Roedah Mansour

GEOG 331/HONORS 231

March 6, 2015
Reflective Essay #3
A development that has been taking place all around the world is
one of blatant discrimination and inequality: care (and cleaning) work
has fallen to womenspecifically, though, it has fallen to minority
women. The title of minority falls to women of color, particularly
those of lower socio-economic standing. Care and cleaning work
provides for low-wages, and more often than not, the women who take
these jobs are those who are unable to obtain better paying jobs
those who are uneducated, undocumented, without much networking,
new to the country, and so forth. These women care for others at a
cost: they give up time put forth in caring for their own selves and
families. Paid domestic work ahs increased exponentially in
postindustrial nations where immigrant women are the primary
recruits to paid domestic work, (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 150). It has been
argued that this creates a form of transnational motherhood in which
motherhood is rearranged to fit changes distancesin place and time.
The changing labor demand in the global economy privatizes care work
in a manner that reproduces labor and societal functionswomen are
leaving their homes and families to care for their families (to earn a
better living for them), only to come to a new land to face stigmas

and do care work and cleaning for others (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 160).

These stigmas often pertain to lowly and dirty work (Soni-Sinha
and Yates, 739). There is an interrelationship between gender, race and
reproductive work as aforementioned to put it simply, women
predominate in waged jobs like cleaning and caring because it is an
extension of their expected work at home. Many of these workers face
a common oppression by their employers, be it that they are
underpaid, without benefits, or given overly strenuous hours. Even
union organizers recognize this and acknowledge it in their appeal to
cleaning workers, preaching to build solidarity among the diverse
workers by the commonality of oppression or bad working conditions
and pay (Soni-Sinha and Yates, 743).
I recently spoke with case-workers at ReWA, where I am doing
my service learning, and these are case-workers who primarily help
their refugee clients find jobs. Their objective/goal job that they look
for? Cleaning jobs. Why? Theyre easy to find. There arent a lot of
requirements to be able to get the job. Its low pay, but its still pay.
Its a start, one of the case-workers commented. The majority of my
ESL students will move on from their ESL, job and life-skills classes to
clean. Some may be granted the luxury of being referred to a
community or technical college where they may be able to get a
certificate to further their education and marketability to the scarily
competitive and judgmental job market, but usually, they settle with

their cleaning jobs at hotels, rich houses, and more. They save up to
try to send money to their families back home, to pay back for their
flights to America, but they are barely making enough to survive where
they are.
Its really sad to me, that this easy, GLOBAL reproduction of
labor, socioeconomic standing and stigma, occurs not just in America,
but around the world. It leaves me questioning how indeed so many
have missed out on the fact that globalization has not been all that
good (as opposed to what we were taught in high school).

Works Cited
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. "International Division of Caring and
Cleaning Work." In Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare
State. Taylor & Francis, 2000.
Soni-Sinha, Urvashi, and Charlotte A.b. Yates. "Dirty Work? Gender,
Race and the Union in Industrial Cleaning." Gender, Work &
Organization 20, no. 6 (2013): N/a. Accessed March 6, 2015.
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