Abigail B. Bakan

Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada

In Not One of the Family, experts on foreign domestic workers and workers-turned-activists document how the Canadian system has institutionalized unequal treatment of citizen and non-citizen workers. Since the 1940s, rights of citizenship for immigrant domestic workers in Canada have declined while the number of women recruited from Third World countries to work in Canadian homes has dramatically increased. The analysis in Not One of the Family is both theoretical to the practical, framing ideologies of privacy, maternalism, familialism, and rights, as well as examining government policy, labour organizing, and strategies to resist exploitation. A key resource for all centres for women and immigrant workers, Not One of the Family is also essential reading for civil rights and immigration lawyers, labour groups, and government policy makers.

Negotiating Citizenship: The case of foreign domestic workers in Canada

This paper argues that most conceptualizations of citizenship limit the purview of the discourse to static categories. ‘Citizenship’ is commonly seen as an ideal type, presuming a largely legal relationship between an inidividual and a single nationstate - more precisely only one type of nation-state, the advanced capitalist postwar model. Alternatively, we suggest a re-conceptualization of citizenship as a negotiated relationship, one which is subject therefore to change, and acted upon collectively within social, political and economic relations of conflict. This dynamic process of negotiation takes place within a context which is shaped by gendered, racial and class structures and ideologies; it also involves international hierarchies among states. Citizenship is therefore negotiated on global as well as national levels. This conceptualization is demonstrated by way of identifying one particular set of experiences of negotiated citizenship, involving foreign domestic workers in Canada. As non-citizens originating from Third World conditions, this is a case involving women of colour workers, highly prone to abusive conditions, and under the direction of employers who are more affluent First World citizens and predominantly white women. Original survey data based on interviews with Caribbean and Filipino domestic workers in Canada are used to demonstrate the varied, creative and effective strategies of two distinctive groups of non-citizens as they attempt to negotiate citizenship rights in restrictive national and international conditions.

The racial contract: Israel/Palestine and Canada

In this paper we adapt political philosopher Charles Mills’ notion of the racial contract to consider the fraught context of Israel/Palestine and its interface with other states, particularly Canada. Specifically, we argue the racialization of categories commonly considered to be race-neutral – including: religion; nationality; citizenship; democracy; security; historic claims to or denial of claims to land; and interpretation, implementation or circumvention of international law – must be explicitly recognized in the exercise of power. To illustrate this we address how anti-Semitism, Orientalism and Islamophobia are key historic components of the racial contract in Canada and internationally. We consider how the racial contract has defined the state of Israel since 1948, and how the international racial contract assigns a common interest between the state of Israel and international political allies, including Canada. This process depends upon absenting Palestinians as simultaneously non-white, the subjects of extreme repression, and stateless.

Affirmative Action and Employment Equity: Policy, Ideology, and Backlash in Canadian Context

Abigail B. Bakan and Audrey Kobayashi take up the issue of “backlash” in “Affirmative Action and Employment Equity: Policy, Ideology, and Backlash in Canadian Context.” But where most studies examine the social forces orchestrating backlash, Bakan and Kobayashi consider the ways in which policymakers, including those on the “Left,” respond to and make room for the politics of backlash. In their case study of “employment equity,” Bakan and Kobayashi explore how policymakers abandoned “affirmative action” in favour of “employment equity” in response to an anticipated backlash. Drawing on interviews with policymakers involved in the Abella Report and the Rae NDP government in Ontario, Bakan and Kobayashi argue that the fear of backlash was a central, though often overlooked, factor in shaping employment equity in Canada. The result was that important social policy objectives were abandoned early in the policymaking process. Their study is a timely indicator of the need to consider how and to what extent the politics of backlash may be indirectly shaping public policy in Canada.

Reconsidering the Underground Railroad: Slavery and Racialization in the Making of the Canadian State

The Underground Railroad is commonly understood as a defining moment in the ideology of the Canadian state regarding the legacy of racism and anti-racism. This paper attempts to recast the narrative of the Underground Railroad through the lens of an anti-imperialist, anti-racist political economy, departing from the view of Canada’s anti-racist rescue of fugitive slaves from racist America. The Underground Railroad was in fact the product primarily of the struggle for self-emancipation of American black slaves. The central place of these actors as agents of their own freedom struggle needs to be recognized and restored, taken as a theoretical and historical starting point in explaining the pre-history of Confederation. The British North American colonies served as a safe space for fugitive slaves as a result of realpolitik; racism and a culture of hegemonic whiteness were endemic to the early origins of the Canadian state. This analysis is placed in the context of current and historical discussions of anti-racism and anti-imperialism.

Israel/Palestine, South Africa and the ‘One-State Solution’: The Case for an Apartheid Analysis

The application of the term ‘apartheid’ to the policies and practices of the Israeli state forms a flashpoint in contemporary global politics. South Africa has provided a point of comparison for many state formations, and we suggest that, overall, the apartheid analysis serves as a useful contribution regarding Israel/Palestine within the framework of comparative political science. Moreover, because of the transformation evident in South Africa since 1994, the reference to the apartheid experience draws attention to the possibility of change, and has been a central element in discussions of the ‘one-state solution’ to the Middle East conflict. Adopting an approach consistent with the comparative method in political science, we see comparison as a means through which to highlight both similarities and differences between Israel (post-1948 and post-1967) and the apartheid-era South African context.

The International Market for Female Labour and Individual Deskilling: West Indian Women Workers in Toronto

This article presents the experiences of five West Indian women immigrant workers living in Toronto in 1985 who were employed at the time in distinct skill categories ranging from the live-in domestic to the registered nurse. The case studies were selected from a larger survey (forty interviews in all, eight in each of five skill categories, where there were relatively high concentrations of West Indian women employees). The aim of the study was to identify the combination of skills and expectations with which these women left their home countries, and to relate these to the actual experiences they had upon arrival to Canada.These particular five stories were selected because they display a consistent pattern of “individual deskilling” as a direct result of the immigration process. It is argued that the deskilling process occurs not merely as a feature of the general secular tendencies of the process of capital accumulation on a global scale, but also as a direct effect of the individuals experiences in ...

Marxism, Feminism and Epistemological Dissonance

The analytical relationship between Marxism and feminism has engaged critical scholarship and leftist practice since the time of the foundational contributions of Marx and Engels. Socialist feminist analysis has profoundly advanced contemporary Marxism. However, some strands in Marxist theory and left practice continue to be resistant to feminist contributions. It is this resistance that animates this paper, which is theorized as epistemological dissonance. While not in any way universal, such dissonance is pervasive and suggests an epistemological framing. This is suggested to include four dimensions, regarding: (i) temporality; (ii) idealized masculinities; (iii) specific views of totality in relation to class, race and gender; and (iv) the relationship between activism and the academy. Collectively, these elements maintain and advance not only certain tenets understood as “knowledge”, but also generate a kind of problematic left common sense that can inhibit constructive Marxist and socialist feminist investigation.

Negotiating Citizenship in an Era of Globalization

Contemporary international migration poses a major challenge to modern conceptions of citizenship. It generates complex and multifaceted relationships of individuals to territories, nation-states, labour markets, communities and households. Perhaps more than any other process associated with globalization, international migration highlights the tensions between the universalistic claims of modern nation-state citizenship and its particularistic, and thus inequitable workings. Migration and immigration policies of liberal democratic states are implicitly and often explicitly discriminatory in class, racial, regional and national origins, linguistic, gender and other terms. Moreover, their discriminatory character is legitimated by international law and its interpretation within national jurisprudence that affirms and treats as self-evident the centrality of immigration control to the doctrine of strong, national, territorially based sovereignty.6

Introduction: Negotiating Citizenship

In 2000 there were over 130 million documented migrants worldwide, an increase from the 1965 figure of 75 million. This number swells to 150 million if the estimated number of undocumented migrants are included.1 Most migrants originate from the poorest regions in the world, and an augmenting percentage are women. The implications posed by the growing numbers of female migrant workers from Third World states for our understanding of citizenship is the subject of this study. In an age of globalization, when national borders are commonly considered to be a minor factor in the world system — permeable to multinational corporations, technology and international organizations — the experiences of poor women of colour seeking to migrate in order to support their families often escape analytic scrutiny.