The Opening Session of the Preparatory GFMD Workshop, The Philippines

Speech by Ms Roberta Clarke, Regional Director, UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, and Regional Representative in Thailand at the Opening Session of the Preparatory GFMD Workshop on International Migrant Domestic Care Workers at the Interface of Migration and Development: Action to Expand Global Practice in the Asian Region, 15-16 October 2012, Manila, The Philippines

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Your Excellency Hon. Jose Brillantes, Undersecretary Department of Foreign Affairs, Philippines,

Your Excellency Ambassador Mohsin Razi, Embassy of Pakistan in Manila

Your Excellency Ms. Elizabeth Adjei International Advisor to the Global Forum on Migration and Development Chair for 2012,

Other members at head table,

Distinguished delegates, Ladies and gentlemen,

Good Morning. It is a great pleasure for me to be in this beautiful city of Manila attending the Preparatory GFMD meeting titled, International Migrant Domestic Care Workers at the Interface of Migration and Development: Action to Expand Global Practice in the Asian Region.

Allow me to start by congratulating the Government of the Philippines for its ratification of ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers. This pioneering action of the Government of Philippines has brought the Convention into force and for that we should all give a round of applause for the Government of Philippines.

UN Women appreciates the hand of partnership extended by the Government of Philippines to us in co organizing the discussions on Migrant Domestic Care Workers in the GFMD process. I would like to thank the Government of Philippines, especially Secretary Rosario , Department of Foreign Affairs, for his leadership in organising this workshop.

The lead taken by the Philippines, with the Government of Turkey, to organize and co chair Roundtable 3.3, on Protecting Migrant Domestic Workers – Enhancing their Development Potential at GFMD 2012 is precedent setting, because it places the rights and contributions of migrant domestic care workers on the agenda of the world’s largest dialogue on migration and development.

We also appreciate the support extended by the Government of Mauritius as Chair of the GFMD 2012, for this Preparatory Workshop, which we fervently hope will influence the outcomes of the GFMD Summit Meeting on 21-22 November this year.  

As the title of this workshop indicates, this workshop aims to focus on implementation aspects of global good practices in empowering migrant domestic care workers.  

Domestic work is the work that makes all other work possible. In the words of the US National Domestic Worker Alliance, who recently won a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in the New York and California, “home is where the work is”.

Many of these homes are in Asia, which has over 40% of the world’s domestic workers.  Women make up around 81 percent of the 21.5 million domestic workers in Asia. Many of these women are international migrants, who migrate independently from developing countries to middle and high-income countries, as a survival strategy for themselves and their families.

The women migrant workers of Asia are often poor and often young, and most are aged between 20 and 39 when they move in search of decent work and livelihoods. Migrant domestic care workers especially are denied decent work and their human rights throughout the migration cycle – pre departure, in transit, during employment in countries of destination, and on return to their origin countries are often violated.

Domestic work unfortunately is excluded from labour laws in 40% of the world’s countries, and from many countries in Asia. Domestic workers are invisibilized when their work is reduced to a “labour of love”, or women’s work that belongs in the shadow, informal economy.  Migrant domestic care workers also face unique risks and challenges including a lack of access to safe, legal, low-cost migration, abuse and exploitation including, unfortunately, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), exclusion from labour and social protections, and the denial of access to justice.

However, these women, and men also engaged in domestic work, display courage, creativity and resilience by persevering to empower themselves, and to support their families and communities. In the words of Michelle Bachelet, Undersecretary-General and Executive Director of UN Women,  “[t]he flipside of this scenario is the resilience and determination of these women to find ways to survive, and even indeed thrive. Migrant women are often the lifelines of their families and communities, participants in the development of countries of destination — by way of their skills, labour, consumption and taxes and countries of origin — by way of financial and social remittances.”

In Nepal for instance, the financial remittances of women migrant workers contributed over 11% of GDP in 2011. In the Philippines, I am told, women migrant workers contributed over one-third of all migrant workers’ remittances. These savings sent home crucial for development in Asia, which receives the lion’s share of the 372 billion dollars remitted by migrant workers last year, with the Philippines, India, and China in the world’s top five remittance-receiving countries.

Research by UN Women and others shows that women remit a higher proportion of their lower incomes to support family health and education, basic household needs, and even community development. When migrant domestic workers remit money back home, they become the crucial link in the complex global care chains that are formed to connect their transnational families left behind, and the families they care for in their employers’ homes. We must harness migrant domestic care workers’ contributions, to support decent work and sustainable development for all.

We must also celebrate the social contributions of migrant domestic care workers. According to a report released in June 2012 by UN Women and the V V Giri National Labour Institute of India, for women, “the empowerment effect” is the greatest benefit of migration. If we amplify, strengthen, and deepen the empowerment effect of increased skills, confidence, technology and training, migrant domestic care workers will be enabled to claim their rights, celebrate their contributions, and influence the laws and policies that impact their lives.

Distinguished delegates, Ladies and gentlemen,

This Workshop is unique because it builds on the concrete outcomes of two GFMD regional meetings in 2011 in Kingston, Jamaica, and Accra, Ghana.

Just over a year ago I attended the Kingston Workshop, organized by the Government of Jamaica and the Swiss Chair of the GFMD, and supported by UN Women, IOM and others where we achieved some key results including the adoption of a checklist to protect domestic care workers. In the Jamaica and Ghana meetings, delegates from Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, North, America, and Europe, adopted the checklist and committed themselves to using this practical tool to create gender-responsive, rights-based labour and migration laws and policies, to uphold human rights throughout the migration cycle.

The Kingston Workshop also launched a Caribbean Domestic Workers’ Network, supported by the ILO and UN Women. We are grateful to have representatives from the Asian Migrant Domestic Workers’ Network here today, to share their struggles and strategies to achieve real results for migrant domestic care workers in this region.

UN Women encourages all governments here today to ratifying this landmark treaty, which is part of a growing framework of international human rights and labour law protections for migrant domestic care workers. This framework includes other important standards like CEDAW and the General Recommendation No 26 on Women Migrant Workers, and the Migrant Workers’ Convention and its General Comment on Migrant Domestic Workers.

And we also have other opportunities for embedding our global norms on rights of migrant workers further and in this regard, I urge delegates to consider how the 57^th Session of CSW whose priority theme is preventing Violence against women and Girls can be engaged so the vulnerabilities of migrant workers to all forms of violence and exploitation are addressed and embedded in the outcome document.

Similarly as we move towards the evaluation of the MDGs and the development of a post 2015 agenda, the consultations launched by the Secretary general is an opportunity for ensuring the centrality of the equity and equality agenda in which the exclusion and marginalization of domestic migrant workers is addressed.

We need continue galvanizing collective commitments and sharing our good practices, to upscale and replicate what works and to take stock from lessons learned. Where we go from here is up to all of us. Thank you again for contributing to the growing and action-oriented policy dialogue on empowering migrant domestic care workers in Asia, and around the world.  

I wish you all good luck in your deliberations and I look forward to reading the report and the follow up steps on how this meeting leads up to the GFMD Round Table 3.3 on Domestic Workers.