4 - The Rhetoric of ‘Blessedness’: Migrant Domestic Workers and Transnational Social Protection Chains in Pandemic Times

While states extend social protection to their citizens, migrants often have to depend on creating hybrid resource environments that span national borders to protect themselves against livelihood risks. Levitt et al. (2023) uses the notion of transnational social protection to suggest how migrants draw on clusters of social protections emanating from four potential sources: states, markets, third sector, and social networks. In the case of migrant domestic workers who work within the private sphere with blurred boundaries between work and life, social protection is stretched thinly across limited worker rights provided by receiving states and equally elusive rights as citizens living outside of origin countries where they hold citizenship. Given the thinness of social protection provided by states, migrant domestic workers often depend on their pseudo-family status within their employers’ family and informal social networks to secure lives and livelihoods. With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, the fragility of transnational social protection for migrant domestic workers is quickly exposed. We explore three dimensions that surfaced in a time of crisis. First, we analyse how migrant domestic workers deploy the rhetoric of ‘blessedness’ to traverse a ‘deeply fractured, social, political, and emotional imaginary’ (Levitt, 2017). Next, we examine migrant domestic workers’ strategies of creating what we call ‘social protection chains’ to attempt to bridge institutional and familial resource gaps experienced by left-behind family members, especially during pandemic times. Lastly, we dissect the weaknesses of these social protection chains and the limits of hybrid transnational social protection.

Co-Author 1
Brenda S.A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute

Co-Author 2
Theodora Lam, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute