North Carolina Law Review » Current Issue

Globalization, Women’s Work, and Care Needs: The Urgency of Reconciliation Policies

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:36:20 +0000

This Address argues that the increase in women’s participation in paid work in many countries has made more manifest the tensions around balancing family and labor market work, hence making more obvious the need to solve the problems of care facing many families. First, the Address focuses on the significance of demographic changes affecting these tensions, namely rising women’s labor force participation rates, declining fertility rates, smaller family size, and increasing life expectancy. These changes provide the background for an understanding of the “crisis of care,” or the tensions created by the difficulties that families encounter in caring for children, the sick, and aging family members, particularly in high-income countries, such as in western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Second, the Address emphasizes the importance of policies dealing with this crisis, and it argues that, in the high-income countries where public policies have been lagging, female immigration has played an important role in finding some private solutions to the crisis. Third, the Address argues that care-provisioning policies in different countries have resulted in a variety of models, depending on the degree of public intervention and market-oriented strategies. Finally, the Address examines the notion that the current global economic crisis is not gender neutral and is likely to reinforce the tendencies intensifying the crisis of care. This reinforces the conclusion that the need to take up policies to balance family and labor market work seriously is an issue whose time has come.

Families on the Edge: Governing Home and Work in a Globalized Economy

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:35:44 +0000

Scholars working in the fields of labor law, globalization, law and development, and of course gender now encounter the family at every turn. This is sometimes true even when families and households are officially absent from the debate or issue under discussion, as is often the case. Whether the topic is the transformation of labor and employment law, the character of economic restructuring and market reform, or the path of development policy, the place and function of the family turn out to be key items of interest. Noticing, or failing to notice, where the family fits in and what goes on within households may completely change the perception of the issue, the understanding of how social and economic processes operate, and the assessment of what is to be done at the level of norms, policy, and regulation.

Globalization, Canadian Family Policy, and the Omissions of Neoliberalism

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:34:54 +0000

The relationship between globalization, family structures, and social policy is complex, uneven, and evolving. This Article examines social policy reform in Canada during the past two decades in order to advance three propositions about the relationship between globalization and public policy: first, the influence of globalization on social policy is neither direct nor uniform but, instead, strongly mediated by changing political rationalities; second, neoliberalism is most productively understood as a contested political rationality that weaves foundational commitments to the market, market logics, and individualization into new public policies and regulatory fields and onto existing ones; and, finally, analyses of contemporary family policy should be as concerned with the ways in which governments frame social policy reforms as with the amount that they spend on them. Describing recent policy interventions in family income support, maternity, parental benefits, and care policies, this Article describes how Canadian social policy reform relies on fiscalization, which presupposes that relatively modest payments to individuals and families or tax deductions and credits can stand in for social research and planning, democratic debate, and public infrastructure. Fiscalization also imagines that families will use relatively small increments in income for their designated policy goal in an era when a great many families are coping with declining incomes, unemployment, and rising debt. Although income support is necessary for a growing number of Canadian families, this Article concludes that social policy reform has yet to adequately respond to contemporary family challenges, including work-life balance and a growing care deficit.

Families, Human Dignity, and State Support for Caretaking: Why the United States’ Failure to Ameliorate the Work-family Conflict is a Dereliction of the Government’s Basic Responsibilities

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:33:22 +0000

In the last two generations, the hours worked by American families have increased significantly as greater numbers of women have moved into the workplace. The resulting work patterns have put considerable stress on family life, particularly when it comes to accomplishing the caretaking tasks traditionally performed by women. The legal and policy responses to this problem have been surprisingly muted in the United States. Compared with many European nations, for example, the United States has done very little to ensure adequate time for family life, to ameliorate conflicts between work and family, and to ensure that critical functions such as child rearing, which were once largely handled within families, are still adequately accomplished. This gap in law and public policy has left American families to deal with these issues privately. The various routes they have taken, however, impose large costs on important public goods, including children’s welfare, sex equality, and civic participation.

This Essay argues that the United States’ failure to help families negotiate work-family issues is not only poor policy, it is a dereliction of the state’s most basic responsibilities. The liberal democratic commitment to human dignity that is foundational to the United States’ understanding of itself, this Essay contends, requires it to support caretaking in order to meet the dependency needs that are inevitable in human lives. Because of the large role that the condition of dependency plays in human lives, supporting caretaking is every bit as important to maintaining human dignity as protecting citizens’ security or defending their individual rights.

Achieving Accountability for Migrant Domestic Worker Abuse

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:32:46 +0000

Domestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers’ remittances constitute a rich source of revenues for their countries of origin, while their labor ameliorates the “care deficit” experienced in wealthier countries of destination. Despite the importance of their work, migrant domestic workers are some of the most exploited workers in the world. They are often discriminated against based on their gender, class, race, nationality, and immigration status, and they are excluded from labor law protections in most countries of destination.

This Essay examines some of the underlying reasons for this mistreatment and neglect. After describing the scope and framework of the global domestic work market, it explains why the domestic work sector remains highly resistant to formal recognition as a form of labor entitled to worker protections under international and national laws. It explores the roots of resistance to accountability for migrant domestic worker abuse, drawing from sociological studies that have examined the social construction of demand for trafficked migrant domestic workers’ labor. Building upon these findings, this Essay turns to a case study of the trafficking of migrant domestic workers into the United States by foreign diplomats. The study underscores the challenges to achieving accountability for this devalued worker population.

Abortion Access in the Global Marketplace

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:31:08 +0000

In the United States, government funding of legal abortion for low-income women has been uniquely “de-linked” from the fundamental right to an abortion. While the underlying right to an abortion has been repeatedly reaffirmed, federal courts have been unreceptive to any imposition of an affirmative governmental obligation to fund the exercise of the right. In contrast, the human rights framework, increasingly adopted worldwide by other national and regional courts and legislatures, has supported expansion of government funding of legal abortion. The domestic U.S. treatment of abortion funding is illuminated by examining several recent transnational decisions—from Colombia, Mexico, and the European Court of Human Rights, among others—in which legal abortion, framed as a matter of human rights and human dignity, led to expansion of public funding. In particular, these examples indicate that in a context where a national public health plan was already in place, and where the provision of health care was already viewed as a government responsibility, the extension of health care coverage to include newly legal abortion procedures generated little controversy.

Race and Market Values in Domestic Infant Adoption

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:30:19 +0000

For prospective parents seeking to adopt U.S.-born babies, white infants are the most in demand and, relatively speaking, in the shortest supply. Some domestic adoption agencies have responded to this mismatch by assessing higher fees for the adoption of white infants than for infants of other races. After briefly considering the historically prominent role played by race in the different forms of domestic adoption, this Article explores the ethical and child-welfare concerns raised by race-based pricing in private adoption agencies.

Credit for Motherhood

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:29:54 +0000

This Essay builds on prior work exploring the impact of consumer lenders who sell credit products for assisted reproduction and adoption. After reviewing some basic attributes of the parenthood lending market, the Essay discusses how not-for-profit lenders promote traditional conceptions of motherhood and the division of carework in ways that credit discrimination laws were not designed to address. The Essay also articulates some incentives of for-profit lenders to sell motherhood and potential implications for women who are ambivalent about becoming parents.

A Woman’s Worth

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:28:43 +0000

This Article examines three traditionally “taboo trades”: (1) the sale of sex, (2) compensated egg donation, and (3) commercial surrogacy. The Article purposely invokes examples in which the compensated provision of goods or services (primarily or exclusively by women) is legal, but in which commodification is only partially achieved or is constrained in some way. I argue that incomplete commodification disadvantages female providers in these instances, by constraining their agency, earning power, or status. Moreover, anticommodification and coercion rhetoric is sometimes invoked in these settings by interest groups who, at best, have little interest in female empowerment and, at worst, have economic or political interests at odds with it.

The Very Uneasy Case Against Remittances: An Ex Ante Perspective

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:27:56 +0000

Money that individual migrants send back to their home countries has become a major source of foreign exchange for many developing and emerging economies. These remittances now represent a sizable percentage of the gross domestic product for many states; for some, remittance inflows are larger than all other sources of foreign capital. In recent years, scholars, policy makers, and international financial institutions have tended to view remittance inflows as a net benefit for recipient countries. Given the size of these transfers in the aggregate and their relationship to labor migration, it is essential for policy makers and scholars to continue to critically assess the effects of remittances and remittance policies on workers, the states that receive these remittances, and the states from which these remittances are sent.

This Article argues that the existing literature on remittances almost universally underestimates the overall costs and negative effects of remittances and remittance-driven migration by failing to include various costs and harms borne by migrating workers and their families. If these costs were included in efforts to measure the overall impact of remittance flows, it is at least possible that remittances and remittance-driven migration would represent a net loss for some states and their citizens. If the overall impact of remittances is not positive for any particular state, then policy makers in that state may want to consider adopting policies to reduce or limit remittance-driven migration. They might, for example, avoid or scale back managed labor-migration programs. Depending on the particular circumstances of their state, they might also consider policies that reduce workers’ incentives to migrate for the purpose of earning money to remit home, including taxation of remittance flows, currency exchange controls, or liberalization of exchange rate policies. At the very least, if states’ current policies affecting capital inflows are based on a comfortable assumption that remittance inflows are broadly beneficial, this assumption should be reexamined to explicitly account for the costs and harms borne by workers and their families.

The Effects of U.S. Deportation Policies on Immigrant Families and Communities: Cross-Border Perspectives

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:27:15 +0000

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has enacted a series of laws that makes it easier to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens. These laws, which have been highly criticized for the devastation they have brought to immigrant families, represent an abrupt departure from post–World War II immigration policies, which provided increasing rights to immigrants and their families. In this Article, we examine the implications of changes in enforcement strategies for those deported. Drawing on several studies conducted over a ten-year period, during which federal and local enforcement efforts expanded substantially, we show how U.S. enforcement policies have disrupted family ties and created stress in communities in which immigrants live and work.

Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:26:19 +0000

Migration destabilizes families or what we think families should “look” like, as it forces the transformation of households from nuclear to transnational structures, challenges the traditional gender division of labor, and imposes the barrier of geographical distance on marital and intergenerational relations. Looking at the case of migration from the Philippines, this Article examines the effects of the feminization of migration on the family. This Article specifically looks at the emergence of transnational mothering and establishes the resistance in Philippine society against this type of parenting. This resistance, arguably, adversely affects intergenerational relations in the family and discourages the reconstitution of the gender division of labor in households. Instead, it encourages fathers to avoid housework, burdens female daughters and extended kin with greater household responsibility, and pressures geographically distant mothers to remain more active nurturers in the lives of their children than are physically present fathers. This Article concludes by making sense of this resistance to gender transformations in Philippine society and addressing the question of how receiving states that benefit from the labor of migrant women could help ease the gender woes that aggravate their family life in the process of migration.

Disruptions, Dislocations, and Inequalities: Transnational Latino/a Families Surviving the Global Economy

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:25:56 +0000

This Article draws on field research with Honduran and Mexican transnational families and the transnational family literature to explore how global inequality is influencing gender and class relations within poor migrant families. This Article begins with an overview of the relationship between globalization, Latino/a migration, and transnational family formation. The Article then details and analyzes the intersections of transnational care arrangements and the gendered and classed experiences of individual transnational family members. This Article argues that global inequality, specifically the wage gap between the Global North and the Global South, has direct implications for inequalities within Latino/a families. Finally, this Article suggests that transnational families are resilient, and yet gender expectations and the economic crisis have spawned new gender, generational, and class inequalities that could potentially threaten family well-being.

The Legal Production of the Transgressive Family: Binational Family Relationships Between Cuba and the United States

nclrev — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:24:33 +0000

This Article reviews the relationship between U.S. policy after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the legal mechanisms that have influenced the character of the binational Cuban-American family since then. Over the course of the last fifty years, the United States has used the rule of law to deny families fundamental customs of care-taking and comfort. Of course, the immigration regulations and attendant matters of travel and remittances are customarily linked to national policy and international concerns. However, in the case of U.S. laws governing the relationship of Cuban binational families, there is no normativity of impartiality that can be discerned, a condition that continues notwithstanding some recent changes announced by the Obama administration. These efforts have failed to achieve their goals. Cuban-American families have improvised—often extralegal—mechanisms of familial support. In doing so, they act as transgressors of laws and policies as a means to maintain family support systems.