Abstract :
[en] How and through which repertoires of practices do migrant domestic workers access global social protection? And how do their gender, race, class, and generational positioning along with their transnational family relations affect this access? This dissertation deals with these questions and focuses on the case of Peruvian and Colombian Migrant Domestic Workers in the city of Brussels. Such migrants share a paradoxical positioning as they contribute productively and reproductively to the development of their receiving and sending societies but experience a lack of formal and informal social protection on both sides. This analysis first maps through a multi-sited ethnography the repertoire of practices they use to strategize their access to Social Protection in the areas of: 1- old-age and survivors benefits, 2- incapacity, 3- health & family, 4- active labor market programs, 5- unemployment, 6-housing, and education, 7- community and family support. Secondly, it theorizes these practices as Global Social Protection Arrangements that are simultaneously made out of transnational interpersonal relationships and formal support systems. Thirdly, building from the work of Anthias (2016) a Translocations lens is used to analyze how these actor’s gender, race, class, religious and generational positioning within the global reproduction of labor as well as within their transnational family networks simultaneously affect the functionality of such arrangements. Concluding, it’s argued that more privileged migrant domestic workers will use arrangements composed mostly of formal resources, while less privileged ones will see formal avenues less open to them and therefore have to rely on an informal arrangement. Far, from the rights based normative approach to social protection, this thesis provides a glance at how transnational access to social protection is strategize across borders. Furthermore, it’s relevant in a context of increasing human mobility where inequalities in access to social protection emerge as a public transnational social question (Faist, 2016) that is suitable both for academics and policy makers.