The Trafficker Next Door: How Household Employers Exploit Forced Labor

The typical human trafficker is less likely to be a pimp than a well-heeled matron who overworks her maid, according to this hard-hitting exposé. Sociologist Parreñas (Unfree) investigates the plight of trafficked domestic laborers who are transported to foreign countries and exploited as cooks, housekeepers, and child-minders (and, in one case, foot-ticklers to a fetishist). Citing such abuses as 18-hour workdays, rock-bottom pay, debt peonage, and confinement in employers’ homes, Parreñas draws on interviews with (mainly Filipina) domestics and their employers in Dubai and Singapore to explore the issue up close. The domestics testify to their exhaustion and despair, while the employers spin their exploitation as benevolence. Parreñas elaborately theorizes the latter phenomenon, invoking the concepts of the “employer savior complex” (i.e., that no matter how badly treated, domestics are still better off than they were before) and a species of Orientalism that she calls “racist self-deflection” among Western expats in Dubai, who excuse their mistreatment of domestics by asserting that Arabs treat them even worse. There’s a fine edge of anger underlying Parreñas’s anecdotes, which often turn grimly absurd. (One Singapore woman complained to the agency that her domestic ate too much: when given her usual breakfast of an apple and a glass of milk, she “always chose the largest apple.”) The result is a righteous indictment of elite greed and hypocrisy. (Sept.)