Back Stage of the Global Free Market: Nannies and Surrogates

Abstract

Overview An ever-widening two-lane global highway connects poor nations in the Southern Hemisphere to rich nations in the Northern Hemisphere, and poorer countries of Eastern Europe to richer ones in the West. A Filipina nanny heads north to care for an American child. A Sri Lankan cares for an elderly man in Singapore. A Ukrainian nurse's aide carries lunch trays in a Swedish hospital. Going in the other direction, an elderly Canadian migrates to a retirement home in Mexico. A British infertile couple travel to India to receive fertility treatment and hire a surrogate there. In both cases, Marx's iconic male, stationary industrial worker has been re-placed by a new icon: the mobile and stationary female service worker. 1 Drawing on research by Rhacel Parreñas (2001, 2003, 2005), Sambasivan Uma Devi (2003; Isaksen et al. 2008), and others as well as on my own interviews with Filipina nannies and Indian surrogate mothers, I step behind the 'front stage' of global free market – the jet-setting briefcase-carrying businessmen forging deals in fancy hotels – to a lonelier 'back stage'. There we find the migrant worker. Increas-ingly the work she does is not the physical task of building roads and constructing buildings, but the emotional labor of caring for people. One part of that emotional labor is to address the wrenching ruptures in her relationship with her family and with herself. This hidden part of the emotional labor women do reflects the enor-mous costs of life in a total free market. Many in the First World fear the oncom-ing 'big Mack truck' of an over-powerful Orwellian government. What they do not fear, and should, is another big Mack truck, coming from the opposite direction – a pure market world with no help or regulation from governments at all. Until recently, scholars have focused on migratory flows as matters of money and labor while scholars of work-family balance have focused on First World pop-ulations where emotional life is a more visible issue. But emotional life for migrant workers is as real as it is for anyone else – and more wrenching than for most. The same is true for Third World women to whom clients travel for service.