The Impact of Employment Relationships on Domestic Worker’s Achievement of Transnational Family-Work Balance

While the average mainstream woman’s daily commute to work is 28 minutes, the ageing Peruvian domestic workers I have followed for the past year, crossed the Atlantic ocean 12 years ago for jobs in Europe’s capital. They found in Brussels the opportunity to be employed either in the informal or formal domestic sector while they continued to cope with their transnational obligations as spouses, daughters, and mothers. Transnational family and Global Care Chains literature have examined the consequences of migrant domestic workers’ double role as mothers and workers abroad. My contribution takes the discussion one step further and examines how, in spite of their disadvantaged position within the global division of labor, these women manage to informally negotiate a transnational family-work balance. My analysis, based on the life-stories of two ageing Peruvian women, suggests that domestic-workers’ success in their negotiations for transnational family-work balance simultaneously depends on three factors: 1- their gender, race, and class positioning within the migratory, care, and welfare regimes of sending and receiving states, 2- their ability to circulate familial care transnationally through the different stages in their life-course, 3- the business or personalized relationship that they established through their life-course with their employers. Furthermore, this analysis shows that employers are key actors in domestic workers’ negotiation, not only of a family-work balance, but also simply for social protection, especially in their old age. Finally, I suggest that the analysis of these complex employer-employee negotiations may allows us to see how these particular domestic workers are taking small steps to professionalize their work while paving the way to erase the historical vestiges associated with it.