After briefly tracing the recent disappearance of Feltex Carpets, a major yarns mill site in Braybrook, a Western suburb of Melbourne, the paper analyses material collected from interviews with ...migrant women retrenched from the Feltex factory, as they adapted to their new working lives between 2006 and 2008. Utilising Bourdieu's notions of habitus, disposition and capital, the paper considers the links between individual resistance amongst this group of workers and the power relations beyond the field of work.
Whilst much has been written concerning the decline of the Textile Clothing and Footwear (TCF) industries in Australia, little attention has been paid to the lives of individual women workers involved in and affected by these events. Little is known about what happens to migrant women as they move out of long-term, full-time jobs as machine operators and into casual employment. In analysing their subjective shifts in the years following retrenchment, the paper highlights how their changing self-perceptions interact with their subjective framing of choice and resistance in relation to work. The paper uses this analysis to draw some implications for unions seeking to promote the conditions for collective resistance and social transformation around low-paid women's work.
In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by developing a Foreign Worker Program. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of labour migrants ...from the Global South were issued work visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Migrants have since settled, primarily in Tel Aviv, where some have also overstayed their visas, given birth to children, and established ways of living as undocumented residents of Israel's largest urban centre. In this article, I describe how undocumented migrant women and their Israeli-born children have had a particularly significant impact on the social and political context in which they live. Specifically, I explore how they have come to constitute a "privileged underclass" within the ethnically, geographically, and socio-economically stratified population of the city. While they share dilapidated public spaces and conditions of poverty with their historically marginalized Mizrahi neighbours in the southern part of the city, undocumented women and their children share special events, interpersonal engagements, and processes of "sentimental civics" with the largely wealthy and politically enfranchised Ashkenazi residents of Tel Aviv's north who are their employers, financial patrons, and supporters of their campaign for citizenship. The development of a "privileged underclass" has thus exacerbated class conflict in Tel Aviv, bringing to the surface the well-established, but long-ignored Mizrahi struggles for recognition, and sowing the seeds for a sometimes violent, yet politically nuanced, anti-migrant mobilization.
Mendoza examines cross-border migration by Mexican women, who live in Mexico and work in domestic service in the U.S.. She finds that multiple factors such as age, financial stability, and previous ...work experience draw women to "migrate" across the border daily. In addition, gender, social class, and nationality transform the spaces they encounter crossing the border. These spaces shape the reception and the perception of their status as migrants. The legality of cross-border domestic workers fluctuates and is complicated by the "safe" and "risky" spaces they inhabit on their journey. Finally, Michele Lamont's theory of symbolic boundaries is important to understand the relationship between Mexican American employers and Mexican employees at the border.
This cross-sectional survey explored the depression status of new migrant women and its relationship with self-rated health in the Hong Kong Chinese context. A convenience sample of 68 migrant women ...volunteered to participate in the study. The data were collected by using the Problem Solving Inventory, the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression questionnaire, and a self-rated health scale. The respondents were found to have a lesser degree of problem-solving appraisal, compared with other populations, and almost half of the volunteers were found to be depressed. Approximately 50% of the women reported their general health as "excellent", "very good", or "good". The Pearson's correlation showed a positive significant correlation between problem-solving appraisal, depression, and self-rated health. The results of the regression analysis showed that family income, self-rated health, and problem-solving confidence are predictive factors of depression. Community nurses could consider using multidisciplinary interventions that focus on life-skills training in order to promote the psychological and general wellness of migrant women in addition to the use of counseling or medication interventions.
The complexity of globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity as these are reshaped by dominant/marginal identity relations that become increasingly fluid across transnational ...space. Ex/neo-colonial South Korea, growing in economic power and transnational cultural influence mostly in Asia, has become a host to Asian immigrants. Accompanying the changing ethnoscape, media discourse constitutes (more than reflects) immigrant identities and their experiences. Study of discourse in two South Korean films about marriage migrant women reveals constructions that serve new nation-building policies in the global era while maintaining traditional assumptions about, and realities of, gender, race/ethnic, and class relations.
Drawing on the experience of migrant women domestic workers, theological ethics, and liberationist theologies, this book offers an intercultural theology of migration that arises from the ...(dis)continuities, (im)mobilities, and (dis)empowerment embedded in the encounter between gender, class, race, culture and religion in the context of migration.
The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the `nursing profession' in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways in which a rudimentary welfare state ...and a large informal economy have created the demand for les infirmières exclusives and for `quasi-nurses'. The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate this informal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant women themselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their deskilling, exploitation, marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that these processes take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicity and class, as sexism intersects with different forms of `othering' and racialization processes in the destination country. The position of these women is also located in terms of ethnic and national boundaries.
This article examines the application of the social enterprise model of poverty reduction and empowerment in the context of community organization among migrant women in China. In recent years, the ...social enterprise model has been portrayed as one of the most viable strategies in providing innovative and sustainable solutions to social problems. However, scepticism remains as to whether the business model is compatible with NGO and social work practice models. The author applies an entangled social logic approach in analysing the everyday practices of community workers and mainstay service users in reacting to the introduction of the business model in transforming women's groups into quasi-social enterprises. Evidence for analysis is collected through two cases studies of NGOs in China. Finally, broader theoretical and methodological issues of the synergy or tensions between the social enterprise model and NGO or social work practice models are discussed.
"I have a stomach full of words, but I just can't say them" is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical ...role that the Dagongmei's Home, a Beijing women's organization that promotes the rights and interests of female migrants, plays in producing identities for its members and in channeling their voices into the public arena. The Dagongmei's Home is both a site of articulation and a cage that limits and contains the marginal voices of migrant women. By "hailing" its members into subjectivity as the dagongmei (working sister), the organization empowers these women to speak in otherwise closed spaces. However, since the women can only speak as dagongmei, they end up reproducing the state's discourse of modernization. Nevertheless, a community-based drama workshop, set up by a British woman in collaboration with the Home becomes an unlikely site of resistance as migrant women break the script of strong women sacrificing for the nation's economic development, thus doing dagongmei subversively.
PDF
