More Than Fifty: Women’s Migration and Labor in the 21st Century

Intro

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WOMEN’S WORK: A NUMBERS GAME
Something profound is happening to the world’s women today. A 2005 United Nations report on migration trends indicated that fifty percent of the world’s 191 million migrants are now women, with numbers of female migrants into Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania exceeding fifty percent . Of that 191 million, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 90 percent, roughly 94 million, were economically active migrant workers and their families . These numbers represent a more than 20 percent increase from those reported in 1960, with the largest increase, more than 3 percent, occurring between the years 1980 and 1985. The reasons underlying women’s increased movement over the past fifty years have been both implicitly and explicitly linked to the phenomenon known as globalization, resulting in the systematic exploitation of women’s labor within industrial and domestic sectors.

Globalization is a complex and multi-faceted economic, social, and cultural process realized through shifts in policy reform, trade agreements, and corporate business practices. The full-scale adoption of neo-liberalism as a model within capitalism following World War II, it’s practice of expansion through appropriation, combined with restrictions imposed through financial restructuring programs, weak labor laws, and the effective removal of communism at large with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 created a global environment hostile to women.

The exploitation of women’s labor worldwide has manifested in multiple ways. The physical migration of women from underdeveloped regions to advanced industrial countries is generally undertaken with the aim of obtaining economic viability and security for her family, typically through domestic or agricultural work. But exploitation of women’s labor doesn’t always require her movement from place to place. The regular practice by multi-national corporations (most notably within the garment and technology sectors) of relocating jobs from advanced industrial countries to underdeveloped regions, where weak labor laws offer the possibility of maximizing on cheap labor, offer an equally threatening economic environment.

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LOVE AND GUILT: THE PLIGHT OF A MIGRATING DOMESTIC WORKER
The restructuring of the family in developing nations like the United States has created a serious demand for childcare. As Rhacel Salazar Parrenas writes in “The Care Crisis in the Philippines”, Filipina women have responded to this call in mass numbers, creating social change and unrest within the community. Parrenas reports that roughly two-thirds of Filipino migrant workers are women, whose ‘exodus’ as she calls it is generally to fill domestic jobs (39). The continued lack of opportunities to earn a living wage in developing countries like the Philippines has meant that women are forced to seek economic viability and security abroad (39). To be sure, many women migrants are single mothers whose families depend on them as the sole source of income. Women active in the domestic sector working as maids and caregivers provide for their families through remittances, monies sent to their home countries. In the Philippines, Parrenas says, it is estimated that 34-54 percent of the population is sustained by remittances, with more than $7 billion dollars contributing to the nation’s economy in 1999 alone (41).

But while women’s migration contributes to the country’s economic prosperity, it also works to deplete it of another important resource. As women migrate from poorer countries to care for the children of the affluent, they are forced to leave their own children behind, thus leaving a new care deficit in the wake of their departure. The strain of separation is a burden carried by both mother and child. ‘The price is high,’ Parennas says, and maintaining relationships across borders is challenging. Mothers must work hard to assure their children of their love and that they have not been abandoned. In addition, a strong network of surrogate support is crucial to the child’s development.

But even if women can manage to maintain familial relations across borders, they face scrutiny from a community still heavily entrenched in traditional gender ideologies that identify women’s rightful place in the home. Parrenas explains that the media’s vilification of women as the source of the country’s problems adds yet another layer of complexity, registering a conflict between the economic realities of globalization and national and gender ideologies (52).

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MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND OFF-SHORE LABOR
One of the hallmarks of economic globalization is the unprecedented practice by multi-national corporations of relocating factory jobs from advanced industrialized nations to less developed countries. Offered as a cost-cutting measure in response to rising labor costs at home, these corporations take their cues from formulas employed by early industrialists. In, ‘Bananas, Beaches, and Bankers’ Cynthia Enloe explains that the form of capitalist exploitation of women’s labor we find today is historically rooted in the nineteenth century British textile and garment industry’s labor practices (160). Acquiring cheap labor was considered essential to the industry’s ability to be economically competitive on a global scale, and to further solidify England’s supremacy within the global market. This imperative was therefore met with a tactful reorganizing of staff from male to female workers, combined with a public relations effort that devalued women’s labor and kept wages low.

First, Enloe says, factories drew upon existing patriarchal assumptions about women’s ‘natural’ abilities for sewing and other domestic tasks as a way of decreasing its value as ‘skilled’ labor (162). As ‘unskilled’ labor, the women’s work in the factory garnered a rather low wage. In addition, says Enloe, specialised or ‘skilled’ jobs, such as work on a cutting machine, were reserved for men, essentially locking women into the lower paid positions.

The rationalizations for this approach, Enloe says, were located within the existing cultural assumptions about women’s role with in the family (162). Women were considered to be secondary wage earners, either under the care of their husbands or fathers. In addition, money earned by single women was considered disposable income, or ‘pin money’, used for frivolous expenditures while waiting for a suitable marriage prospect. As such, women’s work was depicted as a hobby as opposed to a means to fulfilling an economic need, and as such was paid at a low rate.

The success of the British textile and garment industry thus became a focus of study for other aspiring industrialists, who quickly adopted the British model of exploitative labor practices. This model persists within industry today, particularly throughout the garment and light industrial markets; but strict labor laws and minimum wage requirements make it difficult for corporations to manipulate women’s labor as effectively as in the past. As a result, factories are being relocated from advanced industrialized nations to poorer countries where government infrastructure is minimal and/or can be persuaded to enter into unfriendly, unequal trade agreements.

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1. United Nations Population Division. “World Migrant Stock: The 2005 Revision.
2. International Labor Organization. “Facts on Labor Migration.” Genva, Switzerland: International Labor Organizaton.

REFERENCES
Enloe, Cynthia H. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases : Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. 1st U.S. ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1990.

Salazar Parrenas, Rhacel. “The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families in the New Global Economy.” Global Woman : Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Eds. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. 39-54.

Myrna Balk

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As an artist and social worker, Myrna Balk’s work has been affected by her curiosity, and her wish to experiment with new materials, as well as her need to express her feelings about the world around her. Her art has been influenced by her commitment to human rights. A hallmark of her work has been the use of a variety of materials. She first began as an artist sculpting in steel. Part of this venture brought her to an invitational workshop with British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro. She then expanded her sculptural work by using other materials, such as clay and bamboo. Her sculptures were often allegorical and abstract. She also began creating installations for parks, ponds and public places. The installations explored the environment in which they were shown.

She began printmaking: etchings, monotypes and woodcuts. While in China in 1995, for the UN Women’s Meeting, she contacted Lu Fang, a Professor Emeritus from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, China who tutored her in his woodcutting techniques.

A major feature of her work has been the intersection of her social work experience with her artistic talents. This is best illustrated by her experience in Nepal. As a social worker she began working with women who had been victims of sex trafficking. She then began to create art which both reflected their experiences and informed people about the exploitation of women. While Myrna’s art has dealt with such serious topics as sex trafficking, the demand factor in the exploitation of women, and the holocaust, her work can also at times be humorous and whimsical.

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Myrna Balk grew up in University City, Missouri. She attended the University of Iowa where she majored in art and sociology. Myrna received her Master’s Degree in Applied Social Sciences from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and later studied sculpture and printmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

She has received numerous grants and awards for her bamboo sculpture, photography, and etchings, both locally and nationally. Some of her work was shown in Beijing in 1995 in conjunction with the 4th United Nations World Conference on Women. In 2001 she was invited to document, with photographs and etchings, the lives of Dalit women in a remote section of Nepal. Her etchings referencing international sex trafficking were shown at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2000. She is a member of the Brookline-based artist collaborative, Studios Without Walls. In addition to numerous local shows in Boston and Cambridge, she has exhibited in Cleveland, Glasgow, Beijing Budapest, and Nepal. Recently she was invited to the Harmony Artist Residency in Mumbai, India to create installations in black marble, sandstone and bamboo for the permanent collection of the Ambani Foundation.

Myrna has taught in many graduate schools of social work including St. Xavier’s College in Kathmandu, Nepal. She was awarded the Beverly Ross Fliegel Social Work Award for Policy and Change in 2003.

www.myrnabalk.com

Lizza May David

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I once visited my aunt in Hong Kong, where she works as a full-time live-in domestic helper, in hopes of shooting a short film about her. Upon arriving I was informed that it was not possible for me to visit her in the apartment, where she lives and works around 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. She said: “My employers don’t like anybody to come to their apartment, because they say it’s not modern and representable enough for them.” From her words I sensed my aunt’s integrity towards her employers.

Six months later, acting on her own accord, my aunt bought a videocamera and decided to shoot her surroundings herself. Her employers were planning to renovate the apartment, and since nothing was to remain of its weathered appearance, it was the time to shoot the “missing material.” Out of respect for her employer’s family, my aunt requested that I edit all family pictures, which I have done. These areas in the film are are shown as (>blackspaces).

The resulting work is an intimate documentary of my aunt’s relation to her working and living space in Hongkong. It is a visual approach about the ethics of image-making, a reflection upon Philippine identity abroad and it’s feeling of alienation. It is also about how power relations are interconnected with private space. –Lizza Mae David
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DVD PAL, 4:3, One channel video, color, sound, 1 Flatscreen, 1 framed letter

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Lizza May David (b. 1975 in the Philippines) is a multimedia artist based in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Lyon and Berlin and works on issues of migration, memory and nationhood, especially relating to her Filipino and German experiences. Her works explore subject formation in ‘imagined communities’ (B. Anderson) and therein strategies of image production, projection surfaces and idealogical worlds. Since 2007 she has been a member of the artist group Global Alien.

www.lizzamaydavid.com

Frau Fiber

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KO Enterprises: the labor behind the label commemorated, immigrant textile workers in Chicago. Frau Fiber worked 12 hours shifts, 8am-8pm, for 17 days in the production of five White-collar uniforms, one for each day of the workweek. The White-collar uniform was knocked of from a Hart Schaffner Marx suit, sized to fit Frau Fiber. Hart Schaffner Marx company was started by two German Immigrants in the 1800’s as a shirt company, today the company produces shirts, suits, jackets and trousers in Chicago and around the world. President Obama wears them.

Mimicking the global system of garment production on a micro scale in Chicago, Frau Fiber chose three locations of disassembly production. In disassembly production, component parts are created in separate locations around the world, then are shipped to a central location where the components are assembled. The three locations had historical connections to labor and garment production in Chicago. 1315 Western Ave., headquarters: production of patterns, cutting and sewing of the White-collar Jacket, UE Union hall on Ashland Ave, production of the White-collar shirt and Unite Here Union Hall on Ashland Ave, White collar trousers were produced.

After eight hours of unpaid over time Frau Fiber completed her work and hosted a manufacturers Sample sale. The garments were priced on a geographical wage scale, of garments workers in United State, Germany, Bangladesh, China and Cambodia. The suits ranged in prices from $26-$335. The public was invited to try on and purchase the White-collar uniforms. The priced for Bangladesh and China sold.

Materials: time cards, historic texts, receipts, chalk boards, chalk, pattern paper, one Heart Schaffner Marx suit, one white business shirt, digital photographs, steel garment rack, hand crank sewing machine, pins, needles, thread, buttons, 15 yards white cloth, 35 yards navy blue suit wool, 15 yards interfacing, card board, chair, two sets scaffolding, nails, hammer, price tags, sales book, Frau Fibers uniform and whistle.

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Frau Fiber is the ultimate ego of Carole Frances Lung. As Frau Fiber, Carole utilizes a hybrid of playful activism, cultural criticism, and research and spirited do-it-yourself, she investigates the human cost of mass production and consumption. Addressing issues of value and time through the thoroughly hand-made construction and salvaging of garments.

Carole appropriates local and regional textile and garment manufacturing histories combined with contemporary visual fashion culture, crafting one of a kind labor experiments. She has transformed public spaces into micro manufacturing facilities, making the apparel industry recognizable. These labor experiments are an attempt to redirect energy away from the production of capital, forming a reflective dialog about garment history, labor, marketing and the environment.

This work began following a twelve-year career in the Couture Bridal Gown Industry; Carole received MFA in 2007 from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC). She has created site-specific performances of garment production labor in United States, Germany, Ireland and Haiti. She was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, an Irish Arts Council Commission Grant for OUT OF SITE, an AT the Edge Award, from the University of Illinois-Chicago, Gallery 400, Fred A. Hillbruner Artist Book Fellowship and recently was nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and participated in The Ghetto Biennale in Port Au Prince Haiti. Carole has lectured internationally, and was a visiting artist at Northern Illinois University, School of the Art Institute Chicago, Bates College and Maine College of Art, she is currently Assistant Professor, Department of Art, California State University Los Angeles. Press includes: Jan 10 Art in America, PRI the World, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Sew Hip Issue 07, and Performance Research Journal.

http://sewingrebellion.wordpress.com
http://madeinhaiti09.wordpress.com
www.fraufiber.com

subRosa

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What are the economic, cultural and every-day life effects of the outsourcing of labor and globalization on towns like North Adams and Juárez? Processes of global change are manifested locally where specific forces come together to shape the conditions of life. subRosa discovered that many aspects of the labor conditions and daily lives of women in North Adams resonated intimately with those of women in Ciudad Juárez.

In the Museum installation, oversized map pins on large aerial photographs of North Adams and Ciudad Juárez denoted “points of visibility”––usually places of refuge or exploitation––in the two cities. A “forensic floor” concealed a dozen spaces beneath its weathered wooden surface. Visitors became active investigators as they discovered the objects, texts, and clues beneath the loose floorboards and made connections between the histories and present-day lived experiences of women working in both cities. Ephemera and interpretive artifacts documented women’s struggles and resistance––from union organizing to subversive eavesdropping, and the role of hairdressers as a gateway to refuge. Five posters (from a collection of 60) by Mexican graphic artists expressed concern and outrage about the continuing murders and disappearances of Mexican women–many of them maquiladora (factory) workers in Ciudad Juárez–over the past decade. (1) A large pamphlet that unfolded like a road map provided texts [available on line at http://canuseeusnow.refugia.net], images and bibliographical information that further explored the themes of the installation.

In MASS MoCA’s front lobby, subRosa installed another work: A large dymaxian map with scissors tethered alongside, invited museum visitors to trim off the tags from their own clothing and pin them to the map at the geographical point of manufacture, or assembly, for that article of clothing. Visitors thus actively explored and demonstrated their own participation and complicity in globalized labor conditions. Their participation in this simple action provided a multi-layered geography lesson, as many of the most common assembly zones are in countries that have changed names frequently or have been de-/re-annexed as the forces of globalization and free trade have swept across their territories. Thick clusters of tags piled up anywhere the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or other capitalist colonizing forces have travelled. The territories of “First World” nations such as the US, Canada and Western EU member countries remained largely free of the tags, which typically represent oppressive labor conditions that mostly affect women and children.
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Can You See Us Now? ¿Ya Nos Pueden Ver? was created by subRosa for “The Interventionists; Art in the Social Sphere.” Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, May 2004-April 2005. Curated by Nato Thompson.

subRosa is a cyberfeminist art collective committed to combining art,
social activism and politics to explore and critique the intersections
of information and bio technologies on women’s bodies, lives and work.
Since its founding in 1998, the group has developed a “site-uational”
form of trans-disciplinary art practice that creates open-ended
environments where participants engage with objects, texts,
technologies, and learning experiences, and interact with each other
and the artists. subRosa has performed, exhibited, and lectured in the
USA, Spain, Britain, Holland, Germany, Croatia, Macedonia, Mexico,
Canada, Slovenia, and Singapore, and has received many commissions for
its work as well as funding from the Creative Capital Foundation,
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
at Carnegie Mellon.

http://cyberfeminism.net
http://home.refugia.net

Moira Zoitl

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At the exhibition “Moira Zoitl, EXCHANGE SQUARE,” the artist treats the complex relationship between public and private space for migrant domestic workers by structuring one side of the exhibition space like the urban space of Hong Kong and marking the dimensions of the tiny room of the household domestic Maria Theresa Hamto on the other side of the space with wooden walls. Zoitl thus undertakes a division into public and private, while at the same time showing their mutual interpenetration.

In the first part, the gray pillars symbolize the high-rise architecture of the city and define the placement of the video monitors. Their arrangement corresponds to the spatial division of activities of the Filipino community in the urban space of Hong Kong. The pillars serve as projection surfaces in both a metaphorical and a literal sense: the videos Statue Square, Taking Pictures and Bring back HK$ 3,670! Snake Rally are projected onto one of them—these videos document the activities of the labor migrants at Statue Square; on the other side, glass panes bearing the logos of famous fashion labels and designers are leaned up against the pillars. This indicates the fact that these buildings are occupied by fashionable shops, but at the same time this is shown to be a temporary inscription and attribution. The monitors showing the migrants in public space are placed in front of these pillars close to the floor, thus alluding to the spatial position of these people in the space of Hong Kong. At the same time, viewers are forced to take a position similar to the one taken by the migrants documented in the video. Urban space is translated in the exhibition space and becomes a display of information that structures perception.

On the other side of the exhibition space, there is an installation that could be seen under the title Theresa’s Room or Street Actions5 in earlier exhibitions. Here, Zoitl combines various forms of documentation (videos, a newsletter) in a single space that is a true-to-scale reconstruction of the room of the domestic worker Maria Theresa Hamto. Visitors must enter the space to be able to see the objects. They experience the narrowness of the room and have the possibility of understanding what living there might be like. The level of purely looking at documents is complemented with the level of physical experience. In this way, a different form of perception of the visitors is addressed. At the same time, the individual representations are placed in a context that shapes the individual parts into an overall impression. The space in Theresa’s Room is marked as Hamto’s “room of her own,” and her fate and activities are set in relation to the more general social situation by the newsletter. The penetration of the private by the public and/or society becomes evident.
–Renate Wöhrer, No Room of One’s Own

THERESA’S ROOM
The installation Theresa’s Room consists of the life-sized reconstruction of the room of Maria Theresa Hamto, a Philippine domestic worker for a Chinese family in the New Territores, an outer district of Hong Kong. The embroidered bed covering The Maid’s Rulebook lists some of the rules of behavior for “housemaids,” fixed in their work contracts. The video Maria Theresa Hamto Performing Babae/Women and the Newsletter/01 with the title Street Actions (2005) document the political and social activities of migrants on the street, while Maria Theresa Hamto at Work shows the daily routine of domestic work.

Publications for download:
newsletter02.pdf

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Babae Woman, performed by Theresa Hamto.

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Moira Zoitl
*1968 in Salzburg/Austria, lives and works in Berlin
From 1990 to 1997 she studies at University of applied arts, Vienna, AT (Diploma 1995); and 1997 at University of fine arts Berlin (Visual Communications). Since 1994 she was invited to several projects and artist residencies amongst others in Budapest (1994), Rome (1998/99, Austrian federal ministry of Art), Hong Kong (2002/2004), London (2003/2009, Austrian federal ministry of Art), Bukarest (2006) and Stockholm (2007, Goethe Institute) and received i. e. in 2004 the National Award for Fine Arts (Austrian federal ministry of Art).

Moira Zoitl’s video works and installations have been shown in international exhibitions i. e. 2008 «The Third Guangzhou Triennial», Guangdong Museum of Art, China. «°I MYSELF AM WAR!», Open Space, Wien, AT. «Show Down», Projektraum exex, St. Gallen, CH. 2007 «Moira Zoitl – EXCHANGE SQUARE», Kunsthalle Exnergasse, AT. «As in real life» P74 Gallery, Ljubljana, SLO; «Sexy Mythos – Ideas and Images of Artists » (Publ), Overbeck-Gesellschaft Kunstverein Lübeck, D. 2006 «Arbeit/labour*» OBG Ormeau Bath Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland and Galerie im Taxispalais Innsbruck, AT. «Equal and less Equal» Museum on the Seam, Israel. 2005 «ongoing. feminism & activism», Galerie 5020 Salzburg, A. «REALITÄTEN I: Machtfaktor Wirtschaft», Fotogalerie Wien, A

www.moirazoitl.com