Rachelle Bascara

The current trend of asymmetrical migration of mostly female domestic workers from developing countries to wealthier nations is an emblematic intersection of global and gender injustice. I relate theories of global injustice and Susan Okin’s feminist critique of liberal philosophy to the situation of migrant domestic workers. According to Okin, a problem with liberal philosophers is that they refuse to subject the domestic sphere to assessments of justice. Due to its confinement to the home and the history of invisibility of this kind of work, domestic work has a particularly precarious nature, rendering domestic workers especially vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Using cosmopolitan theories of justice, I show how the interdependence of local economies make it possible to speak of an unjust global economic order, where powerful nations dictate and shape the landscape of global trade and activity. In wealthy, self-identified liberal countries, the entry of affluent women into the traditional labor force created a need for the importation of cheap, migrant domestic labor. The Philippines’ top export is female domestic labor. Many governments that accept migrant domestic workers, including the UK, default on their responsibility to regulate the condition of domestic workers. Migrant domestic workers share an acute form of exploitation in that, unable to find decent jobs in their home countries, they are forced, on pain of destitution, to do invisible, undervalued work in their host countries, where they are prone to more abuse and more exploitation. This phenomenon of migrant domestic workers is a manifestation of the lack of gender progress. I argue that insofar as women who have entered the traditional paid labor force have outsourced their ‘domestic duties’ to women of lesser economic and social standing, claims of gender-advancement are but mere simulacra, or a smokescreen concealing the continuing lack of gender progress within gendered domestic expectations.

This paper shows an alternative way in which compatriot partiality could be justified within the framework of global distributive justice. Philosophers who argue that compatriot partiality is similar to racial partiality capture something correct about compatriot partiality. However, the analogy should not lead us to comprehensively reject compatriot partiality. We can justify compatriot partiality on the same grounds that liberation movements and affirmative action have been justified. Hence, given cosmopolitan demands of justice, special consideration for the economic well-being of your nation as a whole is justified if and only if the country it identifies is an oppressed developing nation in an unjust global order. This justification is incomplete. We also need to say why Person A, qua national of Country A, is justified in helping her compatriots in Country A over similarly or slightly more oppressed non-compatriots in Country B. I argue that Person A’s partiality towards her compatriots admits further vindication because it is part of an oppressed group’s project of self-emancipation, which is preferable to paternalistic emancipation. Finally, I identify three benefits in my justification for compatriot partiality. First, I do not offer a blanket justification for all forms of compatriot partiality. Partiality between members of oppressed groups is only a temporary effective measure designed to level an unlevel playing field. Second, because history attests that sovereign republics could arise as a collective response to colonial oppression, justifying compatriot partiality on the grounds that I have identified is conducive to the development of sovereignty and even democracy in poor countries, thereby avoiding problems of infringement that many humanitarian poverty alleviation efforts encounter. Finally, my justification for compatriot partiality complies with the implicit cosmopolitan commitment to the realizability of global justice theories.