Decolonizing Reproductive Labor: Caribbean Women, Migration, and Domestic Work in the Global Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women who migrated to Canada in the late twentieth century in search of better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. Female migrants initially entered Canada on a temporary basis to work and later decided on permanent settlement. They had similar experiences of working in domestic services while securing their residency status and supporting their children from abroad. I utilize feminist qualitative methodology incorporating semi-structured interviews conducted on ten female migrants who share their experiences of migration, domestic work and motherhood. I interrogate how domestic work in the global economy is informed by intersectional inequalities along gender, race, class, and citizenship lines that not only contribute to the devaluation of paid reproductive labor, in particular, but also reinforce asymmetries between working-class African-Caribbean women and their white female employers in relation to work and family. I investigate 1) how the racialization of reproductive work under colonialism has contributed to the devaluation of black women's labor in paid domestic work at the present time; 2) the relationship between migration and stratified reproduction as experienced by Caribbean domestics in Canada in the late twentieth century; and 3) how Caribbean domestics negotiate the ambiguities of care work with their employers. Overall, I argue that the issue of paid domestic not only raises several questions about an unequal gender division of labor vis-à-vis so-called women's work and men's work, the under-remuneration of domestic labor, and the devaluation of care work, but it also exposes the stratified class and race dynamics in reproductive work (both paid and unpaid) among different groups of women in the global economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".