Anna Triandafyllidou, ed.

, Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in

Europe. Who Cares? 2013, Farnham (U.K.), Burlington (Vt.), Ashgate,
Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations Series, 256 p.
Stéphanie Condon
In Population Volume 70, Issue 3, 2015, pages 640 to 643

ISSN 0032-4663
ISBN 9782733210567

This document is the English version of:

Stéphanie Condon, «Anna Triandafyllidou (ed.), Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe. Who Cares?, 2013, Farnham (U.K.),
Burlington (Vt.), Ashgate (Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations series), XVI-256 p.», Population 2015/3 (Vol. 70) , p. 640-643

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How to cite this article:
Stéphanie Condon, «Anna Triandafyllidou (ed.), Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe. Who Cares?, 2013, Farnham (U.K.),
Burlington (Vt.), Ashgate (Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations series), XVI-256 p.», Population 2015/3 (Vol. 70) , p. 640-643
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 Book Reviews
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Anna Triandafyllidou, ed., Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe. Who

Cares? 2013, Farnham (U.K.), Burlington (Vt.), Ashgate, Research in Migration and
Ethnic Relations Series, 256 p.
Over the last ten years the subject of this collective work has been taking
on importance in sociological research on migration. Historically in Europe and
elsewhere in the world, domestic work and female migration have been closely

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linked at the regional, national, and international levels. And since the 1990s,
various demographic, political, and social changes have strengthened that tie
through international migration. In response to increasing demand for home
care and cleaning services, migrants – especially women – leave home to work
for and in private households. Despite the demand for their services and the
obvious importance of the role they play, in many cases it is hard for them to
obtain residence permits. And as the texts in this work demonstrate, the lasting
status of irregular migrant impacts not only on their living conditions but the
quality of their social relations at work and ultimately the work itself.
Debate in the “migration and gender” research field has produced a kind
of consensus around a general model – the “global care chain” – based on a
social, gendered division of labour that corresponds to international expansion
of an economic sector whose workers are primarily women migrants. Home
care and cleaning is often represented as women migrants’ “preferred”
employment sector, and in any case one that is particularly open to “low-skilled”
women. Studies on the living and working conditions of women migrants
doing these jobs describe the vulnerability caused by their informal nature,
the difficulties these women have claiming their rights, and the specificities
of the employer-employee relationship, particularly for undocumented women
workers. To better understand female migrant vulnerability but also the
resources these women have for improving their situation, this book, coordinated
by Anna Triandafyllidou, stresses the necessity of looking beyond general
models and taking the specificities of national context into account. First,
despite the fact that there has been some harmonization of immigration policies
at the European Union level, legislation on residence rights vary by country.
Second, as historians Louise Tilly, Joan Scott, Leslie Page Moch and Theresa
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McBride, together with recent gender-and-work sociology studies, have shown,
legislation on and regulation of domestic work – sector restructuring but also
efforts to formalize these jobs – vary greatly from one country to another.
Likewise, immigration history, including political management of integration
and collective mobilizations around the issue of migrant rights, is an important,
highly specific component of national context.
Triandafyllidou’s introduction is followed by eight chapters that analyse
the situation of (primarily female) migrants in domestic work and how an
“irregular migrant’s” situation impacts on her daily life. The countries studied
are Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
All chapters except the one on the Netherlands were written in the framework
of a European Union research study conducted from 2009 to 2011 and funded
and coordinated by the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA). Case study authors
were asked to describe the political and legal context of foreign migrant work
and residency (using available statistics on number of migrants working in the
home care and cleaning service sector), to present the recent stages in formalization
of domestic work, and to analyse the impact of migrants’ work and situation

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on their health and family lives. They also discuss the notion of occupational
mobility and “career” as they pertain to this category of worker, drawing on
the experiences of these women to explore the blurred boundary between
legality and irregularity and examine the obstacles to maintaining family life.
The conclusion reviews one by one the characteristics of the employment
situation of migrants working in this sector and briefly discusses migrant
domestic worker access to labour rights and the vulnerability that comes with
long-term or repeated “irregular migrant” status.
Collective regularizations of migrants – in Italy, for example – have often
been presented as an acknowledgment by the regularizing country of its need
for a domestic help workforce; they are therefore said to reveal a favourable
attitude toward integrating foreign workers. Yet what the majority of these
chapters stress are the negative effects of regularization, which requires a degree
of commitment and support from the employer that in turn results in employee
dependence. The employer-employee relationship is in fact the primary focus of
these analyses. For migrant women in Italy or Greece who have benefited from
collective regularizations, women migrants without residence permits in Germany,
and “filles au pair” in Brussels alike, being a live-in domestic employee opens
the way for exploitation and other abuses. As we read in these accounts, that
situation works to isolate women migrants who are not proficient in the language
of the country or have no network to inform them of their rights, other job
opportunities, administrative formalities for obtaining healthcare, etc. The
employer-employee relationship can also become complex for live-out women
migrants. Regardless of national context, employers tend to see themselves as
“clients” paying for services to be performed in their home rather than “employers”
with legal obligations related to ensuring employee’s wellbeing at work.
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The book echoes other studies that point up the insufficient recognition of
the social and economic value of domestic work. The understanding is that this
work goes unrecognized because the jobs in question are seen to replace the unpaid
work of housewives or other family members. The originality of the book is to
show how formal or legal conceptualization of these jobs has changed and to
present the measures that have been taken for protecting migrant workers. However,
there is little on the political mobilizations that led to the various legal innovations.
Most of the chapters mention the stratified, hierarchically ordered aspect of
this employment sector, and the effects this has on migrant hiring and working
conditions. But there is little probing of dynamics, probably because of the book’s
structural constraints and the number of points to be discussed in each chapter.
So while “ethnicization” of tasks and jobs is mentioned (in the chapter on the
context in Spain), only the chapter on the Netherlands (which uses the term
“racialization” for this sector) analyses stereotypes about the quality of migrant
workers by origin.
In the excerpts of interview accounts by migrant women themselves,
regularization is presented as the sought-after solution to a daily life of fear of

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being reported and expelled from the country. But the experiences and trajectories
of regularized migrants show that obtaining a residence permit does not resolve
many of the problems they have with employers and institutions, nor does it
protect them from poor working conditions, underpay and discrimination.
By bringing together a set of national case studies, this work definitely
achieves its aim of providing a comparative perspective on the constraints migrant
women in domestic work must cope with, women who perform crucial services
for households and dependent persons despite the fragility of their legal status.
However, each case study could be further developed in connection with two
key questions: how sector stratification relates to migrant origin; why these jobs
continue – and will continue – to attract women, especially migrant women.
Stéphanie Condon
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