Maid to order: the Third World women who leave their children to take care of ours.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: Book Review: GLOBAL WOMAN: Nannies, Maids; and Sex workers in the New Economy - Book Review

GLOBAL WOMAN: Nannies, Maids; and Sex workers in the New economy edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild Metropolitan Books, $26.00

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, THE PARKS and plazas of central Hong Kong teem with women. They are Filipinas mainly, but Indians, Thais, Sri Lankans, and others as well--women from the Third World who come to the First to scrub floors, care for children, and generally do work that affluent households no longer have the time or inclination to do. They sit on benches and blankets, chat, eat, entrust parcels to friends going home for visits parcels the friends will carry in big, plastic zipper bags they call "Manila Vuittons."

Sunday is their day off. The mood seems high-spirited, festive almost. Most of these women work--and live--in small apartments under the hawk eyes of demanding bosses. They have little privacy and less free time. The park is an escape. Guest workers in a strange land, they have nowhere else to go.

The discerning might note a sadness in some of the eyes. Many of these women are mothers. They have left their own children in the care of husbands and relatives, to come to Hong Kong to care for the children of the Chinese, and of British and American expats. Many like them are similarly employed in the Middle East, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. There is nothing new to migratory labor, of course. Whether it's by Metrobus from Anacostia to Chevy Chase, a Greyhound from Mississippi to Chicago, or Philippine Airlines from Manila to Hong Kong, people have always followed work and pay.

But the conversion of mothering into an object of global trade is another matter entirely, and certainly on this scale. Some 30 percent of children in the Philippines have a parent who works abroad. That means 8 million kids whose mothers (most often) or fathers are thousands of miles away. It also means a lot of First World kids whose experience of the Third is a dark-skinned woman who scrubs their toilet bowl.

For the women, it is a way to make the best of a bad hand. A few might be escaping bad marriages; in a nation without legal divorce, work abroad can be the only way out. But the vast majority are doing it for cash to send home. A college graduate can make at least five times more as a maid in Hong Kong than as a teacher in the Philippines. Given the anemic Philippine peso, Hong Kong and U.S. dollars are worth a small fortune. They pay school tuition and enable families to buy land and build homes. Walk through a rural village in the Philippines and you generally can tell, by the quality, of the house, whether someone in that family has worked abroad.

But the price can be high. Mothers end up separated from their kids for years. If they are undocumented workers in the United States, they cannot go home at all. As guest workers all these women are easy targets for abuse, with legal recourse that is questionable at best and in practice often irrelevant. You don't like it, Panmoy? There's a plane leaving tomorrow morning, so go back to your pigs and dust and hungry kids.

This is not the global economy over which editorial writers enthuse, the one that supposedly will uplift the masses. It sounds more like an arrangement to ensure a supply of cheap labor to clean those editorialists' homes. Yet it is pretty much invisible in America, where nannies and maids disappear into suburban kitchens or else blend into the polyglot throng in major cities. (By one estimate, less than 10 percent of household work in the United States gets reported to the IRS.)

That ignorance won't be so easy now, thanks to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, a new collection of essays edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. It is an apt pairing. The former is the author, most recently, of Nickel and Dimed, an account 0f a year of low-paid "women's work" in the service economy. Hochschild has written extensively on the time-deficits in American households and the effects upon women, most notably in the Second Shift and the Time Bind. The "global woman" of the book's sardonic title is a Third World housekeeper; and the house she is keeping, and the children She is caring for, are those of a First World family that doesn't have--or want to make--the time.

As a cage-rattler the book succeeds. The authors give these women a story and a face. I doubt that anyone who reads it will look at Filipina nannies pushing strollers through the Safeway quite the same way again. But as a discussion of the global economic forces that channel Third World women into this role, and the hard facts of their legal status, Global Woman is somewhat spotty. The 17 essays, all by different authors, veer more into the gender politics of household work; some broach thorny questions for the feminist mind. For one thing, the domestic tyrants who rule over migrant maids are, in most cases, women...