Not in Focus:Migrant Women Caregivers as Seen

by the ILO and OECDRianne Mahon

Wilfred Laurier University, CanadaSonya Michel

University of Maryland, USA

This paper has been partly funded by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Partnership Grant on Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care ((File No: 895-2012-1021), Ito Peng, PI, with Rianne Mahon and Sonya Michel serving as co-investigators.

Why international organizations?

• Intimate spaces in global perspective• Global care chains

Limited role of the ILO and OECD—why?

• Remit, siloization• Internal structures• Migration as an “orphan”• “Ways of seeing”

The ILO

• Workers with family responsibilities (#156, 1981)

• Gender Promotion Program: migrant women workers

contribute to host countries by “freeing national

women to take up higher status, better paying jobs in

the national economy” (Lim et al., 2003)

• Recognizing care work as work (→ #189, 2011)

ILO-UNDP Recommendations

• Create sufficient opportunities for decent work• Facilitate return of migrants, family

reunification• Guarantee equal labor rights for migrants,

including child care• Make employers co-responsible

--ILO/UNDP, “Decent Work in Latin America and the Caribbean: Work and Family” (2009)

OECD

• Language of “policy sciences”

• Working parties, 1990s-2000s—a “warren of

committees” (Woodward, 2009)

• Focus on need for care services in host

countries but not in sending countries

(“Babies and Bosses,” 2004; “Help Wanted,” 2011)

Conclusions

• Care work falling through institutional cracks

• Role of welfare states and schemes

• Ways of seeing