What is it about?
Increasing urban recycling rates is a widespread environmentalist goal, in Europe and elsewhere. In this article, I examine how the everyday burden of sorting, packaging and delivering recyclables is increasingly falling upon low-income migrant women employed as domestic and care workers. While women's participation to recycling efforts is well-known,previous studies have focused on the efforts of citizens - homemakers and mothers - concerned with environmental quality of their own communities. This paper is one of the first to consider the experiences of paid domestic workers who do so under exploitative working arrangements.
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Why is it important?
This article draws attention to how European societies are constructing environmentally-friendly practices as unpaid or underpaid domestic work. This contradicts optimistic expectations of the green sector generating new middle class jobs and indicates that wealthier societies are outsourcing the work of environmental sustainability towards societies of the Global South
Perspectives
I hope this article will help draw a greater attention to the connections between migration and environmentalism. By showing how central migrant labor is becoming to making Western environmentalism possible, this article departs from highly biased views of migration as a threat to sustainability. It is also my hope that this research will contribute to important conversation on the meaning of sustainability
valeria bonatti
Bard College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Taking out the garbage: Migrant women’s unseen environmental work, European Journal of Women s Studies, September 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1350506817729857.
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