3071-The political economy of new slavery

112 Migrant Domestic Workers and Slavery
employ than others. 6 In London, for example, employers want Indians
because they are docile, Filipinas because they are good with children
and so on. This makes it difficult for African women in particular to
find work. And when they do get jobs they tend to be lower paid,
further from central London and longer hours than other people. While
women from some countries have had to pay agencies, and therefore
are more likely to be middle class, to have a level of education and
to speak some English, women from other countries are more often
from the rural poor. Lack of English again acts against them in the job
market. The harder it is to find work the more likely you are to stay in
an unsatisfactory, or even an abusive job. So migrant domestic worker
does not signify a homogeneous group: while some workers are well
paid and have, albeit in the face of great difficulties, negotiated reasonable
conditions, others are abused and exploited and there are certain
groups (national, economic, religious) who are more likely to have
difficulties than others.
The problem with fetishizing victimhood is that by focusing on
individual, dreadful cases of abuse and how benevolent and horrified
supporters can ‘help’, it is too easy to think that the less dreadful cases
do not matter. It is important to recognize that there are differences, not
least because those who are in the stronger position, who speak English,
who are better educated, have more days off, who live more centrally,
and so on, will inevitably find it easier to participate and take lead organizational
positions. So, unless we recognize such differences between
workers, the organization risks leaving the most powerless behind. It is
by raising the situation of the most powerless that all migrant domestic
workers are empowered because, slave or happy family member, the
mechanisms and structures that keep them doing the dirty work are
shared.
And this is the problem with the rhetoric of slavery. Because one of
the functions of the term ‘slave’ is that this is unacceptable. This is one
reason why it is undoubtedly an effective campaigning tool, for it is
a term that captures the moral high ground. ‘We’ cannot accept slavery.
It is not ‘civilized’. It is a word like ‘genocide’: we can never condone it.
So, who is the villain in the slave trade? The traders and the slave
masters. Who are the villains in the domestic worker industry? Evil and
abusive employers. This focus enables a denial of the materialistic
context, the structural forms of power that often allow the possibility of
abuse in the first place. So structural adjustment, for example, or the
immigration and asylum policy that drives migrants into risking their