From “Caring for the home” to “Caring for the environment”: Migrant Domestic Workers and Circular Household Waste Management in Singapore

Abstract

This article advances a relational feminist approach to better understand the roles that migrant domestic workers play in their everyday handling of household waste in Singapore. Despite emerging scholarly emphasis on the feminization of waste work in circular transitions, the outsourcing of pro-environmental circular R-behaviors—which are usually integrated into the management of household waste—to live-in foreign domestic workers has been largely neglected so far. R-behaviors refer to routinized practices of, for example, reducing, reusing and recycling household waste to transform it into a resource. Rather than consider R-behaviors performed by migrant domestic workers as a manifestation of individual action, we foreground these R-behaviors as emergent, negotiated practices inflected through the unequal relationships between domestic workers and their employers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with migrant domestic workers and their female employers, we explore two key themes. First, we attend to the tensions that surface between the employer–worker dyad when there are conflicting obligations or divergent modes of handling household waste. Second, we underscore how migrant domestic workers are uniquely positioned within transnational circuits of reuse and value-recovery from household items that might be unwanted by their employers. Overall, our study contributes to the existing scholarship by reinserting migrant women’s labor and their subjectivities into circular household transitions. It also points to how just circular transitions must take into account not only the gendered but also transnational dimensions of pro-environmental domestic labor.