Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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mean that migrant female workers in private households are at particular risk of falling prey to human
trafficking, forced labour or degrading working conditions. Far from their own families and social
networks, many female domestic workers tend to live in their place of work, i.e., in their employers’
private residence. This creates the potential for employers to abuse their position by restricting time off,
limiting social contact and failing to provide adequate living conditions. On occasions, domestic work
provides a front for human trafficking. Amnesty International (2005) explicitly states that better
protection is needed to prevent sexual harassment by employers.
While migrant women send remittances to their households in their home countries, other women
in their family are looking after their children and home. Female migrants employed in domestic work
therefore affect not only their employers’ families, but also the structure and dynamics of their own. This
is known as the “global (or transnational) care chain” (Hochschild and Ehrenreich, 2002), a term which
alludes to the international division of care work and the emergence of transnational care economies that
provide women from poor backgrounds with incentives to seek employment as domestic workers abroad.
Hochschild (2000) describes a typical global care chain in which a woman from a developing country
leaves her children in the care of her eldest daughter or mother (the family grandmother) while she “cares
for” another family as a domestic worker in a more developed country. Hochschild argues that this
constitutes a “human ecology of care”, since the different actors in the chain are bound to one another by
a high degree of dependence. Just as the female employer in the wealthier country relies on her domestic
worker to do the housework or look after her sick parents, the migrant domestic worker relies on her
relatives in the home country to look after her house and children. Although each woman’s decision is
part of a survival strategy in a labour market offering limited opportunities, the resulting private
arrangements between them help to perpetuate the sexual division of labour and maintain the status quo
that dictates that women have prime responsibility for reproductive work and caregiving.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the existence of an interdependent care chain is evident from
the profile of migrant female domestic workers in the region, a striking number of whom are mothers with
established families of their own. Some of the main flows of migrant women are from Nicaragua to Costa
Rica and from Peru to Chile, both countries where a higher proportion of migrant women than local
women are employed as domestic workers. According to a study by ECLAC (2004e), 42% of all female
Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica work in domestic service, compared with only 9.1% of Costa Rican
women. In Chile, 72% of Peruvian migrant women are employed in domestic service, as against a figure
of 16% for the female population as a whole. These large differences in employment rates show that there
is marked discrimination against female migrant workers, not least because many of them are
undocumented, a problem which they often resolve by marrying nationals of the destination country to
regularize their situation.
All this is happening in a region that is the world’s largest destination for remittances. In 2005,
remittances to the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean represented 2.67% of the region’s GDP and
totalled US$ 53.6 billion, or 24.5% of total remittances worldwide. 45 The remittance total is very difficult to
calculate because of the large amounts sent through informal channels as remittances “in kind” (food,
clothing and other consumer products), through the post or with friends or relatives who happen to be
travelling, which are methods widely used by women. Accounting systems in most of the region’s countries
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In 2005, remittances represented 27.56% of GDP in Haiti, 37.15% in the Dominican Republic, 16.26% in
Jamaica, 16.67% in El Salvador and 21.02% in Honduras. Data from multiple household surveys show that in
most of the region’s countries remittances account for a large percentage of incomes in the households receiving
them, and this is particularly true of countries such as Uruguay (45%), Paraguay (41.9%), Ecuador (35.9%),
Mexico (35.6%), El Salvador (34.1%) and Honduras (33.6%) (IDB, 2006b).