Global Cities, Global Workers, Global Unions
Global Cities, Global Workers, Global Unions
This chapter focuses on local and migrant domestic workers' unions in Hong Kong, in the context of the international domestic workers' movement for the International Labor Organization Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers. Global norms are providing collective action frames that facilitate cohesive activism, as well as international opportunities, symbolic and material resources, and publicity to pressure governments and corporations. In Hong Kong, domestic workers' unions are an amalgamation of a women's movement and a trade union that goes beyond the organizing of women or workers, but incorporating the frames of democracy, human rights, and social justice locally and internationally. Transnational organizing, on the basis of common social location and interests as women and workers under global capitalism, allows local and migrant domestic workers to envision and enact solidarity. But it is also this interaction that hierarchies of class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality become visible, illustrating that privilege and oppression are often not absolute categories but, rather, shift in relation to different axes of power.
Keywords: Domestic Workers, Domestic Work, Convention No. 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, International Labor Organization, Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Workers Union, International Domestic Workers' Federation, Global Unionization, Global Norms
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