"We had different fortunes": relationships between Filipina domestic workers and their employers in Rome and in Amsterdam

Abstract

The thesis is organised in five chapters, wherein the analysis of the interviews covers the last three. First of all, I will situate myself, not only for what concerns (1) this conceptual frame, but also regarding (2) my contribution to the debate on paid domestic work and (3) the process of interviewing the participants, with remarks on the differences between Rome and Amsterdam. In the second chapter "Filipina, Italians and Dutch", I will discuss (1) how Italian and Dutch employers are embedded in settings which are differently shaped by the long-term effects of the women’s liberation movement, and the process of female integration in the labour market. However (2) looking at the legal policies on migrants’ integration in the private care sector, crucial differences will be outlined, which affect the living conditions of Filipinas I interviewed. Finally, (3) the experience of Filipina participants can be understood looking to the twofold character of Filipinas’ migratory path. In Rome and in Amsterdam, they are one of the biggest group employed in the private care sector; and, at the same time, in Philippines, the crucial combination between a perennial economic and political crisis in the country, and the spreading of female sacrificing models push women to emigrate. In the third chapter, "Domestic Models", I will consider employers and employees as protagonists in shaping new female models in relation to female skills and roles in the domestic realm. They are engaged in negotiations provoked by the substitution in the household of one woman with the other; the commodification of domestic tasks, and the manipulation of female skills. The chapter on "Personal Boundaries" will demonstrate how other axis of difference affect the relationship. Ethnicity, together with age and class, are ingredients of the distancing or bonding that the participants enact at the personal level. The existence of stereotypical representations surrounding Filipinas will have a central role. Finally, in "Feeling Citizenship" I will reach the more political dimension of the relationship in the dyad, wherein the transnational character of the research is more significant. In order to let the difference of citizenship status emerge, I will look at specific feelings expressed by the participants. I will show, indeed, how super-structural asymmetries in social and legal rights between natives and migrants enter in the relationship.