Abstract
Twenty-nine-year-old Girlie is one of approximately 4,100 Filipino au pairs in Denmark, 20 of whom I interviewed in Denmark in the summer of 2012. As an au pair, Girlie only works 30 hours a week. She mostly performs light cleaning and sometimes she helps in the kitchen and with afternoon childcare. Her current workload is a vast improvement from her prior job in Singapore where she worked as a domestic worker for five and a half years. In Singapore, she worked from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Her duties included general cleaning, cooking, hand-washing the entire laundry, cleaning the car and doing childcare. By relocating from Singapore to Denmark, Girlie saw a jump in her salary from US$270 to US$580.
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© 2014 Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
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Parreñas, R.S. (2014). Migrant Domestic Workers as ‘One of the Family’. In: Anderson, B., Shutes, I. (eds) Migration and Care Labour. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319708_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319708_4
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