Employment is often seen to be empowering for women, and various agencies and individuals have advocated the unrestricted movement of women to enable them to find employment in other countries. In Nepal, for instance, where until recently women were debarred from going abroad to perform informal sector jobs, there was vociferous demand that women be given the freedom to migrate in the pursuit of a vocation. Ironically, as a recent study by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific highlights, such freedom of mobility often leads to servile forms of domination and abuse that rival and surpass the conditions of domestic servility at home. In many instances, women after migrating to foreign labour markets could either find themselves in the sex industry or become practically enslaved or bonded domestics in elite households. Illusions of emancipation and empowerment are best discarded where the question of female migrant labour is concerned.
This is not to suggest that the economic options provided by migration should be foreclosed. But we must address the issue without preconceived notions about its emancipatory potential and to focus instead on the regulatory aspects of the process. While the ethical attitude to female labour migration may vary, the inescapable fact is that migration of women in South Asia is burgeoning and is happening under a regime of globalisation which is not particularly benign in its attitude to labour, and even less so towards women.
As one of the most used and perhaps most abused terms of times, 'globalisation' refers to the transition towards a global community with common norms and institutional frameworks that facilitate international cooperation. Pitched as the next best thing to happen to the world after the United Nations, it promises the free flow of capital, technology, information and people. It is as well to remember that definitions that promise so much in principle, seldom live up to the expectations entertained of them. The flow of people has not become as free as the flow of capital has become. Barriers are being erected to the free movement of workers at a time when loss of livelihood both in the farm sector and in manufacture in the developing world has created an enormous reserve of labour.
The process of globalisation has created industrial zones and huge business subdivisions that threaten food security and livelihood options, owing to the limited number of groups that benefit from the process. The pursuit of neo-liberal policies has resulted in the loss of jobs, 'casualisation' and 'contractualisation', and an inordinate and precipitate decline in the conditions and remuneration of wageworkers. Simultaneously, the insecure conditions of the workforce are a strong incentive for the creation of localised zones of production in favoured parts of the developing world to which labour seeks to migrate, as an escape from their own degraded conditions of living. For women, the pressure to find jobs outside one's community and country is especially strong since the earlier means of sustenance are shrinking. And this pressure to migrate has been building up at a time when gender bias and discrimination in opportunities in the global labour market has become rather more pronounced. Under such circumstances, when the male workforce has lost its few privileges, it is unlikely that migrant women workers will find emancipation at the workplace.