ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reforms introduced in the Overseas Domestic Workers (ODW) visa regime in the United Kingdom and the politics and practice of human rights that has surrounded these changes. The move by the UK government to introduce a highly precarious temporary status for migrant domestic workers and wider policy discourse on circular migration, mark a resistance to the expansion of human rights norms to the realm of domestic work and to migrants. The shift towards direct cash payments has been a key feature of social care policy in the UK over the last decade, facilitating a trend towards outsourcing of care work to private actors, including migrant women. Assessing the process of law reform in the UK law, it might be argued that the position from 1998 to 2012 was an anomaly of sorts, the product of a short-lived "political moment" and a powerful advocacy campaign that successfully enacted domestic workers' rights.
