“We are workers, we are not slaves” The importance of grassroots discourses on decent work for migrant domestic workers

Abstract

We argue that grassroots participation in multilateral negotiations over norm-setting is important because grassroots discourses differ from those of multilateral organizations. To compare the two, we use sociolinguistic theories that link embodied experience, ideology and discourse. We analyze texts about domestic work from the International Labour Organization (ILO) and a grassroots organization of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB). Findings show that AMCB’s commitment to grassroots migrants, and the embodied experiences of its members and leaders, enables their discourses on “decent work for domestic workers” to be more intersectional, more substantive and more critical than the discourses of the ILO. This case illustrates that even when the overarching norms appear to be the ‘same’, the discourses of grassroots and multilateral organizations still offer fundamentally different images of what constitutes “decent work” and what is required to achieve it.