Recognizing the home workplace

17Apologizing for her absence from a union meeting, Ahmedabad resident Shanta, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of six with a tubercular husband, explained, “I didn’t go because I thought if the seth [subcontractor] finds out, he won’t give me any work. That meant no food for my children, or going back to domestic help.” Still, she told the canvasser from the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), “I prayed for the meeting’s success.” Although the work rolling agarbatti (incense sticks) as part of India’s expanding informal sector in the 1980s was demanding, it paid better than working as domestic help and could be combined with watching one’s own children. ¹ Nearly a quarter of a century later, other Asian women workers returned to household work when garment manufacturing left for cheaper locations, an organizer from HomeNet Thailand reported in 2013. ² In places such as the Philippines, some paid women workers labored in the homes of nearby women, joining the ranks of transnational mothers cooking, cleaning, and caring for yet another group of women—those who entered the labor market as part of the managerial professional class in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and elsewhere (Parreñas 2001; Huang, Yeoh, and Abdul Rahman 2005; Ray and Qayum 2009; Lutz 2011).