Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas’s article is a foundational text for understanding global care chains. It places household care after women’s labor-market entry within transnational political economy: affluent countries and urban middle-class households purchase the domestic and caring labor of migrant women, while those workers’ own families often rely on other female relatives or lower-paid caregivers.

The article matters because it does not treat domestic workers only as individual laborers. It analyzes an international division of reproductive labor. Care is not a private emotion that simply happens; it is work organized by markets, migration regimes, family responsibility, and global inequality. Feminism that celebrates professional equality without asking who cooks, cleans, and cares for children and elders risks reproducing class and national hierarchy.

For FemRes, this text connects care economy, domestic labor, migration, and transnational feminism. It helps readers see that the care crisis is not merely a household management problem but a structural question about how global capitalism depends on feminized labor that can be moved, undervalued, and emotionalized.