Understanding Domestic Work (Essay Sample)

Critical Essay on Domestic Work
Marlene A. Ramos
LLD 306
Dr. Bernadette E Dayan
Ateneo de Naga University
September 10, 2021
Critical Essay on Domestic Work
Domestic work can be defined as “work performed in or for a household or households” CITATION Int20 \l 1033 (International Labor Organization, 2020). Domestic work, in other words, a work where the workers provide personal and household care such as cooking, cleaning, taking care of children, the elderly, and the disabled, attending the garden or pets, or driving the family car. These workers may work part-time, full-time, or on an hourly basis and may live in the employer's home or not.
Due to domestic work, many women worldwide succeeded in entering the paid labor market is increasingly enormous proportions and breaking the glass ceiling. When women work in paid activities outside the home, they either have to reduce their rest and leisure time, ask the help of partners or family members– if the family or woman can afford it – pay another to do the care work they would typically do. Thus, domestic workers' share of economic growth is substantial, enabling an increase in dual-income families CITATION Ric14 \l 1033 (Valenzuela, 2014).
However, despite these domestic workers' contributions to households and national economies, domestic work is at a current low end of the care economy, working the most extended hours for meager wages. These conditions have resulted in part from the discrimination of a female-dominated class of workers.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, it was roughly estimated that domestic workers range from approximately 600,000 to 2.5 million CITATION Rap12 \l 1033 (Rappler, 2012). Most domestic workers in the country are likely to be from the Visayan regions, Bicol, Southern Tagalog, and Northern Mindanao. Overseas domestic workers, primarily female laborers and unskilled, are among the top remitters for the Philippines' economy.
However, as domestic workers' number increases, reports of violence and abuse are directly proportional to the ever-continuous increase. According to the International Domestic Workers' Federation, workers face multiple types of violence: physical abuse, intimidation, threats, bullying, sexual assault, harassment, poor-quality food, and a lack of privacy in their affairs. Severe instances of violence have been recorded CITATION WIE15 \l 1033 (WIEGO, 2015). Specific categories of domestic workers face more significant disadvantages. Live-in domestic workers experience sad separation, less privacy, and more limited mobility in doing work and leisure, work longer hours and receive a larger share of payments in kind compared to others. Living conditions are frequently insufficient. They are also more susceptible to physical/sexual abuse by employers due to these factors.
It all dates back to Ferdinand Marcos's reign. Ferdinand Marcos baptized the conjugal dictatorship as the “New Society,” and alternately, as a rule of "constitutional authoritarianism" implemented under martial law cover. However, this is merely a resort to semantics. Martial law by any name is a dictatorship; it becomes a conjugal dictatorship when the ruler's No. 1 wife enjoys the privileges and wields with greater gusto and irresponsibility the powers of the dictator CITATION Pri76 \l 1033 (Mijares, 1976).
In the 1970s, President Ferdinand Marcos’s government encouraged labor emigration, coinciding with rapid economic growth in Hong Kong CITATION Kay16 \l 1033 (Kaye, 2016). Filipinos became the dominant foreign worker demographic up until the arrival of Indonesian migrants in the 1990s. Then-president Ferdinand Marcos saw citizens' migration to regions such as the Middle East as a survival move over a stagnant economy deal with restless young men who could otherwise stir up trouble and curb poverty remittances. Even after Marcos was eventually exiled as democracy was entrenched in the Philippines, the domestic economy only marginally improved.
Meanwhile, on the rise of Arroyo’s reign in the Philippines, during a state visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo aggressively encouraged U.S. businesspeople to hire Philippine workers to address the gap of their employment needs in the territorial United States and beyond CITATION Rod20 \l 1033 (Rodriguez, 2020). Today, Arroyo suggests, the Filipino is a thoroughly modern and civilized global worker who can labor anywhere and under any set of circumstances for Americans and other employers. Philippine workers are a temporary workforce ostensibly less able or willing to demand wage increases or better benefits over time. In short, the Philippine worker's promise is not merely the promise of a worker of good quality, but ultimately one who is cheap. According to Arroyo, she is not merely president but also the "CEO" of a profitable "global enterprise" that generates revenues by successfully assembling and exporting a much sought-after commodity worldwide: “highly skilled, well-educated, English speaking” as well as “productive” and “efficient” workers.
President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, on the other hand, is in chasing the aspiration to improve the working