment practices, wage theft, passport confiscation, unsafe living and working conditions, and excessive work demands, which may amount to forced labor and violate domestic and international law.

[gothhabiba]

[...] [T]he ‘imperial boomerang effect’ is a term for the way in which empires use their colonies as laboratories for methods of counter-insurgency, social control and repression, methods which can then be brought back to the imperial metropolis and deployed against the marginalised, subjugated and subaltern within. With weak moral and legal restrictions, empires are gifted a free hand to test new technologies and social hierarchies on colonised populations. Once honed, the circulation of personnel and knowledge through the empire spreads these repressive methods across colonies – and back into the domestic heartland.

During the era of high European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, numerous techniques, ideologies and practices perfected in the colonies were brought back into Europe and deployed against marginalised populations, dissidents and outcasts. Sometimes, entire colonial institutions were imported back into the metropolis. At other moments, particular counter-insurgency tactics were deployed against migrant populations who had fled colonial wars and settled in the imperial motherland. In the present era of neo-imperialism, the boomerang continues to deeply influence the subjectivities of majority white nations, and to structure the terrain of struggle between the working-class Left and the ruling classes.

— Connor Woodman, "The Imperial Boomerang: How colonial methods of repression migrate back to the metropolis." 9 June 2020.