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Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, by Bridget Anderson. London; New York: Zed Books, 2000. 213 pp. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 1-85649-760-7. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 1-85649-761-5.
Increased movement across nation-state borders has provoked governments of advanced states to enact restrictive immigration laws and to fortify borders to stem the tide of unwanted migrants from poorer countries that have suffered the worst ravages of global capitalism. As Bridget Anderson conveys in her remarkable book, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, the current obsession of industrialized states with border control has not deterred the international migration of women, nor their employment as caregivers and domestics in private middleclass households. On the contrary, hundreds of thousands of women from Southeast and South Asia, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe migrate every year to toil as household workers in frequently harsh and degrading circumstances. While some are recruited through personal networks, debt bondage to rapacious recruitment agencies entraps many others in abusive relationships with employers. In the European cities Anderson examines, these migrant workers provide physical and emotional care for the families of strangers and service the lifestyles of those who by accident of birth, race, and citizenship live in more privileged circumstances. As Anderson details, the reasons private household work figures so prominently in the employment of...