We are workers, we are not slaves
The importance of grassroots discourses on decent work for migrant domestic workers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6084387 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lydia Catedral (0000-0002-6708-294X), Danilo Reyes (0000-0001-9158-8724), Zhaohe Shi, Eunice Wong (0000-0001-9274-7547) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/jlp.24257.cat |
| OpenAlex | W7106635887 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
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
Domestic work · Embodied cognition · Grassroots · Ideology · Negotiation · Work (physics
Why International Organizations Hate Politics
Migrant Workers and the Many States of Protest in Hong Kong
Substantive equality revisited
How To Do Things With Words
A Decolonial Crip Linguistics
Sociolinguistic Protests for Decolonial Future Making
The Discourse of Powerlessness and Repression
Global Migration Governance from Below
Analysing Discourse
Migrant and lesbian activism in Hong Kong
ILO Convention C189—a good start for the protection of domestic workers
No Angry Women at the United Nations
Dialogue, Activism, and Democratic Social Change
Affect-ing discourse
Bernstein and poetics revisited
Grassroots Movements as Transnational Actors
Fighting hunger at the grassroots
Analysing Power Relations in Partnerships
Chronotopic resolution, embodied subjectivity, and collective learning
From Global to Grassroots
Global prohibition regimes
Quo vadis, Moldova? The role of social and political elites in the norm internalization process
Shaping gender policies at the COPs
Norm destruction, norm resilience
Peasant activism and the rise of food sovereignty
How Ideas Spread
A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press
Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics
Beyond citizenship
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |