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

Globalization has intensified many of the national trends regarding women’s work in many countries. The “new gender order” is linked to the feminization of the international labor force and to other factors such as demographic trends, women’s higher levels of education, changing family forms and the formation of transnational families. One of the consequences has been the increase of tensions around care needs, particularly but not exclusively in high income countries. This has resulted in a new consciousness regarding gender equality and the gender division of labor while falling fertility rates in many countries has stirred debates about social reproduction and the need for new policies to  balance family and labor market work. The current world economic crisis could exacerbate some of these tensions while also presenting an opportunity for positive change.

Holning Lau
Associate Professor of Law
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This paper navigates through popular interpretations of the relationship, which has evolved over the past three decades in advanced liberal economies, between globalization and social policy, particularly family policy. Initially focusing on the concepts of globality and globalism, the paper argues that the apparent relationship between economic globalization and de-investment or underinvestment in families has been strongly mediated by neoliberal political rationalities that position the market as the most efficient governing mechanism to realize social wellbeing. Drawing largely on the experience of family policy reform in Canada, the paper demonstrates the ways in which the social policy architecture has shifted from a gender-infused family wage model to an individualized family self-sufficiency model. Although this paradigm shift has reduced levels of public investment in social policy, it also importantly has focused resources and deployed such characteristically neoliberal governing strategies as individualization and fiscalization to underwrite a particular kind of family and a privatized strategy for care. The paper argues that this neoliberal experiment in social governance has left all types of families vulnerable to recurring global financial crises and ill-prepared to cope with emerging challenges to both families and national states. The paper concludes that, contrary to contemporary practices, social investments should figure prominently in economic recovery and stimulus packages as well as in long-term economic growth strategies.

In the last two generations, the hours worked by American families have increased considerably as a result of a complex set of factors, including the pressures of globalization, women’s entry into the labor market, and the changing structure of work.  These increased employment demands have put considerable stress on family life, including the caretaking and homemaking tasks traditionally performed by women.  The legal and policy responses in the United States to this problem have been surprisingly muted. 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 childrearing that 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 each impose large costs on important goods such as children’s welfare and sex equality that we, as a nation, should care a good deal about.  In my essay and talk, I will consider the assumptions that impede development of a more coherent work-family policy that better promotes a range of important goods.  I will then discuss directions for an adequate work-family policy in an era of globalization.

This paper examines two aspects of US immigration policy that affect parents and their children—state social welfare supports and deportation—and argues that the state has an obligation to refrain from actions that would unnecessarily weaken or sever the parent-child bond, and in addition to take some affirmative steps to support immigrant families. I limit my discussion to “mixed status” families in which at least one child is a citizen and at least one parent is not.

My discussion draws on two bodies of literature—the ethics of care and various theories of citizenship—to support my contention that the state bears a responsibility not to disrupt, and also to provide material support to maintain the parent-child relationship. I suggest that some current welfare and immigration policies fail to afford adequate respect, protection, and support to the family relationships of citizen children. Policies fall short when they deny certain welfare benefits to the parents of citizen children, and when they fail to provide means by which citizen children can obtain a hearing to block deportation of their parents.

I conclude that while most people in the US affirm the importance of the family and parent-child relationships, many aspects of public policy that touch immigrant families are shockingly indifferent to the effect of both government a private sector practices that put severe strains on the family life of mixed status families. Considerations of both expediency and justice make it imperative that the polity take steps to amend those policies that make responsible and satisfying childrearing difficult for many and, for some, impossible.

Families are on the edge in a number of senses.  As the crisis is now revealing, families are often ‘on the brink’ and subsisting in a precarious economic state, and they are the location where the effects of deep social and economic transformation are most visible.  But it is also clear that families are connected to markets and economic processes in myriad overt and hidden ways.

Households and labor markets everywhere are undergoing a parallel set of transformations: both home and work might now be thought of sites of fragmentation, feminization and flexibilization. These changes, all of which entail significant transformations in both risk and access to resources, are best imagined not as independent developments.  Instead, they are driven in part by changing governance norms and priorities. The effects of these governance initiatives on families and workers reveal in stark detail significant conflicts and shortcomings within broader governance initiatives, and they point to both better and worse futures through law and public policy.

Michele Rivkin Fish
Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The group of healthy infants available for adoption in this country is comprised disproportionately of African-Americans. The group of adults seeking to adopt infants, and deemed by relevant licensing authorities eligible to do so, is disproportionately white. Multiple studies document the fact that most white people prefer to adopt white children. Many adoption agencies have responded to this mismatch by offering reduced agency fees to adults who agree to adopt Black children. The stated intention of these race-based discounts is to find placements for children who are difficult to place – “special needs” children, in adoption-speak. An unstated but obvious corollary is that adoptive parents are also permitted to pay more for whiteness.

Building on the work of R. Richard Banks, Michele Goodwin, and Solangel Maldonado, among others, this article will consider the legal and ethical implications – for parents, the children they adopt as well as those they do not, and for society as a whole — of basing the price of adoption on race

For-profit and not-for-profit institutions offer loans to individuals and couples specifically for acquiring goods and services related to assisted reproduction and international and domestic adoption. The goods and services providers – fertility clinics, egg banks, adoption foundations, adoption agencies – play important roles in screening applicants and distributing loan proceeds even if they do not provide the capital.  This paper will examine how certain loans channel women into traditional gender roles.  The paper will also examine how a broader set of loans coincide with incentives to create more mothers and the impact of this intersection on women who are ambivalent about motherhood (Letherby 1999; May 1997; Morell 1994; Park 2005; Wager 2000) who may nonetheless participate in a “culture of perseverance” (Thompson 2005).  I may situate this debate within a larger discourse on the construction of motherhood and childhood through consumption and material culture.  This paper is part of a broader project on the parenthood loan market.  The first phase of the project is forthcoming in Law and Contemporary Problems. That piece reviewed adoption and assisted reproduction financing generally, observed how specialty loans bolster descriptive claims of a robust parenthood market, and identified three flash points at which repeat-playing lenders might alter the political economy of the parenthood market in unexpected ways (adoption versus assisted reproduction; fulfillment of parenting goals for unpartnered and same-sex couples; and quality control over assisted reproductive technology).

This Article re-examines commodification concerns in three settings: (1) compensated egg donation, (2) surrogacy, and (3) sex work.  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 may disadvantage women as a class in these instances, constraining female agency and earning power.  Moreover, anticommodification 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.

This essay explores the obstacles to achieving accountability for abuses against migrant domestic workers in the United States.  On the one hand, domestic work has become increasingly commoditized in the global economy – migrant domestic workers’ remittances both a rich source of revenues for the workers’ countries of origin, and a lucrative source of profits for traffickers, who increasingly traffic migrant domestic workers for the exploitation of their labor.  On the other hand, domestic work remains highly resistant to formal recognition in the market as a form of labor entitled to worker protections.  Even within the context of human trafficking –  a phenomenon that has inspired both widespread moral outrage and aggressive legal reforms in recent years – the trafficking of domestic workers remains an underexplored and unaddressed problem.  This essay explores the underlying reasons for this neglect, drawing from sociological studies into the social construction of demand for trafficked migrant domestic workers’ labor.  Building upon these findings, this essay concludes with a critique of current initiatives to address the trafficking of migrant domestic workers, with a particular focus on the trafficking of migrant domestic workers by diplomats and its implications for the role of the State in addressing such abuses.

Niklaus Steiner, Ph.D.
Director, UNC Center for Global Initiatives

Since the mid-1990s the United States has enacted a series of laws that makes it easier to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens.  In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDOA) were signed into law by President Bill Clinton.  Five years later, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush passed the USA PATRIOT Act.  These three exclusionary laws represent an abrupt departure from post-WWII immigration policies, which provided increasing rights to immigrants and their families.  The effects of these laws on deportations, now strategically called removals, have been dramatic.  Between 1995 and 2007, deportations (with orders of removal) skyrocketed from 50,924 in 1995 to 319,382, representing a 600 % increase over a 12 year period.  Depending on the reason for deportation, these noncitizens are barred from reentry into the United States anywhere from 5 years to life.

One implication of US enforcement polices is the forced repatriation of a diverse population of immigrants.  This population consists of many new or recent arrivals who were apprehended during a first attempted unauthorized entry or shortly thereafter. It also includes authorized permanent residents who may have violated immigration provisions or committed relative minor criminal offenses.  Among this latter group are deportees who left spouses and children in the United States.  Relatively little is known about how deportation influences ties and relationships with family members left behind.  Drawing on interviews conducted with deportees in El Salvador and families of deportees in the United States, this paper addresses two related question. First, how are family relations and ties disrupted by deportation?  Second, how do these family relationships influence the future migration and settlement intentions of deportees?

This article explores the relationship between regulation of capital controls — especially regulation of remittances — and migration of labor.  It describes how these regulations affect incentives for workers to migrate internationally, in some cases increasing their exposure to unfair business practices and imposing costs on family members who remain in the workers’ home countries.  It considers whether policymakers should take these potential costs into account in crafting policies regulating capital controls.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 and the punitive US. response have served as the context for a vast––and continuing––Cuban migration.  By the end of the twentieth century, more than one million Cubans––one-tenth of the total population––had emigrated, mostly to the United States.  That U.S. policy has relied principally on economic sanctions as the method to remove the Cuban government has resulted in unrelieved hardship on the Cuban people, and in the process has profoundly transformed the nature of untold numbers of Cuban families.

Migration developed within two phases of specific global contexts, corresponding to Cuba’s changing international position and U.S. policy: the period after 1960, when Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet bloc in the final decades of the Cold War; and the years after 1990, when Cuba adapted to the global economy in the post-Cold War environment (Special Period).  In both instances, Cuban families were adversely affected by the vicissitudes of U.S. policies that purposefully politicized migration as part of the larger strategy of economic sanctions.  Divided families have found themselves continually separated not only by the Florida straits but also by U.S. laws and policies which have manipulated migration procedures, restricted travel authorization, and tightened remittances regulations, the very means by which families maintain connections.

This article examines the relationship between U.S. policy after 1960 and the legal mechanisms that have influenced the character of the binational Cuban/Cuban-American family.  The United States has used the rule of law to deny families the capacity to fulfill the fundamental custom of care-taking and comfort for the purpose of subverting the Cuban revolution. Of course, the regulation of migration 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, a normativity of impartiality that ideally characterizes the rule of law cannot be discerned.

U.S. efforts to dislodge the Cuban government by way of inflicting hardship on Cuban families have failed.  On both sides of the Florida straits, individuals improvised––often extra-legal––mechanisms of mutual familial assistance.  In doing so, they often have been obliged to act as transgressors of laws and policies as a means to maintain family support systems.

Migration destabilizes families or what we think families should 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, my article examines the effects of the feminization of migration on the family. My article specifically looks at the emergence of transnational mothering and establishes the resistance in Philippine society against this type of parenting. This resistance I show adversely affects intergenerational relations in the family and discourages the reconstitution of the gender division of labor in households. It instead encourages fathers to avoid housework, burdens female daughters and extended kin with greater household responsibility, and pressures geographically distant mothers to remain more active carers in the lives of their children than are physically present fathers. I conclude by making sense of this resistance to gender transformations in Philippine society.

This essay looks at the trends toward and implications of gender and class inequalities within Latino families as they struggle to survive in the global economy. I begin with an overview of the relationship between globalization, Latino migration and family formation. I then highlight three family forms that have emerged with contemporary migrations, exploring inequalities within each. The first are families who have responded to globalization’s unsettling effects by transnationalizing, dividing their reproductive and productive labor between the U.S. and their home country. Within this case I look at the important role of kin-networks and remittances to family maintenance and individual members’ experiences. Second, I look at the new demographic trend of Latino families who have migrated to non-traditional destinations in the U.S. in search of work. Unique to these families are the challenges of surviving without the presence of extended networks and basic social structural supports. Finally, I introduce “reverse transnational families,” Latino families who after an extended period of settlement in the U.S. have been spurred by economic crisis or deportation to re-divide members across national borders, subsequently confronting unique cultural, economic and legal challenges that accompany repatriation. I conclude by emphasizing the commonalities which connect poor Latino families; disruption, dislocation and adaptation, and the persistent ways that class, gender and generation shape one’s position and experience in the family.