NET-workers

Make sure to check out this NYTimes article on immigrant Latina and Polish women who work in housekeeping and other day labor in New York City.

At a time when male day laborers have become the most public and contentious face of economic immigration to the United States, these two rare female shape-ups have doubled in size almost unobserved in recent years. Their growth reflects a larger overlooked reality: Women make up 44 percent of the nation's low-wage immigrant work force, and worldwide, studies show, more and more women are migrating for work.

...Ms. [Rhacel Salazar] Parreñas [a sociologist] and other researchers find that women who migrate for work are likely to be single mothers supporting children in their native countries. Compared with their male counterparts, they earn less, despite higher levels of education, according to a 2002 study of the United States' low-wage immigrant work force by the Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, which estimated that two million foreign-born women made less than the minimum wage. Yet women are also more likely to remain in America, and they send home a higher proportion of their earnings.

I think the issue of violence against these women, raised near the end of the article, is especially important. Nina Berstein states that these are "places where women are willing to put their personal safety in jeapordy for a days work." To me, it doesn't seem fair to portray this as a simple choice for the women, because they are forced to risk their own safety, and are likely at greater risk of violence, because of their economic desperation.