7    Sisters in Struggle?

Wars Between Daughters-in-law
and Migrant Workers

Frank T. Y. Wang and Chin-ju Lin

INTRODUCTION

One of the characteristics of welfare states in East Asian countries is the influence of Confucian culture (Lee and Ku 2007; Kwon 2005; Holliday 2000; Ku, 1995; Jones 1993). Caring for frail family members is considered to be a family responsibility under the influence of Confucianism, rather than a social issue to be dealt with by the state. By privatising caring responsibility for frail persons, social policies become subordinate to economic policies, which are aimed at economic development. Although Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan share the influence of Confucian teaching, what distinguishes Taiwan from South Korea and Japan in its response to the growing needs for care is its relatively unrestricted policy on semi-skilled migrant domestic care workers.¹ The care work for frail persons in Taiwan is mainly provided at home by daughters-in-law, the designated caregivers within the traditional family discourse. As the tradition of family care becomes more and more difficult to achieve, a new group of women is made available through the recently formed global care chain, namely migrant care workers. At the intersection of traditional culture and globalised organisation of care work, the number of Taiwanese families that include both daughters-in-law and migrant care workers has been increasing during the last two decades. This chapter investigates the experiences of such families, especially the conflicts, tension, and struggles between Taiwanese daughters-in-law and migrant care workers, how they re-arrange housework, and how they negotiate the tension and conflicts between them.

The chapter is composed of two parts. In the first part, we will set the context for understanding the wars waging between two women within the household. The daughter-in-law role is socially constructed through Confucian teachings on family ethics that function to minimise the role of the state and to relegate women to the role of family caregiver in Taiwan. Then, in order to maintain the cultural image of family care, the need for an affordable source of care labour has been increasing. Over the past fifteen years, migrant domestic workers have become the most popular choice. Thus, a new woman emerges in the picture of Taiwanese family, i.e., the migrant domestic worker. Migrant domestic workers are a result of the historical formation of the global care market. The answers for why migrant domestic care workers have become the favorite choice of surrogate caregiver for families lie in the Taiwanese migrant labour policy. Therefore, migrant labour policy is examined to show how migrant domestic care workers are systematically excluded from the protection of labour laws against the risks of abuse and mistreatments. In short, the traditional Confucian family ethic gives Taiwanese women the primary role as caregivers in the family, while migrant labour policy renders migrant female labour available for Taiwanese women to fulfill their moral obligation as daughters-in-law. These forces set the context for the power relations within the households.

In the second part of the chapter, we look at four cases of Taiwanese households with Filipina workers to explore the conflicts, tension, and struggles between daughters-in-law and migrant care workers and to demonstrate how gender, class, and race intersect in the daily lives of Taiwanese households that hire migrant care workers. The war between women for their care work in the household has been the key reproductive mechanism by which women are subjugated into the role of caregiver. The old war between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law in Chinese family discourse has its modern version in the relation of daughter-in-law and migrant care worker. What remains unchanged is that wars over domestic work are always wars among women.

The Daughter-in-Law in the Traditional Three-Generational Family Discourse

In the Chinese family tradition, caring for frail people has long been defined as a family responsibility, and therefore a woman's responsibility (Hu 1995). However, since this hegemonic family ideology has been challenged since the political democratisation process, which began in the late 1980s, the resulting changes in ideology have implications for policy formation and enforcement. The traditional Confucian ideas of family ethics enable the Taiwanese government to play a minimal role in the provision of longterm care, by defining elder care as a private responsibility. The government provides institutional care only to a strictly defined population, namely those elders who are poor and without family. Any attempt to expand the role of government in long-term care is interpreted as a threat to the traditional family value system. It was not surprising, then, that responding to a request from the opposition party for a public care system for the elderly in the early 1990s, former Premier Ho replied that “The three-generation-family is the ideal type of family in Taiwan and the promotion of this ideal type of family should be the future of Chinese elder care” (United Daily News, 14 September 1991).

The ideal Chinese family system has long been recognised as a perfect example of patrilineal patriarchy (Hamilton 1990; Gates 1987). Only males were heirs; female children were seen as only a temporary part of the family, and thus were trained in household skills so they could be married into a friendly, rich, and powerful household (Copper 1990). A man and his sons and grandsons, forming a property-owning corporation, ideally lived together in a continuously expanding household that might encompass the proverbial ‘five generations under one roof.’ This image of the multi-generational family has been the symbol of a secure old age for Chinese elderly people because the large number of young men and their potential wives represents the amount of caring labour available. In the patrilineal version of kinship relations, women take a distinctly and overtly inferior place. Because a daughter is considered to be less valuable than a son, almost not a member of the family, her only legitimate destiny is to marry and become a mother in some other family.² A married woman is expected to act as a humble, servant-like daughter to her parents-in-law and to obey her mother-in-law in everything. Warm and affectionate relations between wife and husband are to be concealed, if they develop, for fear of the mother-in-law's jealous disapproval, in that the security of her old age depends on her son.

With the birth of a son, the daughter-in-law will strengthen her status in her husband's family; the status of a daughter-in-law depends upon the number of sons she gives birth to. With the arrival of a daughter-in-law, a woman achieves a position of authority as mother-in-law and her life improves with the onset of old age (Gallin 1994; Gates 1987). This transformation of daughter-in-law into mother-in-law had been normalised as a pattern of living for most Chinese women, a consistent mutually abusive relationship between old and young female generations. A vicious cycle of women's oppression is constructed to extract women's caring labour into the family, with women both the oppressor and the oppressed (Hu 1995). The patriarchal family structure positions different cohorts of women into competition for men's affection and, in that competition, the family is provided with the necessary caring labour.

Taiwanese married women are under constant surveillance as wives and daughters-in-law, according to their care work in the family. Those who fail to obey the norm of submissive daughter-in-law and to provide care to family members are labelled as ‘un-dutiful daughter-in-law.’ The well-established images of obedient daughter-in-law and harsh mother-in-law are deeply rooted in the fables and slang of Taiwanese society and have become the norm for examining women's practices of care within the family. When an elderly person is in need of care, “where is his/her family?” is the question raised and, in fact, it is the daughter-in-law who is scrutinised and examined.

In practice today, as the rapid economic development in the past four decades has increased female labour participation to more than 50 percent, it is increasingly more difficult for Taiwanese women to stay at home to carry out all the care tasks, compared to the traditional agricultural economy; nevertheless it remains women's responsibility to manage care work within the family. Finding substitute care becomes the strategy for the daughters-in-law who cannot or will not care for the family by themselves. Therefore, the need for substitutes has become a growing market, as Taiwanese women have been incorporated into the labour market since the 1960s, when Taiwan's economy started the process of industrialisation.

THE GLOBALISATION OF THE CARE MARKET

With increasing rates of female employment and aging populations and the gendered cultural expectation of family care, providing care has become difficult in most societies (Taylor-Gooby 2004). The lack of public intervention has turned the rising needs for elder care into a profitable market with varying levels of care and cost.

Although the Taiwanese government has been expanding the public subsidised home care for elderly people since the 1980s, its target population has mainly been low-income elderly persons. Public subsidised home care has been available to all since 2004, but a 40 percent co-payment requirement has made home care less attractive than the employment of migrant domestic care workers. Compared with the needs for elder care, the supply of public subsidised home care and nursing homes is insignificant. The importation of migrant domestic care workers, i.e., the cheapest care, since 1992, has made migrant workers the primary providers of home care. The 2000 Population and Housing Census (Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics 2000) shows that there were 182,351 elderly persons in need of care and only 8 percent of them were institutionalised. Among those living in the community, 78 percent of them lived with their families. At the same time, there were 74,793 migrant care workers reported to be living in Taiwan in 1999. These care workers were estimated to provide care for approximately 40 percent of the elderly persons in need of long-term care in Taiwan (Lo, Yu, and Wu 2007). The number of migrant care workers working at home to care for frail adults reached 183,573 in 2010, a figure that is almost 2.45 times the figure in 1999 (see Table 7.1). A recent study from the supply side shows an even more significant proportion of migrant care workers. Chen and Wu (2004) reported that the capacity of institutional care was 56,038 and that of public subsidised home care was 28,138, with a total capacity of 84,176. However, the total number of migrant workers was 135,659 in 2004, or about two thirds of the capacity provided by the long-term care system in Taiwan.

Migrant labour policy has become the most decisive force in shaping the organisation of the long-term care system in Taiwan. The cultural expectation ‘pulls’ families to keep the elderly member at home. Yet, the lack of public long-term care policy ‘pushes’ families to turn to the market where the migrant worker is the cheapest and most available type of care.³ The sheer number of applications far exceeds the current capacity of the long-term care system. The needs for elderly care therefore take the different path of privatisation, not through the family, based on Confucian teaching, but through the market, via a transnational exchange of caring labours, which Hochschild (2000) called ‘global care chains.’

Table 7.1   Number of Migrant Workers in Taiwan (1992 to 2010)

Source: Commission of Labour Aff airs (2010)

MIGRANT CARE WORKER POLICIES THAT PRODUCE DOCILE CARING LABOUR

Facing competition from China, Taiwanese employers put pressure on the government to address the lack of labour force and lobbied for importation of migrant workers to enhance ‘national competitiveness’ in the early 1990s. Although Liu (2000) argues that the so-called lack of ‘labour’ is in fact lack of ‘cheap and exploitable’ labour, the Taiwanese government decided to import migrant workers in 1992 for the sake of “compensating for a shortage of local labour” (59). The migrant worker policy adopted the ‘guest worker’ principle that they will not be granted permanent resident status, in order to prevent permanent settlement. The government introduced a system of quota control and contract employment to regulate the number and the length of stay of migrant workers. These regulatory measures deprive migrant workers of their basic rights as workers.

As guest workers, migrant workers face multiple constraints which leave them in a very inferior position to bargain with their employers. Migrant workers are not free labourers in the market, as they cannot quit their jobs. As migrant workers cannot change employers and the renewal of their contract depends on their employer's consent, migrant workers find it difficult to say no to their employers. In addition, migrant workers cannot join unions, they cannot use collective bargaining power with employers, nor do they have a right to strike. Migrant workers residence is also time-limited because they cannot stay longer than nine years. Worst of all, their working conditions are not covered by the Labour Standard Law, which guarantees workers’ basic rights. Therefore, the working hours and job description are left for migrant domestic workers to negotiate with their employers individually. In such an unequal power relationship, it is very difficult for migrant workers to refuse employers’ requests, both reasonable and unreasonable.

The scope of importation is limited to certain industries and occupations. Soon after the importation of manufacturing workers began, the government immediately added the second type of migrant worker, the ‘migrant care worker.’ This migrant care worker policy is presented by the government as a cost-saving solution to the growing demands for paid childcare and eldercare among the growing number of nuclear households and the aging population. Therefore, the policy is considered a type of ‘welfare.’ Ironically, this welfare is not provided by the state, but by the market; what the government does is simply grant the families the right to access the market.

Each migrant care worker can stay in Taiwan no longer than nine years, with an initial permit lasting for three years, and a maximum of two extensions if the employer is willing to apply. Employers have to pay the ‘Stable Employment Fee’ of NT$2,000 (US$67) per month to the government in order to compensate for the possible loss of employment opportunities for local Taiwanese workers. The total cost is thus about NT$20,000 (US$595) per month. Despite the qualification of employers being subject to strict regulations, the number of Taiwanese families employing migrant domestic care workers has rapidly increased within the past seventeen years (see Table 7.1). Currently over 180,000 migrant workers, coming from Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, are legally employed as domestic workers in Taiwan (Labour Affairs Commission 2010).

There are two types of migrant care workers. The government granted work permits in 1992 to ‘domestic care workers’ who were employed to provide personal care for the severely ill or disabled. This has become the major type of migrant care worker (over 90 percent). In the same year, the government allowed a small quota for the employment of ‘home helpers,’ the so-called nanny or maid, to households with children under the age of twelve or elderly members above the age of seventy. There is a distinction between domestic care worker and home helper; the former provides personal care to the disabled or patients while the latter helps with household chores and childcare. However, such distinctions are usually blurred in practice. Many households apply for domestic care workers, but then assign them household chores or childcare, or vice versa. It does not matter how a migrant worker comes into the household. Once they are in the house, they care for all members of the family.

The rise of the care market indicates a different form of privatisation of care work. Since caring for family members is defined as a family responsibility, managing migrant workers is also considered part of this family responsibility. To minimise management costs for the state, and to prohibit migrant workers from permanent settlement, the government requires employers to oversee migrant workers. If the migrant worker should run away, the employer is obliged to inform the police and locate the worker, and the employer is penalised, losing the right to apply for another migrant care worker until the previous worker is caught.⁴ Government policy has thus created fear among the employers about their migrants potentially running away, and has divided Taiwanese women and migrant care workers into supervisors and subordinates (Lin 2009).

This tension between employers and migrant workers provides an opportunity for the broker to construct migrant care workers based on their ethnicity. Lan (2000) reported that Taiwanese brokers tend to construct racially stereotyped images of migrant domestic workers to manipulate employers’ perceptions of the migrant workers in order to have a docile worker with minimum risk of running away. For instance, Filipina workers are portrayed as troublesome but capable of speaking English, which is good for teaching children; workers from Vietnam are seen as obedient, culturally similar, and therefore adaptable to the local lifestyle; Indonesian workers are construed as docile but lacking in good hygiene habits due to their background as peasants from rural areas. Yet, in fact, Vietnamese workers have the highest rate of running away in Taiwan. What is made invisible behind this racial construction of migrant care workers is the different transnational organisation of the migrant worker market which offers various commission rates to the local brokers. Such racialised portrayal of migrant care workers allows the broker to manipulate the hiring behaviours of employers. What is missing from the scene is that these stereotyped images of migrant care workers are, in fact, tightly linked with the calculation of profitability among migrant workers, which is shaped by the political economy of the international migrant worker brokerage trade.

POWER RELATIONS WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD: ARE WE SISTERS STRUGGLING AGAINST EACH OTHER?

We will look at four cases of Filipina domestic workers working for Taiwanese households to explore the power relations between wives/daughters-in-law and domestic workers in the household. The following analysis is based on interviews conducted by the second author with members of the four households: the Lees, the Changs, the Wangs, and the Hos (all pseudonyms) (see Table 7.2), and their domestic workers (see Table 7.3). These Filipina domestic workers were recruited as home helpers, that is, nannies for children, but in reality they cared for all members within the household, or worked as maids for the family.

Table 7.2   Data of Interviewed Households

Table 7.3   Data of Interviewed Migrant Workers

THE FEELING OF GUILT AMONG DAUGHTERS-IN-LAW

When a Filipina domestic worker was hired, the care work would be re-arranged among the women in the household. Both Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang were full-time housewives responsible for managing the domestic labour and childcare before employing a Filipina domestic worker. Their husbands were successful in business and spent little time at home. Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Ho worked full-time. Mrs. Wang had her mother-in-law to care for her child, while finding a nanny became Mrs. Ho's task. The gender division of labour followed the rigid man-as-breadwinner pattern. After each of these women employed a domestic worker, the domestic work gradually becomes the maids’ work. The employers became house-managers, with all the heavy and routine jobs done by the domestic workers.

However, the domestic workers do not exempt daughters-in-law from the duty of domestic labour. No matter how privileged and wealthy she appears, a daughter-in-law or a wife in a Chinese family is expected to keep house and to care for the family members with love. Taiwanese women not only bear these expectations but also internalise these ideas of what a ‘good woman’ should do. Therefore, when they do not perform housework and caring roles at home by themselves, they feel guilty. Both Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang thought that they were still doing the housework because Mrs. Lee now could ‘make more cookies’ and Mrs. Chang had more time ‘playing with children and being in a good mood.’ This shows their anxiety in employing maids to perform the work that they are ‘supposed’ to do. Likewise, Mrs. Wang felt guilty if she did not help the mother-in-law do the domestic work and Mrs. Ho also felt guilty about her children if she could not take care of them because of her work. Hidden behind these women's guilt are the social expectations of women carrying out housework and child/elderly care.

Domestic labour is considered women's work, and is always shifting from women to women: from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law, and from wife to maid. The war between daughter-in-law and migrant worker is a re-activation of the old war between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. The script is the same. In this sense, all women share the same structural position to do domestic labour. Women in power are always trying to download the care work to the ‘other’ women. It was the daughter-in-law, who was the woman from the ‘other’ family, in the three-generation family discourse; but now it is the migrant worker, who is the woman from the ‘other’ country, in the global chain of care. Yet, the existence of a Filipina maid does not free Taiwanese women from domestic labour. The gendered construction of domestic labour has not yet changed. The daughter-in-law is still expected to supervise the maid's work and to fill in when the maid is off.

IF LOVE/SEX + LABOUR = WIFE, WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US?

In addition to the physical labour, a wife performs emotional labour in the family. Emotional labour is regarded as the most special characteristic of a wife. A wife is different from a maid because she does domestic labour with love. If the live-in domestic worker provides emotional labour, would the maid replace the daughter-in-law?

The Filipina domestic worker provides emotional labour, especially when she is responsible for caring for children or the elderly. The maid usually develops strong ties with her charges. Therefore, any interaction implying intimacy between the male employer and the Filipina domestic worker becomes threatening to the wife who fears losing her position as a wife if the domestic worker becomes a competitor. Any ambivalent emotional and physical crossing must be prevented. Therefore, brokers always give advice to the maid to keep away from their male employers: “The agencies told me to have good relationship with daughter-in-law. If she likes you, you can stay long. And, not be close to the master. It's true” (Regina). The Filipina maids were also well aware of the tension between them and their female employers:

“The agency told us that most important was when dealing with the wives, not to provoke jealousy in respect to the husband. Many cases abroad, like in Singapore or Middle East, mostly the madam of the domestic helper is jealous with [of] them, because they [the maid] are very close to the men, their boss. So . . . It's not good to be close to the men, it's better to be close to the wives, so that you can stay longer” (Nancy).

The wives had various levels of anxiety about the perceived relationships between the maids and the husbands. Mrs. Wang did not worry since her parents-in-law were always present at home. Her confidence was built on her perception of the otherness of the maid. She thought that the Filipina maid was so different from the Taiwanese that there was little chance for her husband to fall for the maid. Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang worried less because their husbands had few chances to be in contact with the domestic workers. Mrs. Ho did worry about the possibility but she felt powerless because she spent much of her time working outside the home. The domestic worker, who sensed the underlying tension between them, kept her distance from the husband. This pattern shows how the maid and daughter-in-law relationship is reproducing the competing relationship between the two groups of women.

The same pattern of competition between women also occurs in the relationship between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law in the Chinese family. As the son is in charge of all resources, affectionate relations between wife and husband are to be concealed, for fear of the mother-in-law's jealous disapproval. Similarly, as the male is the main breadwinner, his affections will determine a woman's position within the family. It is possible that the maid could win his affection and further replace the wife. The old pattern of mothers-in-law abusing their daughters-in-law is reproduced in the relation between daughter-in-law and migrant worker. A consistent, mutually abusive relationship between old and young female generations is now expanded into women of two nations as well as two classes. A vicious cycle of women's oppression is reproduced to extract women's caring labour into the family, with women both the oppressor and the oppressed. The patriarchal family structure ensures that the man secures the financial safety and thus positions different nations of women into competition for the man's affection. In that competition among women, the family is provided with the necessary caring labour.

“WE ARE A FAMILY, AREN'T WE?”

As Fung (1952) pointed out, the traditional Chinese family system was one of the most complex and well organised in the world. The Chinese have developed a complicated system of addressing each other to reflect the hierarchy of authority within the family, based on gender and age. The superior persons can call the inferior ones by their first name, while the superior ones must be addressed by their titles. Proper practices of address are considered part of the basic manners for a Chinese person (Jacobs 1990). As an outsider within the family, the maid needs a name to be present within the family. How the maid is addressed reflects her position within the family and how her behaviours will be interpreted. In our interviews, all the daughters-in-law claimed that the Filipina maid was a member of the family. To claim that the maid is a member of the family made her role as a worker invisible. What was not revealed was how the maids were ranked the lowest within the family hierarchy, as reflected in the ways they were addressed.

The maids are told by brokers to call their female employer ‘Mom,’ male employer ‘Sir,’ mother-in-law of the female employer ‘Amah’ (grandmother), and father-in-law ‘Agong’ (grandfather), as a gesture of respect towards the adults in the family. However, these practices of address construct the maid as the lowest rank in the family, as the child. Accordingly, all the family members, adults or children alike, call her by her first name, thus positioning the maid at the lowest level of the family hierarchy, the same as the position of a child. ‘Mom’ seems to imply an intimate relation with her female employer, but also implies unconditional subordination to the teachings of her female employer. The addresses used in the household already suggest that she is a degraded and secondary family member. The Filipina maid is usually of an age similar to her female employer, but the latter does not regard her as ‘my sister’; rather, she requires the maid to call her ‘Mom.’ This hierarchical practice implies the class differences between them and the fact that the maid should subordinate herself to the daughter-in-law as a daughter is subordinate to her mother.

According to the Chinese customs of address, a female adult in their twenties or thirties, like the maids are, should be called ‘aunt.’ Therefore, when the children call her by her name it is an act of transgression of the kinship hierarchy in which the maid is degraded. However, from the view point of Filipino culture, calling one by name is an act of closeness and friendship, so this is acceptable to the Filipina maids. Being called by their first names does not insult their dignity as adults; however, for a Taiwanese child, calling the maid by her name implies transgression of age hierarchy and shows disrespect to her role in the family.

The lack of status within the family is apparent for Nancy. When her contract was about to expire, she was not informed until one week before the date of expiration. She complained, saying, “My mom says she loves me. She says I am a member of the family. But they are going to send me home without informing me.” This is part of the power that the daughter-in-law is given by the state apparatus, in that only the employer can apply for extension of the work permit. The power relations between the daughter-in-law and the maid are not merely a result of discursive formation, but are supported by policies that deprive Filipina workers of their rights to quit a job, bargain for wages, form a union, or go on strike. In addition, all migrant workers have had to take on heavy debt to come and work abroad, which makes them unable to say no to their employers.

DEGRADED AS A FILIPINA MAID

As a guest worker, job security for migrant care workers depends on the will of their employers, which is the source of unequal power relations with the daughter-in-law. A Filipina domestic worker carries out degrading domestic labour in the household, under unequal power relations as a member of the lowest class, and she is also degraded for her race as a Filipina. In the Foreign Domestic Helper Habit Guide, which is provided by the broker for the employer, the image of a Filipina domestic worker is connected with dirt, as they are seen as a source of disease. It starts with their sanitary habits. They are told to brush teeth, wash their hands with soap, take a shower every day, and trim fingernails and toenails, etc. This reflects the Taiwanese imagination that non-white foreigners come from under-developed areas and, therefore, the first thing they need to learn is to keep clean. The second part of the guidance is about the living etiquette at home and at public. At home, they are told to obey employers’ requests and to try to please the visitors. In public, they are told to wear neat clothes, not to litter, keep out of mischief, not to make noise in public places, obey traffic regulations, and so on. These instructions are quite common in children's school textbooks. The efforts to ‘educate’ Filipina maids with such teachings reveal the fact that the Taiwanese people regard Filipino workers as ‘uncivilised’ and ‘uneducated’ foreigners. This perception is far removed from the reality, namely that Filipina domestic workers are well-educated workers from a ‘westernised/civilised’ country.

Many domestic workers feel that they are looked down upon and degraded. Regina had degrading experiences as a Filipina domestic helper. She ate with her employers at home, but when the family went out to eat, she had to stand and serve them. Her employer degraded her by showing her off to his friends. In front of his friends, the employer asked her to clean after a dog, which was not her responsibility. Regina was very embarrassed and then her employer and friends laughed at her. She was degraded through the metaphor of a dog and dirt by being asked to make the dirt unseen (to clean the shit). These degrading situations are unlikely to happen to Taiwanese maids.

MANAGING THE OTHER WOMEN AT HOME AS BUSINESS

Within the four households, Mrs. Ho and Mrs. Wang worked full-time and spent a great deal of time at work, while Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang were housewives with strong networks and very rich social lives. Looking at their relationships with the domestic workers, and borrowing Romero's (1992) concepts, we categorise the former two as having ‘business-like’ relationships and the latter two as having a pattern of ‘emotional control.’ The daughters-in-law had different managing styles towards the maids.

In the business-like style, the daughters-in-law had less time at home to supervise, so there was little communication between the employee and the employer. This relationship may be good for a live-out domestic worker but it was problematic in the context of the live-in domestic worker. The lack of trust and communication between them meant that the relationship could be difficult to sustain, due to suspicions or conflicts.

Mrs. Wang maintained a business-like relationship with her domestic worker, Grace. They rarely communicated with each other and Mrs. Wang did not trust Grace. When the family members suspected Grace of stealing something, Mrs. Wang did not respond with emotion; instead she dealt with this rationally. Since nothing important was lost, she decided it was not important and ignored the complaints. She said, “I don't know whether she stole something or not. But, I have to believe that she did not. I tell myself that if I did not find something lost, that thing must be not important for me. Otherwise, I will have to stay at home looking after her all the time.”

The business-like relationship is also reflected in the employer's decision on workers’ days of leave. Mrs. Wang felt that Grace's workload was not heavy so she gave Grace only one day off a month. Grace had no say in this. When Grace asked for one more day off, Mrs. Wang was angry and prohibited her from receiving any phone calls. The daughter-in-law exercised her power over the maid to display her authority and reinforce the class differences. Mrs. Wang later decided not to extend Grace's contract. She regrets that she failed to maintain strict criteria from the beginning to make Grace a good worker. If Mrs. Wang could start again, she would like to stick to a clear work schedule and defined tasks for her maid. That is in line with her business-like management style.

The Hos stayed at home less than twelve hours a day, and they also had a business-like relationship with Nancy. Nancy had a heavy workload but she was not supervised and had some freedom when the employer worked outside the home. The communication between the worker and the employer was limited. Living under the same roof but having limited conversation made Nancy feel that she was different and was not trusted by her employers. However, one benefit for the maid in a business-like relationship is that the maid can maintain her privacy away from the employer's intrusion.

EMOTIONAL WORK BY THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

In contrast to the distant and suspicious business-like relationship, Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang had a much more emotional involvement with their domestic workers. Both of them were housewives so they were able to spend a lot of time with their children and their domestic workers. Harmony is the guiding principle for the Chinese in dealing with interpersonal relations. Deeply influenced by the cultural expectation of being a good woman, they said that domestic work was their responsibility and they just employed maids to ‘share’ it. A good woman is expected to manage interpersonal relationships within the household harmoniously. Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang paid a lot of attention to their maids and maintained a good relationship with them. The cultural expectation of managing interpersonal relations in harmony provides a counter-force to balance the institutional tendency to abuse migrant care worker and makes Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang ‘good employers.’ They considered the issue of “how to manage and have good relationship with the maid” as important as having good relationships with their husband and children. Both maids mentioned that they were treated as a member of the family and had very good relationships with their mistresses. Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Chang showed their affections to their maids because an equal and respectful relationship freed them from the feeling that they were oppressing another woman. Their relationship was based on the reciprocal exchange of labour and affection. These cases reveal that the workload and emotional support are two different things and not necessarily related. Even though the employer may be emotionally attached to the domestic worker, the workload may not necessarily be reduced.

Nevertheless, their management style was a dynamic process and covered a range between business-like and emotional control, rather than being a fixed dichotomy for the Taiwanese daughter-in-law. Mrs. Lee is a good example. Mrs. Lee did not have a maid until she employed a Filipina maid and later employed four such maids. She explained how she learned to adjust to the relationship with a maid. At first, she had very loose expectations of the first maid, and the only clear one was for the maid to take care of the youngest daughter when Mrs. Lee was busy. Mrs. Lee tried to show respect to her Filipina maids so she used ‘Miss Finipina’ to refer to the Filipina workers, while the common usage in Taiwan is ‘Filipina maid.’ She also took care of her maid, taking a personal interest in her, her background, her family, her friends, etc. When she was out, she would bring home a McDonald's hamburger for the maid. She said that she was very nervous about having a maid. However, that was quite an emotional burden for both sides. Having employed four different maids, she learned not to treat the maid as her child in need of protection, and moved instead towards the pole of a business-like style. She gave the maid certain jobs, was concerned only about her work performance, and did not need to know about all the relatives and life concerns of the maid in order to prove that they were a family.

PEER SUPPORT AND GOING HOME

Being unprivileged and doing degrading work as foreign maids in Taiwan, Filipina domestic workers suffer from homesickness, stress, depression, and loneliness. But the comforts of meeting other Filipinos, their belief in God and attending Sunday mass, the support from family in the Philippines, and sometimes the affection for their charges give them strength to continue their work. The Filipino support network plays a very important role in their working lives in Taiwan and was mentioned over and over in the interviews.

Of course people cry. Not only me, also my daughter, also my husband. Sad and very lonely. But, even [when] I feel so lonely, I went to church. I talked to the priest, I talked [about] my problem. Of course, it's a problem, right? Yeah, and the Father told me, ‘oh, you just pray. You ask our Lord.’ After [that], I pray. No, no more problems. In the [Taipei] Train Station, sometimes we talk about the lives, and, after that, the funny stories. We laugh, laugh, all day long. Sometimes I went to the park to take pictures and send [to] my husband, send [to] my daughter, just like that. (Rosemarie)

Meeting with peers creates a public space that belongs to Filipina maids to share their problems and stories. “Because we miss our homeland in the Philippines, so every Saturday I am very happy. Tomorrow is Sunday, I am going out and I feel relax. If I meet Filipino, we [are] just like in the Philippines. That's why we like to meet each other” (Regina). The collective gathering of migrant workers has transformed certain public areas, such as the Taipei Train Station, into a Filipino space during Sundays, so much so that even Taiwanese feel they are strangers in that space (Wang, forthcoming).

When Filipina domestic workers feel really unhappy, they make use of the final tactic they have left, returning home, to resist the oppressive system. Going home implies that there is still an alternative in their lives. Although few workers do go home, the knowledge that they could has provided them with the strength to prove that they still have some dignity as a Filipina worker in Taiwan. However, money is the major issue that blocks their return home. Although Taiwan offers higher wages for migrant workers than most Asian countries⁶ (NT$15,840 (US$528) per month), migrant workers often must go deeply into debt to pay the broker's fees and need to pay that back before they can start making any money. The ‘payment’ in Grace's account was her major concern in the decision to go home. “Even she [the daughter-in-law] said that ‘don't go home until you finish your work,’ but I miss home. It's payment, anyway. I have already [earned] half of my payment. The other half, if they want me to go home, it's OK for me. I can see my family” (Grace).

In Regina's case, her family encouraged her to go home and was willing to reimburse her financial loss. But she was struggling to stay and wished to find a good employer, so she could stay. “My father, they gave me financial aid already. I am about going home, but still not yet finish . . . They said, ‘you'd better come home and you will be happier.’ Because my children miss me, but, if only I found a good employer, I would not thinking of going home. That time I signed the contract, it was my desire to work for two years” (Regina). In her account, whether she would be able to earn money during her time in Taiwan depends on her luck to have a good employer, somewhat akin to the lottery. The words “if only I” fully demonstrate the lack of control and power on the side of migrant workers within the family as well as within the global system of care.

CONCLUSION

The cultural ideas of family ethics and the migrant care worker policy result in the same political effects of re-producing women into docile caring labour. In the family discourse, a married woman is expected to act as a humble, servant-like daughter to her parents-in-law and to obey her mother-in-law in everything. As guest workers, migrant workers face multiple constraints which leave them in a very inferior position from which to bargain with their employers. Such an unequal power relationship renders the migrant workers unable to refuse employers’ requests. When the daughter-in-law encounters the migrant care worker, a new hierarchy among women is formed based on race and class. Migrant care workers take the position of daughter-in-law who provides care, while daughters-in-law move into a managerial position similar to that of mother-in-law. A consistent, mutually abusive relationship between old and young female generations has now expanded to include women from other countries. Multiple vicious cycles of women's oppression are constructed to extract women's caring labour into the family, with women both the oppressor and the oppressed. However, we also find that the cultural expectation of a good woman to maintain all interpersonal relationships in harmony can become a counterforce to transform the female employer into a good employer.

In general, the employers are not mean and keen on exploitation. However, both parties are locked into a vicious cycle created by policies that portray migrant workers as ‘the other,’ which legitimises the deprivation of their basic rights. This is similar to the construction of the image of the un-dutiful daughter-in-law, whereby women are designated to provide care work, therefore reinforcing gender inequality. Both forces transform structural oppression into interpersonal conflicts. The concept of the ‘un-dutiful daughter-in-law’ divides women according to age by their role as mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, with the former competing against the latter for the son's affection. The construction of the migrant worker as ‘maid’ divides women according to race and class based on their role as employer and domestic worker, with the former supervising the latter in constant fear that the worker will replace her position as the wife. Such patterns have gone on for too long without recognition.

NOTES

1.  The term ‘migrant care worker’ is used in the general sense to refer to those migrant workers who provide care to patients, elderly or disabled persons, or children in the home setting or in institutions. It will be used interchangeably with terms such as domestic worker, maid, and nanny.

2.  This patrilineal determination of women's roles is reflected in the division of caring tasks for elderly family members between daughters and daughters-in-law. When an elderly family member is in need of care, unmarried daughters can choose not to share the work while daughters-in-law have no option but to take on the role of caregivers. The logic is that daughters are supposed to care for elderly members of their husbands’ families. In other words, daughters are viewed by Chinese parents as daughters-in-law of other families.

3.  The Council of Labour Affairs (CLA) tried to integrate the long-term care system into the needs assessment process in 2005 as a way to regulate the rapid increase in migrant workers. However, the developmental nature of the welfare state and the reluctance to invest in the elderly and the disabled have resulted in an under-developed public care system that lacks effective management of needs assessment.

4.  The whole regulation has been abolished since 2008, but this regulation has had a major impact on the relationship between employers and migrant workers, and provides important context for the cases discussed below.

5.  Names that appear are all changed to protect the interviewees.

6.  Hong Kong is said to offer the highest wage to migrant care worker. The official minimum wage for foreign maids in Hong Kong was $460 (HK$3,580) in 2011.

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