Class Identity and the International Division of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids

In 1996, 408,000 Sri Lankan women, nearly 10% of the country’s working-age women, worked abroad, many of them in the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf. In this paper I compare the influence of international migration on local hierarchies of class and gender in two villages in southern Sri Lanka: a Sinhala-speaking Buddhist village where I did my doctoral dissertation research in 1992-4, and a Tamil-speaking Muslim village where I spent some time during the summer of 1997. I discuss the challenges of using ‘class’ as a unit of analysis in a non-Western setting where gender identities, family ties, caste solidarity, religious allegiance, and ethnic affiliation also shape economic relations. Bringing female domestic servants into the global economy revolutionizes local understandings of both class and gender. Although it receives recognition as ‘work’, housework and childcare remain ‘women’s work’, and women’s internationally accepted gender status as unskilled, ‘supplemental’ family wage earners justifies meager salaries for housemaids. High Sri Lankan demand for scarce jobs in West Asia drives wages down and agency fees up, keeping housemaids ‘working class’ in the global economy. Isolated in the homes of their individual employers, migrant housemaids nevertheless are evolving a nascent class consciousness through their struggles with local Sri Lankan middlepeople and through retold stories of conflicts with abusive employers. Religious and ethnic differences between the Sinhala and Muslim villages affect the extent of class solidarity. The paper investigates how patterns social stratification, such as religious and ethnic practices, caste statuses, and gender roles affect the emergence of class identity in two villages in Sri Lanka. Introduction: Grossly unequal distributions of power, wealth, and prestige characterize the global economy. Poverty and lack of jobs for men and women in Sri Lanka drive women overseas to work as housemaids in the Middle East. This paper compares migration experiences of women in two villages, a Sinhala-speaking Buddhist village where I did my dissertation research in 1992-4, and a Tamil-speaking Muslim village where I spent some time during the summer of 1997. I argue that family patterns, household dynamics, and local, national and international economics influence women’s work experiences. I also argue that patterns of social stratification, such as gender roles and religious and ethnic practices, affect class struggle and the emergence of class identity. Migration: poverty, unemployment, and the international division of labor Migration from Sri Lanka to the Middle East started in the mid-1970s when oil prices rose world-wide. At first the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) nations in the Middle East spent their profits building infrastructure, and many Sri Lankan men went abroad to work as carpenters, electricians, masons, and heavy-machinery drivers. When the building boom petered out in the early 1980s, the demand for male labor dropped, and families in the Middle East began to spend their disposable income to hire domestic servants. In 1996, 580,000 Sri Lankans worked abroad. Of these, 70% were women, most of whom worked as housemaids in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and UAE (SLBFE 1997). These statistics suggest that nearly one in ten of the working-age women in Sri Lanka are now employed out of the country. While Muslims make up 6% of the Sri Lankan population, Muslim women account for 20% of the migrants. Muslim women’s over-representation in the migrant population show the importance of studying their experiences. Comparing experiences of women from a Sinhala-speaking Buddhist village and a Tamilspeaking Muslim village allows me to ask how ethnicity, religious beliefs, and cultural practices influence migration and class consciousness. In 1994, the Sinhala village of Naeaegama (Village of Relatives) had 138 households with approximately 1000 inhabitants, divided into two main castes. Over a quarter of the households had or had had a member working abroad, and 90% of the migrants were women. The Muslim village of Minigoda (Many Gems) is about 25 miles south of Naeaegama, and in 1997 it had 500 households with roughly 3500 inhabitants. At least 200 people had experience abroad. Minigoda has no caste system of social stratification, but I noted a diversity of local rankings in status, wealth, and prestige. In both villages, population growth, poverty, and lack of jobs for either men or women make migration an attractive option. Most migrant women went abroad on two-year contracts with the goal of buying land, building a house, or supporting the daily consumption needs of their families (Brochmann 1987; Gamburd 1995). Over the past twenty years, salaries have gradually dropped, while agency fees have increased. In international currencies, women earned about three times as much in 1980 as they did in 1994, when they earned about $100 a month. Several international economic dynamics caused these changes. In 1985, when oil prices dropped, Arab employers lowered commissions paid to job agencies. At the same time, high demand for the limited number of jobs in the Middle East created competition between different labor exporting countries, and between agencies in Sri Lanka. With seemingly endless supplies of workers hoping to travel abroad, local and international agencies offered jobs to those willing to accept the lowest wages. In order to pay competitive commissions to Arab recruiters, agencies in Sri Lanka charged higher fees from prospective migrants. Agencies bargained away workers’ rights, privileges, and salaries in order to secure scarce jobs. On the national front, remittances sent from the Middle East provided a major source of foreign exchange. Fearing that host countries will turn to Indonesia and the Philippines for cheaper labor, the Sri Lankan government has not actively supported workers’ rights. The combination of population growth, unemployment, national policies and international economic dynamics shapes men’s and women’s experiences of migration. Class struggle and class identity Marx discusses social structure in terms of relations of production, relations between people and people, and people and things (labor, machinery, and capital). Class emerges where the relations of production involve a differentiated division of labor. People with nothing to sell besides their labor find themselves at a disadvantage. Marx distinguishes between what laborers need to reproduce themselves and their families, and the exchange value of the labor they perform. Employers pay laborers less than the value of the work they do, which Marx refers to as the expropriation of surplus value. Such exploitation brings about class struggle. In speaking about class, Marx distinguishes between ‘class-in-itself’ and ‘class-for-itself’. ‘Class-in-itself’ refers to relatively objective economic relations of alienation and exploitation. Members of such a class, associated by their position in the division of labor, do not have a public or individual sense of group identity. Through class struggle, however, workers develop a sense of identity and grow into a self-conscious, politically active ‘class-for-itself’ (Marx 1978). Using ‘class’ as a unit of analysis in Sri Lanka requires exploring what ‘class’ means in a non-Western setting. A purely Marxist analysis that sees economics as the base of all inequality neglects the multiple cross-cutting hierarchies of village life. For example, how does one classify the social place and identity of a woman who works abroad for extremely low wages (certainly working class in the global economy), of lower caste in the village, yet wealthy by local standards? Many individuals and families in both Naeaegama and Minigoda adopt a capitalist, individualist, 'Westernized' mindset, deriving status and prestige from wealth and education (Srinivas 1962). However, many of the same people also rely on traditional displays (such as giving to the temple or contributing to rituals) to mark their social standing. Individuals and families position themselves with respect to the multiple intersecting identities and oppressions of class, caste, race, and gender, searching to find, and to legitimate, the system offering them the most upward (or the least downward) mobility. Social mobility depends not only on progress and development within a given system, but also on the relative dominance of different competing systems in the village. Refining and elaborating on Marx’s insights, recent feminist anthropology examines how gender ideology, kinship, and household organization affect global economic processes and power structures (Comaroff 1985; Lamphere 1987; Ong 1987). Migration has brought about new ways of thinking about women’s work and class identity. Scholars often fail to count femalegendered tasks as 'work', or to count unpaid housework as 'employment'. The myth of the housewife's economic inactivity supports cultural ideologies that devalue women's labor (Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Joan Scott 1988). The sale of domestic services on the global market forces both rural villagers and social scientists to recognize that the tasks housewives usually perform for free in fact make significant contributions to household finances (Sacks 1989). In both Naeaegama and Minigoda, female migration changed images of men and women. As more and more married women went abroad, proper roles for mothers shifted to include long absences from home. Men, bereft of the ‘breadwinner’ role, suffered a challenge to their masculinity. In both villages, migrants reported hearing Arabs speculate that “Sri Lankan men must be donkeys because they send their women abroad to work.” Images of uneducated, slothful husbands suggested that men wasted the money their wives earned abroad. Sinhala stereotypes portrayed men turning to alcohol (an exclusively masculine beverage) to dr