Gender, remittances and global cities Flashcards
Yang (2011)
Remittances are flows of capital (human, financial, material etc.). This money is often used to support family, or a third party, in a different location.
The USA is the largest location for the generation of remittances. However, flows do not always follow the expected directions
The biggest remittance flows in the UK are to India and Nigeria. Colonial connection is clear here.
Flows must be put into context when we think about remittances and development. Remittances are rising worldwide. They are also steady forms of income, in comparison to FDI or private debt. It is contested whether remittances lead to development
It is important to note that remittances are frequent, but not necessarily large amounts of money.
Carling (2014)
Discusses some of the ideas and roles of remittances:
A) Compensation (remittance house, cost of care)
B) Repayment (of monetary and social debts)
C) Authorization (receiver is directed in how money is spent)
D) Pooling (the way in which households need to pool resources)
E) Gift (irregular, non-obligatory, need independence)
F) Allowance (regular and autonomy in spending decisions)
G) Obligation/entitlement (as perceived by sender/recipient)
H) Sacrifice (sender subordinated needs to those of recipients)
I) Blackmail (emotional or other forms of extortion)
J) Investment (polyvalent)
K) Donation (charitable or religious)
Levit (2013)
Argues that remittances involve “ideas, behaviours, identities and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities”
Social remittances include: Norms, Practices, Identities and Social capital.
Lindley (2009)
The ‘new economics of labour migration’ (NELM) conceptualises migration as a household-level strategy to diversify income sources. This is in response to risk or local constraints in credit. This model is based on the calculation of the likely costs and benefits of migration; the anticipated remittances are central to this calculation.
NELM tends to focus on remittances from the recipients’ perspective, conceptualising migrants as ‘shadow households’. However, the desire to remit is not always matched by the capability to do so. Even when it is, the conditions of settlement in the host country and individual strategies may shape remittances in important ways. While social networks play an important role in economic life and facilitate migration, in some instances they can hinder migrants’ economic advancement by constraining accumulation.
Example: Somalian remittances
Somali society has a tradition of pastoral migration within the region and labour migration to the Gulf. BUT, after the outbreak of civil war in the north during the 1980s, unprecedented levels of migration occurred: both to neighbouring countries and further afield.
The desire to engage in transnational remittance activities Is influenced by a variety of factors. This is not always matched by capability. A strong recurrent theme in remitters’ explanations was reciprocity and social pressure. Many felt that they owe their parents, and often older brothers or uncles, for earlier material and non-material assistance. Poverty may be reinforced by remitting.
There has been a transformation in the geography of remitting AND a diversification. Particularly a feminisation of participation. Women tend to remit more regularly but in smaller amounts (due to lower wages on average).
Constable (2009)
Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in (let along organize) public protests in the countries where they work. However, over the past decade migrant workers in Hong Kong (particularly Filipinas and Indonesian women) have become highly active: organising and participating in political protests. They are not only protesting their local rights, but framing the protests in wider transnational issues and human rights.
The vast majority of overseas domestic workers are women. The gendered aspects of their work and family roles have received much scholarly attention. Domestic workers perform intimate household and family labor across the divides of nation-states. They participate in transnational labor and contribute to public discourse and debate about human rights and globalization. The majority of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are not politically active, but those who are, are highly visible, vocal, and influential.
Example: The Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards
Part of the anti-WTO protests in Hong Kong during 2005. Protestors, most of whom were women migrant workers, literally embodied in their protest actions the comparative disadvantages for the workers themselves (as women who are “milked” for profit) and the advantages for the leaders, officials, and class elites of various countries.
The seemingly endless supply of low-cost workers for export depends on maintaining a pattern of underemployment, unemployment, and military repression of protests back home that could threaten the valuable image of the ideal worker-for-export.
A global city involves not only the movement of capital, but also the movement of a trans- national workforce. They are spaces of neoliberal exception in which categories of people such as migrant domestic workers are excluded from the benefits of citizenship and denied human rights.
Huang et al. (2012)
Ageing populations across the Asian region have given rise to an increasingly variegated mosaic in the social terrains of care and to new dynamics of care. Much of this labour is being ‘imported’ in the form of healthcare workers, domestic workers and even foreign brides.
It is important to emphasize that local contexts matter when considering what ‘care’ constitutes.
Example: For Chinese women who switch from being domestic workers to becoming the wives of their elderly Taiwanese employers, care shifts from being more about money to becoming more about love and companionship, but continues to sit uneasily somewhere in between
Care work remains deeply feminized even as it traverses across different spaces. Although the general cultural perception that women are more suitable for caring for bodies plays an important role in rationalizing and nationalizing the feminization of care, the actual processes are mediated by highly specific, empirically observable, institutional configurations
Example: Taiwan’s immigration policy makes the immigration of wives as caregivers much easier than for husbands
Example: Indian women’s independent migration as nurses may bring about their devaluation as women, and hence as potential brides, at home despite their increased economic earning capacities abroad
Malecki and Ewers (2007)
The decline in the industrial base in many cities has led to a dual employment structure: a business class and a vast army of low-skilled workers engaged in personal services like hospitality or entertainment .
The highly skilled represent a brain drain of the best and brightest of the developing world who move to the developed world in search of higher wages and higher quality of life (or as a means to an end to send remittances back home). In some cases, it is not a brain drain, but a ‘brain circulation’.
Example: engineers from India and China work for a period in the USA only to return to their country of origin where they become entrepreneurs, utilizing indigenous low-skilled labor and connections with Silicon Valley to start new information technology firms
Example: migration into the Arab Gulf
Flows of labor and their embodiment in local labor markets serve as the key process in global city formation, yet are absent from traditional indicators of world city status.
Labor recruitment networks and agents are utilized to meet the high demands for labor in the Gulf. For example, in a region where women are discouraged from entering the workforce, female labor from elsewhere is necessary
Nursing generally is the primary skilled occupation for female migrants in the Gulf. Highly specialized flows result: Filipinas and Egyptians fill middle status registered nurse positions, while Sri Lankan and Pakistani migrants fill unskilled orderly and janitorial positions
BUT, the wages (up to 10 times that of what the migrant can earn at home) are reduced as recruitment agents take up to 80% of the migrants’ annual earning. However, domestic service jobs in the Gulf remain among the few options for families from poor Asian regions, such as Kerala in India and Sri Lanka, which are origins of large numbers of (male) construction and service workers and (female) domestic servants, respectively.
Osella and Osella (2000)
There are four local categories that are typically assigned to male migrants in Kerala:
1) The Gulfan: typically an immature, unmarried male
2) The Kallan: a self-interested maximiser or individualistic anti-social man
3) The Pavam: an innocent good-guy, generous to the point of self-destruction
4) A mature householder status: successful, social and mature
Migration can accelerate an individual’s progress along a culturally idealized trajectory towards mature manhood. It may accentuate characteristics already locally associated with essentialized categories of masculinity
Gulf migration has begun to play a crucial role in movements along the male life-cycle. Gulf migrants cannot settle away but must, sooner or later, return home, where their new- found wealth and access to consumption may dramatically alter their status and their relationships with others, and offer them the chance to forge new identities.
Roy (2009)
Dubai is the lodestone of desires and aspirations. It is the icon of super-modernity in the backbreaking trudge of transnational migration from the villages of Egypt, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan.
It is surely an ‘evil paradise’ of ‘fear and money’, a ‘dream world of neoliberalism’. BUT, it is also an articulation of an Arab modernity where more is at stake than what Davis (2006) designates as the ‘monstrous caricature of futurism’.
It is the place at which the distinctions between the black economy and global finance capital are erased, where city and nature are violently fused, and where the feudalism of an emirate meets up with an open cosmopolitanism.
Yeoh and Huang (2010)
One of the most striking migration flows within Asia has been that of women migrating to work as paid domestic workers in the region’s higher growth economies. Domestic space is not only gendered but also transnational.
Women face the triple exploitation of being a waged worker in the informal sector, a domestic waged worker and a woman.
Example: Singapore
This is a labour-short city without a hinterland. It has had to depend on both drawing more women into the waged economy (the female labour force participation rate crossed the 50% mark in 1990) as well as on foreign labour of all classes, skilled and unskilled (foreigners constitute some 30% of the country’s work force, the highest in Asia), to sustain its aspirations to attain ‘super league’ status
In 2009, the number of transnational domestic workers reached 180,000, the majority split equally between Filipinos and Indonesians, with a smaller proportion of Sri Lankans and a sprinkling of other nationalities. Singapore’s state policy opposes long-term immigration of unskilled labour. Foreign workers are seen largely as ‘a buffer to even out swings in the business cycle’.
