International Organizations

There are several practical, financial and psychological problems that can be experienced by care workers in leaving their home country and family behind to find work. All of these problems can be compounded by their undocumented immigrant status.

The fact remains that neither home countries nor host countries can adequately address the complex needs of these migrant workers, whose origins cross national borders.

For these reasons, international organizations such as the ILO (International Labor Organization), the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, and the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) could potentially play a role most important. They can provide notification mechanisms, human rights standards, and regulatory frameworks.

This project focuses on the role of international organizations in the provision of care by migrants. How do these organizations view the provision of care by migrants, and how have they worked in cooperation or competition to “manage” migrant caregivers? How effective are their interventions and standards?

In this project, Rianne Mahon studies international governance from the top down. She is interested in the stories and content of speeches and policies of international organizations concerning migrant caregivers. She does document analysis and interviews key informants. Jennifer Fish oversees and analyzes the dialect relationship between migrant workers and international human rights and policy organizations. Her ethnographic work with the International Domestic Workers Federation chronicles the formation of the first set of global policy protections for domestic workers, and the multiple expressions of implementation across five continents.

REFEREED PUBLICATIONS

• Fish, Jennifer N. and Justin Sprague (2019). “Authentic Activism: Domestic Workers as Global Development Agents.” In Gender and Development: The Economic Basis of Women’s Power. Edited by Sam Cohn and Rae Lesser Blumberg, Thousand Oaks: Sage.
• Fish, Jennifer N. and Moriah Shumpert. (2018). “The Grassroots-Global Dialectic: International Policy as an Anchor for Domestic Worker Organizing.” In Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim. Edited by Sonya Michel and Ito Peng, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• ‘The OECD, the World Bank and Transnational Care Chains: A “Wicked Problem”’ Current Sociology special issue on ‘The Global Sociology of Care and Care Work’, B. Aulenbacher, H. Lutz, B. Riegraf editors. 2018 66(4) pp. 562-576

NON-REFEREED PUBLICATIONS

• Rianne Mahon and Sonya Michel, ‘Not in Focus: Migrant Care Workers as Seen by the ILO and the OECD, to appear in a volume on Gender, Migration and the Work of Care, to be co-edited by Ito Peng and Sonya Michel
• Rianne Mahon ‘Gendering Migration Management’ to appear in The International Organisation for Migration: the ‘New UN Migration Agency’ in Critical Perspective edited by Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud
• Rianne Mahon Transnational Care Chains as Seen by the OECD, the World Bank the IOM, in International Organisations and the Globalisation of Governance: Microprocesses and Actor Configurations. D. Dolowitz, M. Hadjiisky and N. Romuald eds. June 2018. Manuscript about to be submitted to Edward Elgar summer 2019 which has accepted the book proposal
• Fish, Jennifer N., Stefania Azzarello, Sylvia Gunther, Lisa-Marie Heimeshoff, Claire Hobden, Maren Kirchhoff and Helen Schwenken. 2014. “’We Want to be the Protagonists of Our Own Stories’: A Participatory Research Manual on How Domestic Workers and Researchers Can Jointly Conduct Research.” Published by the International Labor Organization, Geneva, Switzerland and the International Center for Development and Decent Work, University of Kassel, Germany.