Parrenas Response

I found it very interesting how Parrenas took the topics of the previous three readings we had and synthesized them all together. She combines the idea of reproductive labor found in the Ehrenreich piece, the idea of stratification along gender lines from the Kessler-Harris piece, and the idea of stratification along ethnic lines of the Glenn piece and applies those ideas to the international arena. In that way, the Parrenas is a sort of culmination of everything we have been studying for the last couple weeks.

I thought the most notable point that Parrenas makes in her essay is the idea that Filipino domestic workers who are working abroad are actually hiring other Filipino domestics to fill the voids that they are leaving at home. Much of my extended family lives in Taiwan, where everyone who is the middle-class and above employs at least one Filipino servant (and yes, they are referred to as "servants"). Unlike Americans who have one worker for the yard, another worker to take care of the children, a third worker for the cleaning, and yet another for the cooking, in Taiwan, this one Filipino lady does everything. Additionally, servants there virtually always live at the home in which they work. Most of the servants with which I have talked possess some higher education and view their current job as temporary. Many of them send the vast majority of their earnings home to support a large family or perhaps an ailing parent. I had no idea that these women must have been at least in the Filipino middle-class, so it would make sense that they employ domestic workers of their own at home, as Parrenas points out. Since the working visa system is very strict in Taiwan, few of these workers are able to stay for more than a couple years. I would be interested to hear what Parrenas would have to say about the short-lived nature of these jobs and whether or not she found similar views of these domestic jobs as "temporary" in her research.