Katherine Franke of Columbia University’s Gender & Sexuality Law Blog says of a recent report on New York State’s Domestic Workers Bill of Rights bill, which recently passed in the state Senate.
Frequently ignored in the debates about human trafficking is the vulnerability of the women (typically women of color and often immigrants with less than secure legal status) we pass every day on the street who are caring for other people’s children. . . working conditions in many cases indistinguishable from those who the law would consider trafficked. Because the labor of domestic workers is not primarily sexual in nature, their exploitation has been largely ignored . . . 2006 report: Home is where the work is: Inside New York’s Domestic Work Industry
Sure, it’s not as “sexy” as sex-trafficking and/or pimped prostitution, and since it’s about the way mostly affluent, mostly white people treat their servants and… um… slaves the issue is of no interest whatsoever to mostly white, mostly affluent conservative and neo-conservative “anti-trafficking” activists like Michael Horowitz, Laura Lederer or Donna M. Hughes. But any measure you care to waive about there are vastly fewer immigrant sex-workers than immigrant domestic workers (200,000 in New York City alone according to Domestic Workers United’s report “Home is Where the Work Is” (pdf). And by almost any measure you care to waive about there are more exploited, physically abused, and trafficked immigrant domestic workers than there are similarly trafficked sex workers.
Important: You’ll notice I’m not saying there are no trafficked or otherwise conscripted sex-workers in the U.S. Because, um, there are. Just that they’re only one segment of a much larger national scandal of abuse and exploitation.
Even more important: Gee, I wonder if the genteel obsession with “white slavery,” to the exclusion of everything else, has something to do with the generally socially very conservative and neoconservative nature of the activists involved? And gee, I wonder if there’s any conceivable correlation between the social-conservative and neoconservative indifference to non-sex slavery on the one hand, and their visceral antagonism towards the domestic, industrial, and agricultural unions who tend to champion the rights of exploited non-sexually trafficked? Nah, there’ couldn’t be a connection there.
And hmm… no way they’d object to harm reduction and/or legalization of sex workers (let alone undocumented immigrants in general) just because, say, SEIU or other service-related unions would almost certainly work towards organizing them. Right?
