MIGRANT WORKERS AND THE MANY STATES OF PROTEST IN HONG KONG

Abstract

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”

This article takes migrant domestic workers’ anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and the structural position of women migrant workers there that permits such public protests and shapes their form and content. Such protests, I argue, are shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, including their flexible nonciti-zenship, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the socio-historical context of Hong Kong as a postcolonial “global city”1 and a “neoliberal space of exception.”2

The Consulate Hopping Protest

The Consulate Hopping Protest and the presentation of Hall of Shame Awards took place on Thursday, 15 December 2005, a warm Hong Kong winter's morning. One of many events that took place during the People's Action Week against the WTO (10–18 December 2005), the protest began with a small but boisterous gathering of two to three dozen people, including Filipina, Indonesian, and Thai foreign domestic workers, Nepali migrant workers who were active in Hong Kong's grassroots worker organizations, a few friends and supporters, and several members of the local media. The group congregated first outside of the Nepalese Consulate, in the shadows of the shiny high-rise buildings of Tsim Sha Tsui East. Behind a metal police barricade, protestors passed out fliers, made speeches, and presented the first Hall of Shame Award. A migrant worker/activist (carrying a cardboard gun and wearing a crown) served as a stand-in for Nepal's king, Gyanendra. The “king” was ceremoniously presented with a paper award reading “King of Tyrants” by the vice chairman of Feona (Far Eastern Overseas Nepali Organization) for his dictatorial rule and curtailing of democratic rights. He was then unceremoniously beaten to the ground by the jeering protestors, with appropriate sound effects (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1. At the Nepalese Consulate, the first stop for the Consulate Hopping Protest, a migrant worker dressed as King Gyanendra was presented with the “King of Tyrants” award and then knocked to the ground. 1 5 December 2005. (Credit: Peter C. Alter)

Some of the protestors next crowded into a large bus that had been hired for the event, while others rushed to the subway. They all headed to the Indonesian Consulate across the harbor, in Causeway Bay, where a costumed domestic worker representing Indonesian President Susilo Bambang ("Bangbang”) Yudhoyono — balancing large burlap sacks filled with money on the backs of two domestic workers — was presented with the “Rookie of the Year” award by the chairperson of the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers (ATKI-HK) for Indonesia's success and expertise as a “rookie exporter of labor” — second only to the Philippines as “biggest exporter of cheap labor in Asia” (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2. A domestic worker disguised as Indonesian President Yudhoyono was presented with the “Rookie Labor Exporter of the Year” award as he balanced two large bags of Hong Kong dollars on the backs of domestic workers. 1 5 December 2005. (Credit: Photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.)

The next stop was the Malaysian Consulate where Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia (whose term lasted twenty-two years) — represented by a domestic worker dressed in black leather carrying a whip and maintaining a very stoic appearance — received the “Sultan of Crackdown” award for the massive arrests, harsh treatment, and deportation of migrant workers in Malaysia. The award was presented following a speech by Connie Bragas-Regalado, a Filipina former domestic worker who had served as chairperson of Unifil (United Filipinos in Hong Kong), a Hong Kong grassroots domestic worker organization, and who had returned to the Philippines to become the chairperson of Migrante International, an international alliance of migrant organizations based in Quezon City.

The Philippine Consulate was the next stop. The Filipina domestic worker who was the current chairperson of Unifil presented representatives of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo with the “Milkmaid Award” for “milking the maids” — figuratively sucking them dry and threatening the subsistence of their dependents — by charging excessive fees and relying on them to support the country economically. Milking the maids is a particularly evocative gendered symbol of political and economic exploitation (see fig. 3). A group of about ten Filipino protestors, including two domestic workers wearing flowered maid's aprons and symbolizing the government's greed by waving U.S., Philippine, and Hong Kong currency at the onlookers, then entered the office building and delivered the statement to a Philippine consular official.

Fig. 3. The “Milkmaid Award (Milking of the Maids)” was presented to President Macapagal Arroyo at the Philippine Consulate on 14 December 2005. In the picture, President Arroyo is bathing in the liquid from a bottle labeled “State Extraction of OFW [Overseas Filipino Worker] Remittances.”

At the next stop Thaksin Shinawatra, the twenty-third prime minister of Thailand at that time, was presented with the “absentee government award” by the vice chairperson of the Thai Regional Alliance, for neglecting migrant workers from Thailand and for the lack of services the Thaksin government offered its citizen migrants.

The Hong Kong Government Offices in Hong Kong's Central District were next. There, a young man representing Chief Executive Donald Tsang was presented with the “Edward Scissorhands Award” by a domestic worker who was Unifil's vice chairperson. The award was presented — along with giant cardboard scissors that cut through the words “wages” and “social services” — for cutting wages, slashing benefits, and for imposing a monthly levy of HK$400 (US$51) on employers of foreign domestic workers to support a training program for local domestic workers3 (see fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Hong Kong's Chief Executive Donald Tsang was presented with the “Edward Scis-sorhand Award” as giant scissors cut though “wages” and “social services.” Other signs read “abolish the levy” and “bring back HK$3670.” (Credit: Peter C. Alter)

The final stop was up the hill (near the Peak Tram stop) outside of the gates of the U.S. Consulate. Many more people had joined the protest by then, as had more members of the media, and the spirit and noise intensified. After several speeches by worker activists, including Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, chairperson of Bayan (the New Patriotic Alliance) and vice chair of ILPS (the International League of Peoples’ Struggle), a stand-in for George W Bush, was given the “Terror Award” amidst chants of “U.S. imperialist, number 1 terrorist"; “Down with George Bush; Down with WTO"; and “Junk, junk WTO” (see fig. 5). Finally, some of the protestors returned to Victoria Park to join the Korean farmers and the other protestors in Causeway Bay. Others returned to work.

Fig. 5. During the Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards demonstration in 2005, a migrant worker serves as a stand-in for President George W. Bush, who is presented with the “Terror Award.”

Before unpacking this rich symbolic expression of migrant domestic worker political perspectives, and the workers’ critical commentary on their position in Hong Kong and within the wider global economy, some methodological and contextual background is necessary. In the following section, I briefly describe the wider context of the protest and of my research methodology. This is followed first by a discussion of the specific meanings of this protest and then of the wider significance of migrant worker protest within the context of contemporary Hong Kong, a self-described postcolonial global city and a space of neoliberal exception.

Background and Context

For several months in 2005 and 2006, I returned to Hong Kong to conduct ethnographic follow-up field research among Filipina domestic workers, after a hiatus of almost ten years, during which time Hong Kong had become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China. My main focus was on changes that had taken place in the decade since my earlier research on worker protests. I observed numerous protests firsthand and interviewed participants, observers, and organizers. Although much remained the same in postcolonial Hong Kong, I was immediately struck by three significant changes relating to domestic workers. Primary among them was the phenomenal increase in the number of Indonesian domestic workers; the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), unions, and grassroots associations focused on migrant worker issues; and the wider scope of domestic worker's political protests that were now defined mainly in terms of broader human rights, in contrast to the more narrowly defined labor issues that were the main concerns of the early and mid 1990s.4

Shifting demographics are among the most obvious and significant changes visible over the past decade. Intensified by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and propelled by political-economic crisis and change in Indonesia that prompted the government to promote the exportation of female labor, the number of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia and the Middle East has increased dramatically. Filipinas still constitute the majority of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, as they have since the 1980s and throughout the 1990s (numbering 124,000 in 2005), but the number of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong rose from just over 6,000 in 1993 to more than 90,000 in 2005, outnumbering all nationalities of domestic workers except Filipinas.5 The business of recruiting and training Indonesian domestic workers to work abroad has become big business and a major source of foreign currency remittances and income for the Indonesian government, following the example set by the Philippines.6

Before the Asian financial crisis, as historian Susan Blackburn has observed, Indonesian Embassy officials denigrated women who took “lowly positions as servants,” and the wider Indonesian population expressed “repugnance at Indonesians working overseas in what were regarded as menial capacities.”7 Indonesian women's activist groups protested in Indonesia in the 1990s against the maltreatment of Indonesian domestic workers in the Middle East,8 but the main reason behind their calls for a halt to such labor exportation was a desire not to “lower the dignity and status of Indonesian women.” Only a few Indonesian or-ganizations in those days focused on the human rights of migrant workers.9

By the mid 1990s, however, the Indonesian government began to actively promote overseas contract work in Asia and employment agencies and obligatory “training camps” for prospective domestic workers sprang up to meet the demand. In the camps, Indonesian women recall being warned to avoid troublemaking Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong who might cause them to lose their jobs. As Indonesian domestic workers grew in number, bolstered in large part by employers and recruitment agencies that considered Indonesians “better” than Filipina workers (less savvy more passive, and appropriately submissive), they also gradually became more aware of their rights.10 On the subject of Hong Kong protests involving Indonesian migrant domestic workers, Blackburn notes with surprise, “remarkably, some Indonesian maidservants in Hong Kong succeeded in organising themselves into an Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers [ATKI], which in 2001 staged a protest rally against exploitation by employers, recruitment agencies and the Indonesian government — something which has never happened in Indonesia itself.”11 Indeed, in 2006 one Indonesian domestic worker laughed as she showed me photographs of the ATKI protest in which women's faces were completely covered with black masks. They had worn the masks, she recalled, out of fear of recognition and reprisal by their government. Today, she noted, they openly express their concerns, waving at television cameras and drawing attention to themselves. As another Indonesian activist domestic worker explained to me in 2005, Indonesians have become emboldened in the more democratic post-Suharto period; they are aware of workers’ rights and of the legality of labor organizing in Hong Kong.

The post-1997 policies and rules governing the rights and obligations of Foreign Domestic Workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong remain fundamentally unchanged from a decade earlier. Migrants still come to Hong Kong as temporary workers with a two-year employment contract and temporary visa, and they are required to “live in” and work for one employer.12 Domestic workers are the only Hong Kong workers with a minimum wage stipulated in their employment contracts.13 On the level of domestic worker activism, however, much has changed. Concerns about wages and work conditions are still commonly voiced, but they are increasingly framed in relation to discourses of global justice and human rights. This shift is linked in part to the growth of NGOs and grassroots activist organizations in Hong Kong and to an ever more extensive and complex framework of domestic worker organizations and labor unions.

Although it was small and did not attract much media attention, the Consulate Hopping Protest in 2005 involved a lively and diverse group of migrant workers and reflected the key demographic changes among domestic workers, the proliferation of organizations and NGOs affiliated with migrant workers, and the wider global and transnational framing of their “antiglobalization” message that might best be seen as a “pro social justice position” focusing on migrant rights as human rights.14

The protest and award presentation was sponsored by the HKPA (Hong Kong People's Alliance) on the WTO, an umbrella organization that included hundreds of local and international NGOs and grassroots organizations that had not received approval to take part or observe the actual WTO Ministerial Conference meetings that took place inside the Hong Kong Convention Center in Wanchai. Elizabeth Tang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), served as HKPA's chairperson. Planning and educational outreach for the protest events began almost a year earlier. The Consulate Hopping Protest was listed in the HKPA calendar of events that took place during People's Action Week, one of dozens if not hundreds of planned activities and demonstrations that took place under the umbrella of the HKPA, some involving thousands of people in marches and rallies in Causeway Bay and Wanchai and others involving much smaller groups in events scheduled throughout the nine days in various Hong Kong locations and culminating on International Migrants Day, December 18 (see fig. 6).15

Fig. 6. Waving flags of the Asian Migrant Coordinating Body (AMCB), the Thai Regional Alliance, the International League of People's Struggle (ILPS), the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, Migrante International, and others, migrant domestic workers join the anti-WTO march on 11 December 2005.

The protest organizers had expected the Consulate Hopping Protest to be small, since it was held on a Thursday, when most domestic workers had to work. The choice of day was nonetheless intentional because the organizers did not want to compete with the larger weekend events that they planned to attend and hoped would draw the largest crowds. At any one time the Consulate Hopping Protest had about thirty-five to forty-five protestors plus a dozen members of the press. Some domestic workers attended only part of the 4.5-hour event and then went back to work; dozens of other domestic workers had helped prepare for the protest (creating props and contributing ideas) even though they could not attend.

The largest numbers of participants were Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers; a few were former domestic workers who were no longer based in Hong Kong. Many of the participants in the Consulate Hopping Protest were unemployed migrant domestic workers who were temporarily living in domestic shelters as they awaited their hearings. Such shelters are no doubt the single most important avenue through which domestic workers of various nationalities, but especially Filipinas and Indonesians, are exposed to political and labor activism. In the early to mid 1990s, such shelters, established by NGOs and Filipino migrant worker activist groups and staffed largely by Filipina domestic worker volunteers, housed mainly Filipina workers who had been abused, laid off, or underpaid, and were awaiting hearings with the labor tribunal. Among these workers were some who later returned to the shelter, with their consciousness raised, to work as volunteers or to participate in related grassroots organizations. By the late 1990s, as the number of Indonesian workers grew, and as the rates of abuse of Filipinos declined, the abuse suffered by Indonesian workers increased and they became the main residents of Filipino-run shelters. Both IMWU (Indonesian Migrant Workers Union) and ATKI trace their origins to Indonesian women's encounters with Filipino domestic worker activists and labor organizers in domestic worker shelters.16 Within these “safe,” gendered spaces, formerly abused and displaced maids share eye-opening and politically transforming experiences.17

Despite the small turnout at the mid December event, much larger constituencies and collaborative efforts of multiethnic migrant domestic workers were behind the Consulate Hopping Protest and the criticisms voiced during the demonstration. The protest and award presentation was planned, coordinated, and organized over the course of several months by migrant worker groups in Hong Kong and in the Philippines under the umbrella of the Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body (AMCB)18 and the demonstration successfully incorporated several nationalities of workers and activists: Filipino, Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Nepali, among others. The Consulate Hopping Protest and its participants vividly and literally mapped the transnational, multiethnic, and multi-issue dimensions of migrant workers’ concerns. It raised important questions about the position of domestic workers in Hong Kong, relationships between different nationalities of workers, and the rights and concerns of workers. It also mapped wider geopolitics and networks of activist affiliation. Several well-known international activists joined in the later stage of the protest, giving speeches and showering the protestors with praise and support. These included officials from Bayan, a Philippine alliance of grassroots worker and peasant organizations founded in 1985, and representatives of ILPS, an anti-imperialist democratic international alliance with hundreds of member organizations in over forty countries worldwide.

Comparative Disadvantage

As indicated above, the social organization of the protest and the wider network of grassroots activist organizations within which it is situated are significant. Another important dimension is its performed meaning. Unlike other more militant aspects of protests during Peoples Action Week, the Consulate Hopping Protest and the Hall of Shame Awards had a playful, clever, and creative dimension to it. Each segment can be seen as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque street theater that produces an encapsulated critique of neoliberal globalization and its inherent inequalities.19 The protestors produced a skillful parody of neoliberal notions of “comparative advantage” in the global arena of free trade.20 Contemporary free trade interpretations of David Ricardo's nineteenth century notion of comparative advantage posit that every nation stands to gain by exporting what it produces at relatively low cost. In many regions of Asia, migrant workers — mainly women — are the low-cost specialized product, but their performances creatively beg the question of comparative advantages. To whose advantage is it when workers are marketed as commodities or resources, exploited by recruitment agencies, employers, and their home governments? Protestors, most of whom were women migrant workers, literally embodied in their protest actions the comparative disadvantages for the workers themselves (as women who are “milked” for profit) and the advantages for the leaders, officials, and class elites of various countries.

In the Consulate Hopping Protest, Nepal is not depicted as a tourist's mountain paradise, but as a kingly autocracy that specializes in and benefits from repression and political violence. Indonesian officials are shown to be increasingly skilled at profiteering from the growing exportation of female migrant labor and Malaysia's officials are portrayed as engaging in antidemocratic crackdowns and violent expulsion of illegal immigrants. In other depictions, Philippine officials “milk” migrant women workers and profit from the export of their sweated labor; Thai officials neglect their migrant workers; Hong Kong authorities cut migrant worker's wages and benefits in order to subsidize local interests; and U.S. government officials are patriarchal exporters of violence and the greatest beneficiary of the overall comparative advantages of world trade.

Through such creative and humorous protests migrant workers and other protestors aptly articulate that comparative advantage is relative to one's class position. An advantage to some is revealed to be no such thing from the grassroots perspective of exploited workers. Protestors point to a variety of factors that reveal the underlying power structures that perpetuate a cycle of exploitation and exportation of workers. WTO-supported agricultural policies that put small-scale local farmers out of business, for example, fuel dissent, increase poverty, lead to the growth of urban slums, and result in women's migration as one of few alternatives to unemployment. The seemingly endless supply of low-cost workers for export depends on maintaining a pattern of underemployment, unemployment, and military repression of protests back home that could threaten the valuable image of the ideal worker-for-export. In their repression of protests, local governments often receive U.S. support, previously under the guise of “fighting communism” and more recently under the guise of “fighting terrorism” — caricatured by President George W. Bush receiving the “Terror Award” during the Consulate Hopping Protest. Such theatrical public criticisms of comparative advantage point out that what is promoted as an ideal and profitable solution from the perspective of local governments and class elites in both the sending and receiving countries depends on the perpetuation of structural violence and economic inequality.

Hong Kong: Asia's World City

In the context of a strategic space such as the global city, the types of disad-vantaged people … are not simply marginal; they acquire presence in a broader political process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity. This presence signals the possibility of a politics. What this politics will be will depend on the specific projects and practices of various communities. Insofar as the sense of membership of these communities is not subsumed under the national, it may well signal the possibility of a transnational politics centred in concrete localities. — Saskia Sassen 2001

Hong Kong is a global capitalist city, self-proclaimed to be “Asia's World City” and a “poster child for world trade.”21 As Saskia Sassen has observed, a global city involves not only the movement of capital, but also the movement of a transnational workforce, “both rich, i.e. the new transnational professional workforce, and poor, i.e. most migrant workers; and it is a space for the transmigration of cultural forms, for the reterritorialization of ‘local’ subcultures.”22 Within this context, corporations and governments valorize global capitalism even as they produce new inequalities. An important question Sassen raises is whether the global city “is also a space for a new politics.”

Aihwa Ong, by contrast, posits a notion of spaces of neoliberal exception in which categories of people such as migrant domestic workers are excluded from the benefits of citizenship and denied human rights or where the privileged citizens and skilled or professional migrant workers receive special benefits.23 As Ong argues, the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong is a neoliberal space of exception. “The SAR framework allows for experimentation with different degrees of civil rights in a vibrant capitalist setting, a milieu that acts as a laboratory for China's future.” Within this SAR context, even more than within China's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) “pockets of agitation for civil rights” are accommodated and do not threaten economic, national, and collective security.24

Bearing in mind Sassen's ideas about global cities in which new politics emerge and Ong's ideas about neoliberal spaces of exception, I ask what it is specifically about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that quite literally permits these protests and shapes their form and content at this particular historical point in time? What is it about Hong Kong — beyond generalities about global cities — that both empowers political protest and at the same time defines its limits?

Unlike post-World War II migrant workers in Europe25 — who were initially allowed entry as temporary “guest workers” in response to labor shortages and were soon granted legal permanent residency, citizenship, or citizenship-like rights — Hong Kong's migrant women domestic workers protest in a place where they remain highly vulnerable as guest workers and temporary migrants, remaining in Hong Kong on precarious two-year visas and denied the opportunity of becoming citizens or permanent residents. Their family members are not permitted to live in Hong Kong, unless they come with their own temporary work visas, and they do not receive the medical and educational benefits that citizens, permanent residents, and more privileged immigrants receive. By contrast with the “flexible citizenship” of Hong Kong's elite multiple passport holders (and their parachute families),26 migrant workers can be said to have a particular type of flexibility associated with their noncitizenship. “Citizenship” here refers not only to the legal membership and voting rights in a particular nation-state (e.g., Indonesia or the Philippines), but also to the more contested claims to recognition or belonging to specific sociocultural communities or territories — including gendered ones — and the sense of political responsibility this claim entails.27

These flexible noncitizens, who are transnational in the sense of both transforming and transcending the borders of nation-states, work in a space of exception that simultaneously permits their protests (within limits) and denies them the rights of citizens and citizenship.28 As oppressed and exploited workers who have been “sold out” by their own governments and by neoliberal global capitalist forces, migrant domestic workers contribute labor that privileges the upper and middle classes of the Hong Kong SAR. Indeed, President Macapagal-Arroyo's promise in 2006 to establish training programs to produce more Filipina “super maids” to send abroad was vehemently criticized by migrant workers and their families as yet another form of government extortion and of milking the maids, since prospective workers would be required to foot the bill for the newly required (and dubiously beneficial) training programs. Ironically, within the SAR's neoliberal space of exception, foreign domestic workers are permitted to express public criticism.

Yet Hong Kong does not offer the same opportunity for protest and mobilization of transnational interests to all migrants. As Nicole Newendorp points out, the “right of abode” protests of Mainland Chinese wives of Hong Kong citizens — who wait many years to become residents of Hong Kong, but in so doing lose their rights to residency in the mainland and do not gain the rights of Hong Kong citizenship — have been largely ignored.29 Prospective mainland immigrant wives, by virtue of their claims to the benefits of nationality and citizenship, present a threat that foreign domestic workers do not. This underscores the significance of the racial/ethnic national otherness and the flexible noncitizenship of migrant workers, their claims to human rights and proper treatment as global workers (as opposed to citizenship), as well as the essential work they perform for Hong Kong's privileged citizens within the global economy.

As noted earlier, temporary migrant domestic workers typically do not take part in public protests, and such protests are virtually unheard of among Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, even less imaginable in the Middle East or Gulf States. Hong Kong allows protests that might take on a very different tenor and become violent or dangerous if they took place in other cities such as Singapore, Manila, Beijing, Taipei, or Jakarta. The Hong Kong police force — linked as it is to Hong Kong's image of peaceful and subtle forms of modern governmentality and to the social stability needed for economic prosperity — is a key factor. The Hong Kong police compare favorably to more violent and militaristic police and governments elsewhere: Nepal's military police; the Korean police; the Philippine army and police violence against labor organizers and members of the media; and the violent crackdowns and repression by Malaysian, Indonesian, and Mainland Chinese police and military forces. The fear of deportation and arrest and the outright banning of specific nationalities of workers clearly inhibit potential activism among foreign domestic workers in other Asian and Middle Eastern locations.

In the summer of 2005 a rumor spread among HKPA participants that mainland Chinese police might be brought to Hong Kong during the WTO conference. In the end that did not — and perhaps could not — come about alongside the Hong Kong government's claim to being Asia's world city and a premier center for global trade. I was told in summer 2005 and early during People's Action Week that in comparison to police in Mainland China the Hong Kong police were more sympathetic to protestors. As People's Action Week continued, however, and the protests escalated and the police became more visible — wearing riot gear and masks in rows lined up five officers deep — they were taunted as naïve, inexperienced, and incompetent at dealing with protestors (see fig. 7). I was told that in the Philippines, for example, confiscating a police shield is a badge of honor. During the first march, the protestors managed to take a several shields in a very short period of time then voluntarily returned them to the police, implying that they posed far too little challenge for it to be any fun. Hong Kong police reportedly looked fearful and were ill prepared for what was child's play compared to protests in Korea or the Philippines. What began as praise of police restraint or gentle mocking of their inexperience at the beginning of the week was debated by week's end, especially following the arrest of hundreds of protestors as police used pepper spray, tear gas, and hoses to hold back protestors.30 But despite criticism of the police for their inexperience, overreaction, and lack of restraint, they were still described as relatively peaceful.

Fig. 7. As the anti-WTO protests intensified, more police were seen in full riot gear. 18 December 2005.

Migrant workers interpreted the trials in 2006 of two Korean anti-WTO protestors and the eventual dismissal of charges against all of the arrested anti-WTO protestors as further evidence that Hong Kong was not like their own (or Mainland Chinese) repressive states. The concern over police violence — should it go too far — risked incurring criticism from local Hong Kong citizens and professional expatriates, sullying Hong Kong's reputation for peaceful govern-mentality weakening its ability to rule in more subtle and less overtly repressive ways, and undercutting its claim to being a modern, global Asian city.

The Consulate Hopping Protest thus reveals the multiethnic and international composition of the participants, the central role of domestic workers, but the inclusion of other types of migrant workers as well. The breadth of their concerns was expressed at two significant sites: Hong Kong's government offices, where local concerns were voiced, and the U.S. Consulate, where anti-WTO and anti-U.S. imperialist (including anti-Iraq War) sentiments were voiced alongside issues involving immigrant workers in U.S. sweatshops and the like. Representatives from organizations such as AMCB, Unifil, HKCTU, Mi-grante, Bayan, and ILPS reflected the shifting roles and subjectivities of domestic workers. I was struck by the number of domestic workers who had used their activist experience in Hong Kong as a stepping-stone to other NGO or activist work and politics back in the Philippines. The clear patterns of networking between and through Unifil and Migrante — in relation to the new migrant political party in the Philippines and the recently acquired vote for Filipino overseas workers — points to the political and activist education of women domestic workers and the way in which such experience is linked to newly forming political parties and pressure groups in the Philippines as has been the case elsewhere.31 Indonesian domestic workers are not far behind: several activist Indonesians involved with ATKI and IMWU described their political awakening in Hong Kong and their plans to continue their activism upon return to Indonesia.

The Consulate Hopping Protest and the role of migrant domestic workers in the wider anti-WTO protest illustrate the increasingly global and transnational issues that domestic workers have taken on. No longer do their organizations focus solely or primarily on local issues such as the minimum wage, the levy, and the government's “two-week rule” (which dictates that domestic workers whose contracts have ended or been terminated must return home within two weeks if they have not signed a new contract), although these are clearly still important, but many organizations have become transnational in the sense of taking on a much broader array of human rights issues and expressing critiques that are targeted not only at the Philippine and Hong Kong governments and their policies, but also at a number of other governments and at neoliberal globalization in general.32 Such protests teach migrant worker observers about the ways in which their personal experiences and the difficulties they experience as migrant workers are embedded in a wider global context. They learn the language of human and global rights, as well as the critique of neoliberalism, by observing and listening to protest organizers and activists and other worker participants.

These protests are not devoid of conflict and competition. There is, for example, competition between Filipino groups for influence over and affiliation with other nationalities of workers, and also competition between Indonesian groups, each claiming authority to speak for the interests of Indonesian workers as a whole. Two different migrant worker coalitions, for example, sponsored consulate or embassy protests: one was the Consulate Hopping Protest described above, the other was a march that seemed to attract a larger proportion of international protestors from abroad. The AMCB was closely affiliated with the HKPA and depended on the official HKPA stage and speaker system that was set up in the soccer field of Victoria Park while the Asian Migrant Centre (AMC), another Filipino-led organization, set up its own stage and audio system on the other side of Victoria Park and became more closely allied with some of the international protestors — the highly visible Korean Peasants League (KPL) and La Via Campesina (an international peasant/small farmer advocacy organization) — which put them more squarely in the media and the public eye. Domestic workers often learn after the fact that affiliating with one activist organization or network can also alienate them from others. Some of the divides that exist among migrant workers (Indonesians as well as Filipinos) seem to structurally replicate left-wing political fissures in the Philippines.

Choosing whether or not to join the protests is also significant. Some Indonesian domestic workers who regularly spend their Sunday holiday in Victoria Park in Causeway Bay expressed sympathy for the anti-WTO platform, but most avoided the scene on the advice of employers or recruiters. They were reluctant to participate in the protests for reasons that ranged from a lack of interest to fear of violence. Workers voiced concerns about job security should their employers who had warned them to stay away from the protests see them on the evening news. They also spoke of their vulnerability, as temporary migrant workers at risk for deportation, and of family members who would lose an essential source of income if they were arrested. Yet despite such concerns, other domestic workers chose to actively participate (see fig. 8). Some left the protest area only when so-called “street battles” erupted between police and protestors — the point at which they perceived a serious risk of injury or arrest. Most domestic workers (some with deep ambivalence) left the scene before the arrests began.

Fig. 8. Domestic workers wearing boxes marked “for export” and T-shirts reading “Junk WTO” were among the thousands of members of the Hong Kong People's Alliance (HKPA) who marched against the WTO on 18 December 2005.

No Filipinos — neither domestic workers nor activists from abroad — were among the nine hundred or so protestors who were arrested at the end of the week of anti-WTO protests. Those arrested were predominantly male Korean protestors. Some Filipinos, men and women, expressed their sense of “shame” that although Filipino groups were among the most numerous participants in the protests, and despite their glorious reputation for protest, no Filipinos, not even the famous revolutionaries and radical labor activists who had come to Hong Kong specifically for the protests, had been arrested. Their Korean comrades had not only made a powerful statement and a more coordinated stand in the protest (visually and dramatically), winning over many local observers, but they had also taken the brunt of the violence and the arrests.33 The Korean protestors groups included some women, but overall they were male dominated, militaristic, and hierarchically organized in appearance and style, with drums, chants, and shrill whistles leading military-styled marches (see fig. 9 below).

Fig. 9. In one anti-WTO protest march on 1 5 December 2008, Korean farmers (whose jackets read “WTO kills farmers”) processed from Causeway Bay to Wanchai by walking three steps then bowing their heads to the ground. This kowtowing, an ancient Buddhist rite, moved some local observers to tears.

Organizers and domestic worker activists (as well as HKPA organizers) were publicly committed to peaceful protest. Domestic workers and their supporters did not want to risk being arrested, endangering their visas and their livelihood, and leaders of migrant worker organizations feared placing members at risk. Nor did they want to damage the hard-won and valuable alliances that they had formed with the HKPA organizers, including leaders of the HKCTU and the legislators who organized or supported the anti-WTO protests. Interestingly, after People's Action Week was over, several foreign domestic worker organizations hosted Korean protestors as they awaited the release of their compatriots. They welcomed them to their shelters and meeting places, provided them with mattresses, blankets, and food, and organized protests and vigils for the detainees, even after their compatriots had to return home, thus extending their gendered transnational domestic work to another political realm.

Conclusion

On Sunday, 2 July 2006, just hours after returning from a conference in Europe, Elizabeth Tang, chairperson of the HKPA and chief executive of the HKCTU, addressed a cheering crowd of four hundred domestic workers from eighty organizations at the first Filipino Migrant Workers Summit held in a large lecture hall at the University of Hong Kong. She said, “The people of Hong Kong are very impressed with what you [foreign domestic workers] did at the WTO meetings. Korean protestors set the standard, but you persisted until the end of the week. You are number two [after the Koreans]!” She praised the foreign domestic workers’ participation in a recent May Day rally as well. Whereas locals “ran away” to shop, picnic, and escape the heat, “migrant workers stayed until the end and did not run away!” To a roar of applause, she proclaimed that the HKCTU executive committee members all agreed that Hong Kong locals could and should “learn from the migrant workers.”

The vast majority of overseas domestic workers are women. The gendered aspects of their work and family roles (their gendered labor within private domestic spaces of a global workplace; the commodification of care work that allows women in one location to become the managers or do more highly valued labor outside of the home; their negotiation of gendered familial expectations across transnational space) have received much scholarly attention.34 Scholars have also focused on the formation of NGOs and migrant worker political organizations.35 An examination of the global context of paid household work forces a shift in the scale and reach of what is defined as “domestic.” Domestic workers perform intimate household and family labor across the divides of nation-states. They participate in transnational labor and contribute to public discourse and debate about human rights and globalization. This adds a new twist to the by now classic feminist critique of domestic/public, private/political dichotomies (in which women were once assumed to occupy a feminized private and domestic sphere), demonstrating that the domestic transcends and transforms the public, political, transnational, and global.36

The messages conveyed in domestic worker protests are born in part of their realization that their personal and individual troubles and difficulties (and those of other domestic workers) are not just private and personal (local and domestic), but are linked to larger political issues and deeper global economic inequalities. Their political activities and concerns do indeed involve “home country local and national politics";37 they are also increasingly framed within a transnational and global context; they are “deterritorialized” in certain ways, extending beyond the binary national boundaries of nation-states, involving issues of human rights and a critique of neoliberalism more generally.38

The majority of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are not politically active, but those who are, are highly visible, vocal, and influential. Their expressions of protest — aimed in multiple directions and at various levels of power — contribute to a rethinking of the ways in which feminized labor and migration are both a symptom of specific patterns of globalization and also create and redefine it.39 Women domestic workers are very much entwined (increasingly so) in a critique of the global. As such they develop new political subjectivities and come to see themselves, in the course of their experiences and their encounters with others in shelters, public spaces, and at work, as global laborers whose voices belong and deserve to be heard in public spaces that reach far beyond their household workplaces.

Since the 1990s, the scope and significance of domestic worker activism in and beyond Hong Kong has increased. Filipino overseas workers, for example, have gained the right to vote in Philippine national elections and have established their own political party. Filipino domestic workers are widely considered to be shrewd and politically savvy activists whose “negative” influence is rubbing off on formerly less assertive Indonesian workers. Different sorts of protests — the massive public protests involving locals and migrants on the 1 July anniversaries of Hong Kong's reunification with China; Filipino and Indonesian domestic worker protests criticizing local abuses and exploitative state practices; and migrant worker involvement in international protests such as the anti-WTO protest in 2005 — illustrate the development of new transnational affiliations and oppositions and reflect protestors’ performances and reformulations of their own gendered noncitizenship and migrant worker subjectivities.40

Such migrant domestic worker protests — criticizing the local Hong Kong government, their own and other Asian governments, the United States, and symbols of economic globalization such as the WTO — are highly unusual and do not take place in Singapore, Malaysia, or Taiwan, much less Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Why are such protests tolerated in Hong Kong? A major factor is the uniqueness of the post-1997, postcolonial Hong Kong SAR, with its claims to maintaining its status as a global city and its historical development as a space of neoliberal exception. Also relevant is the fact that migrant domestic workers are women who are not demanding citizenship or permanent residence (in contrast to Mainland Chinese right of abode protestors). They advocate for worker's rights and human rights; their flexible noncitizenship provides assurance that they cannot remain there permanently. Like migrant domestic workers elsewhere, they play a critical role in the global economy. Yet their interests increasingly resonate with the concerns, fears, and growing commitments of Hong Kong citizens and more privileged expatriates to protect their right of assembly and freedom of expression — especially against the backdrop of mainland China's increasing crackdowns and the perceived threats to Hong Kong's self rule.41 Hong Kong's leaders, moreover, even those aligned with the Chinese government, have a vested interest in promoting postcolonial Hong Kong as a well-governed, democratic, and thriving world city, a center for world trade and globalization. They tolerate protests that are peaceful and support or do not threaten the wider economic interests of Hong Kong and its proper citizens. Unlike mainland protestors in Hong Kong, whose demands for right of abode threaten the well-being of Hong Kong citizens, domestic workers pose little threat to the interests of Hong Kong's privileged locals. Their labor is essential to and their protests are defining of the Hong Kong SAR's particular brand of postcolonial neoliberalism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With admiration and appreciation, I gratefully acknowledge Cynthia Abdon-Tellez, Corazon Amaya Cañete, Rodolfo (Jun) Cañete, Eni Lestari, Dolores Balladares, Eman Villanueva, Norman Carnay, Ramon Bultron, Christina DeFalco, and many others in Hong Kong for the assistance they provided in the course of my research and for their commitment to social justice for migrant workers. My thanks to those who offered comments on earlier drafts of this paper at the Association for Asian Studies meetings, Stanford University, the Fairbank Center at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the Social Movements Forum at the University of Pittsburgh. In particular, I thank Nancy Abelmann, Joseph Alter, Kathleen Blee, Suzanne Brenner, Melissa Brown, Lisa Brush, Vanessa Fong, Michele Gamburd, Deborah Gould, Ching Kwan Lee, Haiyan Lee, John Markoff, Kevin Ming, Nicole Newendorp, and Donald Nonini for their probing questions and excellent suggestions. Funding for this research was provided by the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

Notes

1. Sassen 2000, 2001.

2. Ong 2006.

3. Foreign domestic workers (who work full-time for one employer and are “live in”) did not criticize the use of the levy to retrain local women since local workers (who work part-time and hourly) do not compete for the same market. Foreign domestic workers objected primarily to the fact that a HK$400 cut had been imposed on the monthly minimum legal wage of foreign domestic workers in 2003 on the basis that employers struggled to afford to pay such high wages, and then only three months later a HK$400 levy was imposed on the supposedly struggling employers. As such, the employers broke even, the local women stood to gain, and the foreign domestic workers were the “losers.”

4. See Constable 1997 on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, and 2007 for a discussion of the wider changes since 1997 including the influx of Indonesian workers. In December 2005 I was accompanied by my 15-year-old son/photographer, Peter Constable Alter. A migrant worker friend invited us to join this protest and reserved space for us on the bus.

5. Hong Kong Government, email communication, 2005. Beginning with the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s, Indonesian women went mainly to work as domestic servants in the Middle East, but by the 1990s labor exportation had expanded to include other regions of Asia (Blackburn 2004, 190).

6. See also Hsia, and Sim and Wee, this volume.

7. Blackburn 2004, 189.

8. Robinson 2000.

9. Mufti 1996, cited in Blackburn 2004, 189.

10. These stereotypes of Filipinas versus Indonesians are widespread. See Lan 2006 for a discussion of such stereotypes in Taiwan.

11. Blackburn 2004, 191.

12. The live-in rule is more strictly enforced than it was in the early 1990s.

13. One notable change since the late 1990s is the decrease in domestic worker monthly salaries from HK$3870 (about US$490) in 1998, to HK$3270 (US$420) in 2003. Small wage increases, including a raise of HK$50, were introduced in summer 2005 for newly signed contracts. Another change is that workers previously had the option of arranging their own employment, but they are now required to use an employment agency. As noted earlier, the HK$400 levy is also new.

14. Evans 2005.

15. HKPA 2005.

16. Sim 2003a and b; see also Hsia, this volume.

17. Employment agencies have recently begun to sponsor their own shelters. These are less popular among workers and for obvious reasons do not serve the same consciousness-raising purpose.

18. See Hsia (this volume) for a discussion of the history and organization of the AMCB.

19. Bakhtin 1984.

20. I am grateful to Donald Nonini for drawing my attention to the idea of comparative advantage and to Michele Gamburd for pushing me further. See also Robinson 2000, 253; Vasudevan 2005, 4.

21. Ruwich 2005.

22. Sassen 2001.

23. Ong 2006.

24. Ong 2006, 110; 112–13.

25. See Castles and Davidson 2000, 94–96 on the rights of legal residents in Europe referred to as “quasi-citizens,” “margizens,” or “denizens"; see also Soysal 1994.

26. Ong 1999.

27. As Sassen (2001) writes, “the centrality of place in a context of global processes engenders a transnational economic and political opening in the formation of new claims and hence in the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place, and, at the limit, in the constitution of new forms of ‘citizenship’ and a diversity of citizenship practices.” For broad definitions of citizenship, see also Geertz 1973; Rosaldo 1994; Verdery 1998; Ku and Pun 2005.

28. Ong 1999, 2006.

29. Newendorp 2008; see also Ku 2001.

30. See Tiwari and Solnit 2005.

31. For example, Guarnizo et al. 2003, 1214.

32. See Lyons 2009 for a deeper discussion of transnational alliances and organizing.

33. In particular, the “march” in which Korean protestors, mainly farmers, processed from Causeway Bay to Wanchai by walking three steps then bowing their foreheads all the way to the ground, kowtowing an ancient Buddhist rite, moved some of the local observers to tears and others to join the protests, to donate food or water, or to display banners or signs of support. Many news reports commented on both the criticism voiced by locals and their heartfelt support (e.g., Ruwich 2005).

34. Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; Lan 2006; Parreñas 2001, 2005.

35. For example, Hsia 2009; Law 2002; Piper 2005; Sim 2003a; Yamanaka and Piper 2005.

36. H. Lee (2006) argues that in the case of mainland Chinese women who work for foreigners in China, the home is a quasi-public sphere in which cosmopolitan subjectivities are forged. In Hong Kong, many Chinese employers’ homes are viewed far less positively and the public sphere in which their political subjectivities are forged are outside of their workplaces.

37. Guarnizo et al. 2003, 1239.

38. Gupta and Ferguson 1992.

39. Freeman 2001.

40. Ku and Pun 2005; So 2005; Tiwari 2002; Wong 2003; Tsang 2003; Taipei Times 2003; Lin 2003; Knight 2003; IMWU 2005.

41. Lee, C.K. 2000, 2002.