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The dominant role of the employer regarding the access and use of healthcare services by migrant domestic helpers (MDH) often has a negative impact on healthcare provision for migrants in Cyprus. Research relating to the perceptions of MDH employers remains scarce. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of employers on the access and use of healthcare services by their MDH.

Three studies were carried out using semi-structured interviews with MDH (n=13) and employers of MDH (n=12) and structured questionnaires with MDH (n=625). Content analysis for qualitative findings was carried out using QSR Nvivo 10 and for quantitative using Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 17.

Findings provide information about migrant health needs from different views leading to improved documentation via multiple triangulation. Employers play a key gatekeeping role but are not in position to provide sufficient information and guidance to their MDH. MDH reported a need for health services which was not met (18 percent), attributing this to their employers not granting them permission.

The role of the employer is critical and has an impact on the quality of care provided to this migrant group. The involvement of the employer in MDH health matters functions as a barrier. A significant gap exists between employers and MDH regarding the health needs of the latter.

In this chapter, we investigate race discrimination and race equality policies in the workplace at two interrelated levels of analysis in Cyprus. At the macro-national level, the effectiveness and implications of the present legal system is evaluated, and the chapter discusses whether it brought about the desirable results of safeguarding a fairer and efficient legal system, eliminating any kind of discrimination at the European Union (EU) level. At the meso-organizational level, the chapter refers to the results of research presenting a number of organizational policies and practices that safeguard or hinder the inclusion of migrants at the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the work-life (WL) experiences of live-in women migrant domestic workers (MDWs), who represent a significant proportion of migrant workers globally. MDWs play a key role in enabling the work-life balance (WLB) of others, namely the middle-class households that employ them. Yet, their experiences have largely been invisible in mainstream WL literature. The authors draw on an intersectional approach to frame the WL experiences of this marginalized group of women at the intersection of being secondary labour segment workers, with significant legal and employment restrictions as migrant workers, who work and live in the same place as their employers.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with 13 women MDWs from Indonesia and the Philippines working in Malaysia. The women talked about the meaning of work as MDWs, how they maintain familial connections whilst working abroad, and how they negotiate their WLB as live-in workers. Thematic analysis of the interviews focused on the intersection of the women’s multiple dimensions of disadvantage, including gender, class and temporary migrant-foreigner status, in shaping their accounts of the WL interface.

Three thematic narratives highlight that any semblance of WLB in the MDWs’ lived experience has given way to the needs of their employers and to the imperative to earn an income for their families back home. The themes are: working as MDWs enables the women and their families back home to have a life; the co-existence of WL boundary segmentation and integration in relation to “real” and “temporary” families; and the notion of WLB being centred around the women’s ability to fulfil their multiple duties as MDWs and absent mothers/sisters/daughters.

The study is based on a small sample of live-in women MDWs in Malaysia, intended to promote typically excluded voices and not to provide generalizable findings. Accessing potential participants was a considerable challenge, given the vulnerable positions of women MDWs and the invisible nature of their work.

Future research should adopt a multi-stakeholder approach to studying the WL experiences of women MDWs. In particular, links with non-governmental organizations who work directly with women MDWs should be established as a way of improving future participant access.

The study underscores the existence of policies and regulations that tolerate and uphold social inequalities that benefit primary labour segment workers to the detriment of secondary labour segment workers, including women MDWs.

Extant WL literature is dominated by the experiences of “the ideal work-life balancers”, who tend to be white middle-class women, engaged in professional work. This study offers original contribution by giving voice to a taken-for-granted group of women migrant workers who make other people’s WLB possible. Moreover, the study challenges WL research by underscoring the power inequities that shape the participants’ marginal and disadvantaged lived experience of work, life, family and WLB.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the changing pattern of identity politics in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). It shows that in response to the massive urban renewal projects in the 2000s, “civic localism” in the form of cultural preservation movement emerged to protect local community culture against the government-business hegemony. However, due to the deepening of social integration between Hong Kong and the mainland, a new “anti-mainland localism” emerged in the 2010s against the influx of mainlanders. In 2015–2016, as a result of Beijing’s active interference in Hong Kong affairs, localism is further transformed to Hong Kong “independence.”

This paper uses a historical methodology to trace the changing pattern of identity politics in Hong Kong after it becomes a special administrative region of China in 1997.

It shows how the interaction among the following three factors has shaped the pattern of localism in Hong Kong: macro historical-structural context, social movement dynamics and the response of Hong Kong and mainland government.

This paper argues that Beijing’s hardline policy toward Hong Kong localism may work in the short run to all push the pro-independence activities underground. However, unless the structural contradiction of the HKSAR is resolved, it seems likely that anti-mainland localism and Hong Kong independence sentiment and movement will come back with a vengeance at a later stage.

The literature tends to discuss Hong Kong localism in very general terms and fails to reveal its changing nature. This paper contributes by distinguishing three different forms of localism: civic localism in the mid-2000s, anti-mainland in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and independence after 2016. It shows how the macro historical-structural transformation, social movement dynamics and the responses of the Hong Kong SAR government and Beijing government have led to the changes of civic localism to anti-mainland localism, and finally to independence.

This article examinees how vulnerability operates within the intimate economy in Hong Kong’s prominent entertainment district of Wanchai. Best known in its portrayal of The World of Suzie Wong, Wanchai’s historicity is anchored in a legacy of colonialism, orientalist imagination, and Western militarization. Presently, the area continues to cater to Western expatriate men, foreign travellers and the US Navy. An influx of Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong in recent decades has led to the rise of new intimate relationships fostered in the bar district. While Wanchai is renowned as a red-light district celebrating white Western masculinity, a complex portrait emerged after a year of ethnographic fieldwork observing the intimate exchanges between Western expatriate men and Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, as two groups who are positioned on opposite ends of the city’s socioeconomic spectrum. Contrary to recurrent portrayals of female victimhood in commercialized sex industries, this article illustrates how other experiences of vulnerability, particularly those of the Western male expatriate partner, also deserve critical attention. By exploring the decommercialized transactions within Wanchai’s intimate economy, this piece demonstrates how the intimate relations forged between Western expatriates and Southeast Asian migrants can help negotiate longstanding gendered relations of power and shared senses of structural precarity.

This chapter conceptualizes forms and processes of erasure and visibility of migrant domestic workers through the analysis of interview data, media coverage, and public policy. This chapter builds on the existing literature on foreign domestic labor by synthesizing a framework to better represent the mechanisms that produce instances of visibility and erasure; these include transnational forces of erasure like sexism, xenophobia, and domestic labor stigma that interact with country-specific policies and norms. Within this framework of visibility and erasure, we also delineate different aspects of each, such as spatial erasure, erasure in the media, and self-erasure. Finally, this chapter explores how each of these components interconnect into a system of erasure, each aspect enabling another aspect in dampening the individuality of migrant domestic workers. This chapter is intended to illuminate the realities of erasure with careful specificity, while still crediting domestic workers for their resilience and creativity in promoting their own visibility.

This chapter focuses on the case of migrant Filipina live-in domestic workers in Greece and how the frame of their work and employment in precarious, low-status/low-wage jobs and race discrimination at work, that is, the employers’ residences, affect their participation in secondary groups of solidarity and workers and their representation in them, that is, community, migrant labour associations and trade unions, during the economic crisis in Greece. According to the results of in-depth interviews Filipina migrants are entrapped in a frame of isolative and exploitative working conditions and racial discrimination at work, that is, personal services, care and domestic work. In this working context, most of the interviewed migrant Filipina live-in domestic workers appear to have developed individualistic perceptions, they act in an atomistic manner, form materialistic beliefs, are indifferent to collectivity and solidarity and are isolated from their compatriots and other workers. They have low self-perceptions and expectations for social advancement and deal with their social and labour-related problems individually, or completely resign from claiming them.

This paper aims to examine the forms and experiences of victimization of foreign domestic helpers (FDHs) in Hong Kong, the effects of victimization on FDHs and FDHs’ coping strategies.

The main findings are based on semi-structured interviews with a sample of 12 FDHs in Hong Kong.

The findings uncovered a continuum of violence ranging from relatively mundane abuses on an everyday basis to acute events at the time of termination. Some respondents also experienced secondary victimization from police and/or pending criminal justice proceedings after contract termination.

Victimization exerted significant adverse physical and psychological effects on FDHs in our study. Nevertheless, contrary to common assumptions about FDHs as passive victims, our findings suggest that some FDHs experienced a degree of empowerment, as they found ways to cope with their difficulties by individualized and social strategies depending on the degree of victimization and the resources available.

The findings suggest there is an urgent need to review the existing laws and policies that, at best, are ineffective and, at worst, create far more problems than they solve.

Previous research has documented the ways that migration contributed to the rise of Hong Kong as a global city by the early 1990s. Much academic attention has been paid to the causes of labor migration and issues related to the adaptation of migrant workers in Hong Kong. Based on a review of such studies, the purpose of this paper is to describe three representative groups of migrant workers in Hong Kong and discuss how research on migrant workers in Hong Kong has provided new insights to the global city literature and to the study of development and migration.

This paper reviews published works regarding migrant workers in Hong Kong since 1996. Discussion focuses on three representative groups: high-skilled immigrants from developed countries, low-skilled migrant workers from less developed regions and mainland Chinese immigrants.

Findings suggest that the migration patterns and challenges of the adaptation of migrant workers in Hong Kong correspond largely to the social polarization thesis proposed by global city literature. However, Hong Kong is unique compared to core global cities in the USA and Western Europe due to its special power relationship with mainland China and its colonial history, which have a significant impact on immigrants’ decision to migrate and their post-migration integration.

This review paper provides a better understanding of migration and development, and highlights new factors that contribute to reasons for migration and challenges of integration for migrant workers in the host society.

In this chapter, we examine the multifaceted challenges that feminist labor organizations face in decommodifying the lives and labor of poor and working-class women. Using an in-depth case study of domestic worker organizing in South Korea, we find that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the National House Managers Cooperative and the Korean Women Workers Association became entangled in hegemonic state projects that linked support for women’s basic livelihoods to the proliferation of part-time, informal domestic work in the context of widespread crises. To challenge the discriminatory and market-driven logics of state-driven social protection efforts, these NGOs have advanced an emancipatory agenda to improve the working conditions, labor rights, and social dignity of domestic workers through consciousness-raising grassroots organizing methods and contentious policy advocacy campaigns. Their social movement transformation goals, however, have been constrained by the relative organizational isolation and limited organizational capacity of feminist labor NGOs in a broader context of neoliberal precaritization and gender-stratified labor markets. The myriad dilemmas facing domestic worker organizing in an era of global hegemonic market rule highlight the need to develop new political imaginaries to contest gender and economic injustice.