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Gendered political economy and the

politics of migrant worker rights: the
view from South-East Asia
Juanita Elias
Published online: 18 Jan 2010.

To cite this article: Juanita Elias (2010) Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant
worker rights: the view from South-East Asia, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 64:1,
70-85, DOI: 10.1080/10357710903460022

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 Australian Journal of International Affairs Vol. 64, No. 1,
pp. 70
85, February 2010

Gendered political economy and the politics

of migrant worker rights: the view from
South-East Asia

JUANITA ELIAS*1
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Focusing on the South-East Asian region and looking specifically at activism

around the position of migrant domestic workers in the region, this article
seeks to evaluate why migrant activist organisations appear to have had, at
best, modest influence on gendering the International Labour Organiza-
tion’s approach to labour rights. The author argues that this is largely due to
how dominant understandings of labour rights have neglected the signifi-
cance of social relations of reproduction (i.e. those ‘care-related’ activities
associated with the household) to the functioning of the labour market.
Furthermore, a transnationalisation of social relations of reproduction is
manifested in the increased feminisation of labour migration in the region
and this highlights further problems with dominant labour rights perspec-
tives that remain largely state-centric in their approach. The significance of
South-East Asian states in promoting localised regimes of citizenship/
immigration and industrial relations greatly limits the ability of activist
groups to claim and utilise the language of human rights. Nonetheless, the
article argues that a concern with the human rights of female migrants can
potentially destabilise dominant understandings of labour and human rights.
More generally, the article seeks to demonstrate the insights that a critical
feminist human rights approach can bring to studies of work and employ-
ment within international political economy.

Introduction
This article utilises a theoretical framework that is grounded in a recognition of
the centrality of ‘productive-reproductive’ relationships (Bakker and Gill 2003:
34) to the functioning of the market economy. The article seeks to explore why
activist groups in the South-East Asian region involved in advocacy on behalf of
migrant domestic workers appear to have had, at best, modest influence in
terms of gendering the International Labour Organization’s (ILO’s) approach to

*Juanita Elias is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Adelaide. She is the
author of Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Corporation and Gendered Employment in a
Globalising World (Ashgate, 2004) and co-author of the textbook International Relations: The
Basics (Routledge, 2007). Recent journal publications have appeared in the Review of
International Studies, Economy and Society and Third World Quarterly. Bjuanita.
elias@adelaide.edu.au .
ISSN 1035-7718 print/ISSN 1465-332X online/10/010070-16 # 2010 Australian Institute of International Affairs
DOI: 10.1080/10357710903460022
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 71

labour rights. Consequently, the dominant core labour standards (CLS)

approaches to labour rights endorsed by the ILO have, by and large, failed to
recognise the specific problems and issues faced by marginalised and feminised
groups of workers such as migrant domestic workers. I argue that this is largely
due to the neglect of social relations of reproduction within existing ‘rights-
based’ mechanisms of global governance. An overwhelming construction of
labour rights that emphasises formal sector productive work places considerable
limitations on the ability of groups such as migrant domestic workers to claim
‘rights’. Thus, the article seeks to explore how and why a concern with an
economic rights issue such as labour rights might be reformulated in ways that
recognise how gendered structures of socio-economic inequality are central to
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contemporary systems of work and employment in the global political

economy.
The focus of this article on the South-East Asian region reflects two important
factors: first, the extent to which a regional migration regime operates within
South-East Asia. Although it is clearly the case that many migrant domestic
workers seek employment outside of the region, for the major migration ‘host’
countries in the region (Singapore and Malaysia), the vast majority of migrant
domestic workers come from neighbouring states. This regional migration
regime is, furthermore, characterised by formal and informal recruitment and
employment networks that serve to facilitate regional migratory flows (Ananta
and Arifin 2004: 14
6). Second, the existence of a regional migration regime is
mirrored by the development of significant networks of activists engaged in
advocacy and support work on behalf of migrant workers (including domestic
workers) (Ford and Piper 2007; Piper 2004). What is clear is that these activist
groups have played a key role in generating a regional civil society consensus
around the importance of migrants’ rights.
In relation to the South-East Asian case, two important questions are
considered. First, to what extent has the adoption of rights talk by international
organisations such as the ILO been useful for local and regional pro-migrant
worker activist groups in the region? Second, to what extent have non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) been able to challenge and transform this
regulatory consensus around labour and human rights in ways that better
accommodate the needs and interests of migrant domestic workers? Thus, more
generally, this article seeks to evaluate the extent to which rights discourse
provides a useful vehicle for mobilising amongst activists seeking to confront
those gendered inequalities and injustices that are central to systems of migrant
domestic work. This emphasis on challenging and transforming human rights
agendas is something that is central to critical feminist human rights scholarship
(Lloyd 2007). This is an essentially political process: framing and reframing our
understandings of human rights has the potential to upset deep-seated under-
standings of both the ‘human’ and ‘rights’. It is a position that is nicely
illustrated by the way in which women human rights campaigners in the 1990s
challenged what they perceived as a ‘male bias’ in mainstream human rights
 72 Juanita Elias

discourse that failed to view domestic violence as a human rights issue. The
emergence of a women’s human rights perspective has been well documented
(Cook 1994; Fraser 2001) and has reflected the growth of a transnationally
well-organised women’s movement that has adopted the language of human
rights as a powerful discursive strategy (Ruppert 2002: 151). Much of this
activism has focused on issues of violence against women, and it is fair to say
that comparable processes have not been at work around the issue of women’s
economic rights (such as labour rights). This raises an important issue: the
extent to which an analysis of debate and dialogue around women’s economic
rights is incomplete without an appreciation of the structural constraints placed
upon activist organisations (particularly for those organisations located in the
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developing world and engaged in grass-roots activism). Furthermore, we need

to situate these human rights debates within a broader analysis of the gendered
structures of both the productive and socially reproductive economy.
This article is structured as follows: the initial discussion provides a brief
overview of the situation of migrant domestic workers in the region, contex-
ualising this discussion within current theoretical developments in feminist
international political economy (IPE). I then turn to discuss two different
approaches to migrant worker rights found within the region. The first is the
more top-down approach endorsed by international organisations (notably the
ILO) and the second is the endorsement of ‘rights talk’ by migrant worker
activists on the ground. In this final discussion, I focus in on the possibilities and
limitations that rights-based activism poses for migrant domestic workers in the
region.

The (international) political economy of domestic labour in South-East Asia:

recognising the centrality of the ‘care’ economy
Situating women within transnational processes associated with economic
restructuring and/or globalisation has long been a key feature of feminist or
‘gendered’ approaches in IPE.2 A new wave of feminist research in IPE has
sought to revive earlier materialist feminist research into the nexus between
gender and systems of capitalist production through a focus on the politics of
social reproduction. This literature seeks to unpack those gendered assumptions
that construct the market purely in terms of the ‘productive economy’, thus
undervaluing the significant role that women play in economies of social
reproduction (in particular, women’s role in biological reproduction and in the
provision of caring needs) (Bakker 2007; Bakker and Silvey 2008; Benerı́a 2008;
Hoskyns and Rai 2007; Molyneux 2006). A significant emphasis in this feminist
materialist writing is how socially reproductive work has been reshaped by
women’s increased participation in the paid labour market and the market-
isation of care work under conditions of global disciplinary neo-liberalism.
These processes are by their very nature transnational processes. For example, it
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 73

has been argued that the chipping away of those limited systems of social
protection that have existed in even some of the poorest states of the world via
processes of neo-liberal reform creates ‘new directions in the privatisation of
survival, such as the feminisation of international migration’ (Benerı́a 2008: 3;
see also Elson 2006).
Economic development in South-East Asia has been accompanied by the
feminisation of migratory flows, particularly into sectors of the care economy
such as domestic work. Within the region, middle- to high-income states such as
Malaysia and Singapore have witnessed huge increases in the employment of
foreign women as domestic workers*a reflection of a number of broader
/

trends such as the rise in middle-class women’s employment, the lack of an

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effective welfare state, as well as social expectations regarding the employment

of ‘maids’ and the attainment of middle-class status (Abdul Rahman et al. 2005;
Chin 2005). The region also contains a number of significant ‘sender’
countries*most notably the Philippines, Indonesia and the transition econo-
/

mies of the Mekong Subregion. During the 1980s, Filipinas constituted the
largest group of foreign domestic workers employed within the five major Asian
destinations (Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong and Taiwan) (Hugo
2005: 61). However, from the late 1990s, there has been a rapid rise in
Indonesian women seeking employment as domestic workers, with Malaysia
becoming the major destination for Indonesian domestic workers, followed by
Singapore.3 These flows of Indonesian female workers have been greatly
facilitated by the growth of transnational recruitment networks that operate on
both a formal and informal (social networking) basis (Wee and Sim 2004).
Outward migratory flows of domestic workers are also frequently encouraged
by governments, who see female migrants (and, more specifically, the
remittances that they generate) as an important economic resource.
The significance of locating a concern with social relations of reproduction
within analyses of these gendered migratory flows is further evidenced in how
some of the major problems faced by domestic workers stem from their position
as employees working within the household context. Frequently, this means that
the work that migrant domestics do is not officially recognised as ‘work’ at all.
For example, in Malaysia, migrant domestic workers are not considered workers
under existing employment legislation and therefore do not have access to the
same kind of employment rights available to other groups of workers.4 Clearly,
this situation can be related back to the issue raised at the start of this article
concerning the non-recognition of social relations of reproduction in conven-
tional understandings of work and the economy. This contributes to a blurred
boundary between work time and rest time, with many groups of domestic
workers never getting a day off or sufficient rest from work. The household
context also functions as a site for the perpetuation of social fears over the
intimate relationship between domestic workers and family members, leading to
the view that domestic workers need to be tightly controlled. Chin’s (1998)
work, in particular, has charted employers’ utilisation of control and surveillance
 74 Juanita Elias

practices that serve to confine the worker to the home and prevent her from
interacting with outsiders. These practices contribute to a curtailing of workers’
access to the world outside of the household and this, clearly, prevents them from
learning of their contractual rights (for example, stipulations regarding rates of
pay). Thus, migrant domestic workers are especially vulnerable to highly abusive
labour practices which include non- and underpayment of wages, long hours of
work and lack of adequate rest time, and even violence suffered at the hands of an
employer or other household member (Human Rights Watch 2005).

Bringing in a rights perspective

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Thus far, this article has outlined the centrality of the socially reproductive care
economy to understanding both the dynamics of domestic worker migration in
the region and the problems and issues faced by these groups. I now turn to
consider the responses to this situation from both international organisations
and activist groups, which have sought to put forward a concern with the
human rights of migrant workers. The aim is to establish the extent to which a
human rights frame provides a useful language for combating the problems and
issues faced by South-East Asia’s migrant domestic workers. What is evident is
that the centrality of the care economy (or, more generally, social relations of
reproduction) is not something that is recognised within existing approaches to
labour rights, which appear to be dominated by a perspective that equates
labour rights with formal employment outside of the home. It also appears to be
the case that the current labour rights regime embodied in the CLS has proven
to be somewhat inadequate when it comes to protecting the rights of migrant
workers*especially those who have undocumented employment status and are
/

employed within low-skill sectors. Questions need to be raised, therefore, about

the extent to which activist groups engaged in struggles on behalf of migrant
domestic workers in the region are able to reshape the international human
rights agenda in ways that are more compatible with the needs of this
vulnerable and marginalised group of workers.

Formal labour rights and feminist critiques

One of the key players in the promotion of a rights-based approach to migrant
labour has been the ILO. Whereas many governments in the region have tended
to view migration either in terms of the securing of international borders to
protect against ‘illegal’ migration flows or of a perspective that highlights the
economic productivity of migrants (or, indeed, a combination of both
perspectives), the migrant rights perspective attempts to place a concern with
the worker’s human dignity at its centre. As the Director General of the ILO is
quoted as saying: ‘Migrant workers are an asset to every country where they
bring their labour. Let us give them the dignity they deserve as human beings
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 75

and the respect they deserve as workers.’5 An emphasis on migrant workers’

rights at the ILO is in line with the organisation’s move, in the late 1990s, to
overtly recognise the work that it does in terms of human rights promotion
(Mertus 2005: 142) with the launch of its Declaration of Fundamental
Principles and Rights at Work (1998). One of the dominant frames of reference
in the ILO’s turn to human rights has been the adoption of the CLS, which
relate to basic trade union rights (collective bargaining and freedom of
association), the banning of forced and child labour, and non-discrimination.
From this basis, the ILO has moved to position itself as a key player in the
promotion of migrant worker rights. Following the 2004 92nd Session of the
International Labour Conference, the ILO developed the 2005 Draft ILO
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Multilateral Framework on Labour Migration*a document that explicitly

/

endorsed a rights-based approach to migration (ILO 2005a). Various ILO

documents and statements highlight the centrality of the CLS to this rights-
based approach (ILO 2005a,b), whilst also recognising the significance of
specific migrant worker conventions.6
Feminist authors have suggested that the promotion of the CLS advances a
view of worker rights as human rights which often leaves the specific problems
and concerns of women workers on the sidelines of the debates over labour
standards (Elias 2007; Franck 2008; Robinson 2007). More generally,
criticisms can be raised about the minimalistic and neo-liberal-compatible
nature of the CLS. Reflecting on the issues raised in the first section of this
article, what is clear is that the specific problems and issues faced by migrant
domestic workers are often not addressed within dominant approaches to
labour standards. In particular, it must be pointed out that commitments to
non-discrimination render the private sphere of women’s socially reproductive,
domestic and homework invisible. Labour rights are thus associated with work
outside of the home and this poses particular problems for domestic workers. As
the extensive literature on women’s human rights demonstrates, conventional
international legal approaches to human rights generally fail to construct the
household as a site within which rights abuses can take place and rights
themselves can be claimed (Bunch 1990). In particular, as we have already seen
from the preceding discussion, it is the household itself that constrains the
ability of migrant domestic workers to claim rights. Furthermore (and,
unsurprisingly, given the tripartite structure of the ILO), the CLS approach
promotes trade unions as the primary representative voice of workers through
the emphasis on the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association,
despite the fact that trade unions often fail to organise or to meet the needs of
marginalised female workers. This is particularly the case for female migrant
workers, where NGOs have played a much more important role in organising
and providing services to this group of workers than trade unions. Furthermore,
state industrial relations policies and practices frequently exclude domestic
workers from the right to form trade unions and employer practices that act to
limit a worker’s contact with the world outside of the household, and thus
 76 Juanita Elias

present significant obstacles to worker organising, serve to undermine a model

of labour rights that places trade unions in such a central position.
Such inadequacies with the ILO’s approach to labour rights stem from the
dominant construction of work as productive activity. As Barrientos et al.
(2003: 1515) have suggested, implementing ILO conventions within a state’s
existing body of labour legislation ‘takes place within the context of long-
standing institutional forms of employment that are constructed around male
norms, thereby reinforcing labour markets as bearers of gender’. In particular,
the implication of this is that forms of employment regulation serve to uphold a
model of productive full-time employment in which female-dominated forms of
employment*especially those pertaining to reproductive activity*are side-
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/ /

lined.
It should be stressed, however, that the ILO is not the only international
institution that has sought to endorse the rights-based approach to migration.
Of particular note are recent efforts by the United Nations Development Fund
for Women (UNIFEM) to promote the use of the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) shadow
reporting mechanism7 as a means to raise issues facing female migrants
(including migrant domestic workers). The use of the CEDAW process is an
issue that will be returned to later in this article, where it is suggested that, given
the fact that the CEDAW is such a widely ratified convention, this process does
open up some opportunity for women’s rights activists to engage more fully
with the migrant rights agenda. Given the regional nature of the migratory
flows within South-East Asia and the fact that the region is made up of both
host and sender countries, it has also been argued that there is a potential role
for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to play in working to
protect the rights of migrant workers (Chavez 2007). However, the develop-
ment of any kind of regional rights-based regime within ASEAN to protect
unskilled workers such as domestic workers is constrained by two major
factors. First, the dominance of a perspective that stresses non-interference and
sovereignty as the basis for cooperation constrains the adoption of regional
rights-based regimes that might be seen as imposing obligations on member
states (Chavez 2007: 364). Second, the adherence to a model of regional
integration based around principals of economic liberalism serves to privilege
the interests of states and transnational corporations over those of the region’s
working population (Ofreneo 2008).

Utilising rights talk: the view from South-East Asia

The limitations of the CLS in addressing the problems and issues facing migrant
domestic workers are perhaps best evident in the fact that little reference at all is
made to the ILO’s approach to migrant worker rights (and the CLS in
particular) by pro-migrant worker activists in the region. For these activist
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 77

groups, a ‘rights-based approach’ to migration is understood more broadly in

terms of making reference to a wide range of human rights standards (be they
international treaties and conventions such as the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights or ‘rights’ as embodied in national constitutions and laws) as
well as in terms of the mere act of couching their struggles within the language
of ‘human rights’. Rights are thus conceptualised as a vehicle for mobilising and
activating struggle rather than in terms of straightforward legal definitions that
focus merely on the justiciability of rights (Piper 2008). This formulation is also
echoed in the work of feminist socio-legal scholars such as Sally Engle Merry
(2006), who have emphasised the use of ‘rights talk’ as a way of translating
abstract and universalistic concepts of human rights within specific cultural
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contexts.
Thus, whilst one interpretation of the CLS is that they privilege a small subset
of rights that are compatible with neo-liberal values (thus failing to locate the
issue of labour standards within a wider concern with economic and social
rights that raise questions of gendered inequality and poverty), there may well
be space for some reformulated notion of economic rights that rejects the
association of rights with public sphere activity. Just as feminist human rights
activists sought to challenge the public/private dichotomies that failed to protect
women from domestic violence, there is also a need for feminist challenges to be
made towards the public/private dichotomies that underpin exploitative
employment practices.
As I have argued elsewhere (Elias 2008), pro-migrant worker activism in the
Malaysian context has engaged with rights talk in ways that challenge and
confront orthodox understandings of human rights. Of particular relevance to
this article are campaigns that have sought to challenge the way in which
domestic work is not considered to be work. One very interesting example of
this has been the work of a Malaysian NGO, Women’s Aid Organisation,
which, through its involvement in the CEDAW shadow reporting mechanism,
has raised the issue of the non-recognition of migrant domestic workers as
workers in Malaysian employment law. The CEDAW is one of the few
international conventions that has been widely ratified and also directly engages
NGOs in its monitoring process. For many feminists, the CEDAW therefore
offers an opportunity for women activists to not only hold states accountable
for women’s human rights violations, but also to challenge the more
conventional understandings of women’s rights (focused on equality of
opportunity) that underpinned the original CEDAW treaty of 1979. Thus, for
example, NGOs have used the CEDAW to effect changes such as the inclusion
of violence against women issues within the CEDAW shadow reporting process.
In this sense, the CEDAW is understood as more than just a ‘top-down’ human
rights instrument, but is also an important arena for the challenging of
dominant human rights paradigms from below (Jones and Wachala 2006;
Zwingel 2005).
 78 Juanita Elias

However, the appropriation of rights talk by activist groups is clearly limited

by the significant role that states in the region play in shaping and constraining
civil society activism, as well as in perpetuating the subordinate status of foreign
domestic workers via restrictive citizenship and immigration regimes that define
the worker as essentially ‘domestic’ and as an ‘outsider’. The nature of
authoritarian state governance clearly differs across the region, and the cases
of the two recipient countries of Malaysia and Singapore serve as a useful
illustration of this. In Singapore, for example, possible avenues for advocacy by
or on behalf of migrant domestic workers are curtailed by a broader politics of
social control. Thus, both church groups working with Filipina domestic
workers and women’s organisations who claim to act on behalf of all groups of
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women in Singaporean society are concerned that their activities should not be
understood as ‘political’ (Yeoh and Huang 1999). Furthermore, the desire to
curb civil society activism around the issue of migrant domestic worker rights is
indicative of the way in which Singaporean state policy has sought to define the
household realm as an apolitical sphere. Defining the domestic worker as a mere
‘domestic’ or ‘maid’ is thus an act of depoliticisation that curtails her ability to
engage in the public sphere (Lyons 2007).
By contrast, in Malaysia, the existence of a much more vibrant civil society
has generated greater opportunities for pro-migrant domestic worker activism.
A range of organisations, both secular (including women’s rights organisations
and trade unions) and those linked to religious organisations (notably, the
Catholic Church), have been involved in these issues. However, state
authoritarianism is clearly evident in the repressive tactics that were used to
silence the founder of the migrant worker NGO Tenaganita, Irene Fernandez,
when she made critical comments over the state of the country’s detention
centres and was subjected to an ongoing legal battle over charges of sedition
under the state’s internal security legislation. What is more, state authoritarian-
ism in Malaysia rests upon a politics of ethnicity that not only seeks to divide
Malaysian citizens along clear ethnic and racial lines, but also acts to scapegoat
‘outsiders’ through a politics of ethno-nationalism. Thus, despite the country’s
overwhelming reliance on migrant labour, the state has sanctioned one of the
most draconian responses to undocumented migration in the region through the
use of a volunteer police force (RELA) to round up and detain migrants
(Hedman 2008).
In certain other South-East Asian states*notably the Philippines and
/

Indonesia*the suppression of migrant labour organising is much less evident.

/

NGOs in these countries have been able to play an active role in advocacy on
behalf of migrant domestic workers and have sought to provide important
support services for migrant domestic workers when they return home (Ford
and Piper 2007; Gibson et al. 2001). However, what is evident is that states
from across the region are complicit in the perpetuation of citizenship/
immigration and industrial relations regimes which act to deprive domestic
workers of a wide range of both citizenship and employment rights (Ford and
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 79

Piper 2007). For example, Gibson et al. (2001) are particularly critical of the
way in which the Philippine state has sought to construct migrant domestic
workers (and other groups of female migrants working in care-related sectors)
around a neo-liberal model of the migrant as freely moving her labour in order
to maximise her earning potential. Such a paradigm has not only enabled the
state to claim that these workers are ‘heroes’ of national development (because
of the remittance flows that their work overseas generates), but also has meant
that the state has not seen it as necessary to act to protect its citizens when they
‘freely’ move into overseas domestic work. Furthermore, state-centric regimes
of citizenship/immigration and industrial relations regimes are frequently
reproduced in the attitudes of domestic trade unions towards migrant workers,
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which tend to view migrants, especially undocumented migrants, with suspicion

(Elias 2008).
What is evident from the South-East Asian region is that a number of
structural factors make it very difficult for migrant domestic workers to form
their own advocacy groups and associations within host states. These include
factors such as the temporary, short-term nature of the work, the way in which
migrant domestic workers will frequently lack opportunities to meet other
workers due to their confinement to the employer’s household, and specific
state policies and practices that prevent migrant workers from forming
associations and unions.
The dominance of middle-class activist voices in the debates over migrant
worker rights in the region has led to a concern that activists may overemphasise
the negative consequences of contemporary experiences of migration (shaped by
both gendered labour market structures and immigration/citizenship regimes)
and fail to take account of both the complexities of the migration process and
migrant worker agency (‘albeit an agency constrained by limited choices’
[Gardiner Barber 2008: 1266]). This ‘victim narrative’ (Gibson et al. 2001)
around migrant domestic work has parallels with a similar emphasis found in
liberal feminist ‘abolitionist’ approaches to women employed in sex industries,
and it has been suggested it ultimately serves an essentially conservative political
agenda that fails to recognise the importance of wage earning to the economic
status and empowerment of women (Agustin 2007; Weitzer 2007). As Quirk
(2007) suggests, such victim narratives that characterise much of the recent
analysis of migration and trafficking serve to legitimise political responses based
on tightening border controls (which often serves to disadvantage groups of
migrants further) and, more significantly, obscure a focus on the structural
poverty that compels individuals to migrate in the first place.
The level and extent of authoritarian modes of governance across many states
in the region means that activism often takes a regional rather than a local
focus. Regional networks have come to play a significant role in promoting a
rights-based approach to migration. A great deal of transnational advocacy
around migrant rights has its roots in campaigns launched in 1998 for states to
ratify the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of
 80 Juanita Elias

All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (the Migrant Workers
Convention) (Piper 2004). For transnational activist groups such as the network
Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), the discourse of migrant rights has become a
central pillar of their advocacy work. Unsurprisingly, a central motivating
factor behind the adoption of a rights-based approach to migration is a concern
to undermine the centrality of state-based immigration and employment
regimes that curtail the rights of migrants by calling for a ‘premium on human
security over national security based on the fundamental respect of human
rights and dignity for all’ (Asian Migrant Centre and Migrant Forum in Asia
2004: 20
1). Again, we can note the transformatory potential implicit within
the MFA’s approach to migrant rights*for example, the rights-based approach
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is seen as important in developing a more gender-sensitive approach to

migration, focusing on the need to ‘empower women [migrants] to assert their
rights’ (for example, through education) (Migrant Forum in Asia 2004). It is in
this context that it is important to note the parallels between the MFA-endorsed
slogan ‘Migrants’ rights are human rights’ (Migrant Forum in Asia 2006) and
the campaigns of the transnational feminist movement of the 1990s that
adopted the phrase ‘Women’s rights are human rights’ (Bunch 1990).

Conclusion
Women workers employed as migrant domestic workers are subject to harsh
(and often abusive) workplace practices, social stigmatisation and systems of
intense workplace control. The discussion presented in this article draws
attention to the limitations of rights-based activism in the face of top-down
understandings of labour rights such as the CLS, which fail to take into account
wider structures of poverty and inequality shaped by the pervasive invisibilisa-
tion of social relations of reproduction. This is not to suggest, however, that
efforts to challenge and resist unjust employment practices are futile and,
importantly, one should be attendant to the concern raised that ‘the analysis of
women’s labour in globalisation should not simply be a description of suffering’
(Gills 2002: 9). In this article, I have sought to expose some of the limitations of
top-down labour rights approaches. NGOs such as those discussed in this article
certainly have an important role to play in ‘translating’ human rights into a
meaningful strategy for pro-migrant worker political activism. Thus, more
mileage is to be gained from rights-based approaches to migration when they
are pursued in ways that have as their starting point the specific problems and
issues faced by migrant domestic workers.
The emergence of a regional migration regime in Asia has opened up political
opportunity structures which may eventually form the basis for enhanced
feminist activism around issues of migrant domestic worker rights. Indeed, the
significance attached to the rights of female workers within the transnational
MFA network would certainly seem to indicate that such a development is
 Gendered political economy and the politics of migrant worker rights 81

under way. Presenting the plight of migrant domestic workers as a women’s

rights issue, and therefore one that deserves to be included in the CEDAW
shadow reporting process, could provide another meaningful basis for transna-
tional feminist activism. However, as True (2008) notes, transnational feminist
activism around economic issues in Asia has been very limited. Thus, we should
be attendant to the concern raised by both Lyons (2004) and Ng et al. (2006)
that middle-class feminist activists, dependent upon migrant domestic labour
themselves, have developed a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards the rights
of this group of workers.
The emphasis on migrant rights and migrant activism presented in this article
provides an illustrative example of the problems at stake when we engage in
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discussions of women’s economic rights. A broader issue is, therefore, the extent
to which a neo-liberal economic order may be incompatible with talk of
women’s economic rights such as labour rights. This is a major concern in
Elson’s (2002, 2006) work on economic rights and it is a particularly pressing
issue given the way in which a dominant neo-liberal development paradigm
legitimates a view of human rights that presents them as complementing the
operation of the market mechanism. Women from some of the poorest parts of
the world are unlikely to ever have access to things such as decent forms of
work, decent public services and systems of social security*the kinds of issues
/

that would conventionally be included within a definition of economic rights

(Elson 2006: 253). It is precisely these women who have underpinned the
feminisation of migration that has occurred in recent years as poor women seek
out strategies that enable them and their families to survive. The ‘globalization
of care and social reproduction’ (Benerı́a 2008: 8), of which South-East Asia
provides a regional microcosm, provides a restrictive socio-economic structural
context for any kind of rights-based activism. Whilst it is important not to write
off rights-based activism by pro-migrant worker groups as powerless in the face
of these structural constraints, it is important also to recognise that activism
must be firmly focused on addressing the challenge of social reproduction and
how the invisibilisation of socially reproductive labour remains central to both
economic development and authoritarian rule in South-East Asia, if it is to bring
about meaningful change.
In this sense, women’s activism may well have the potential to overturn
universalistic approaches to human rights that tend to exclude the needs of
marginalised groups*in favour of what Fiona Robinson (2003: 180) calls a
/

rights-based ethics that ‘addresses the needs and interests of women’ by shifting
‘away from universalism towards a recognition of difference, specificity and
context’. The wider dilemma, therefore, becomes one of weighing up the
benefits and possibilities of ‘rights talk’ to offer strategic potential for women’s
human rights activism against the ways in which discourses of human rights
have been employed within wider processes of depoliticisation, whereby the
market economy (rather than activist struggles around conflicting human rights
agendas) is seen as the best route through which to secure economic justice.
 82 Juanita Elias

Notes
1. This paper was presented at the ‘Sociological Turn in Australian IPE’ workshop, University of
Adelaide, 4
5 October 2007. The author thanks all those who provided feedback on earlier
drafts. This article draws upon research that was conducted in 2006 when the author was a
visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute
(ARI). The author acknowledges the financial support of ARI and the University of Adelaide’s
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Small Grants Scheme.
2. This is not to suggest that feminist or ‘gendered’ approaches to IPE are concerned exclusively
with the role and position of marginalised groups of women in the global economy. For
example, as Griffin’s article in this issue notes, a feminist IPE also provides useful ways into
thinking through how institutions and practices of global governance are both implicitly and
explicitly gendered (see also True 2008). Feminist IPE has also contributed greatly to
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discussions of global resistance politics (see, for example, Eschle and Maiguashca 2007) and
debates on the state (see, for example, Rai 2002).
3. Hugo (2005: 60) estimates, for example, that currently nine in ten Indonesians migrating to
Singapore are female domestic workers.
4. Yeoh and Huang (1999) note similar practices in Singapore.
5. Juan Somavia, Director General of the ILO, cited on the ILO International Migration
Programme website, Bwww.ilo.org/public/english/protection/migrant  (accessed 21 Octo-
ber 2008).
6. These include the Migration for Employment (Revised) Convention 1949 (No. 97), the
Migrant Workers (Supplementary Provisions) Convention 1975 (No. 143) and other
accompanying Recommendations.
7. The CEDAW is unique amongst international human rights treaties in that it has in place a
monitoring process. In 1999, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the CEDAW
Optional Protocol which, if ratified, confers upon states the responsibility to recognise the
ability of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to receive
complaints from individuals and groups. This complaints procedure is known as the ‘shadow
reporting mechanism’ and enables civil society groups to engage in the CEDAW process.

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