Globalization and the health and well-being of migrant domestic workers in Malaysia.

Structural inequities and the mobilization of gendered values of self-abnegation underpin the migration of domestic workers as a development strategy. While individual self-care practices were used to cope with the hardships of their work and family separation, these efforts did not remedy the harms nor redress structural inequities wrought by neoliberal globalization. Improvements in the long-term health and wellbeing of Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in Malaysia cannot focus solely on the preparation and maintenance of healthy bodies for productive labour, but must attend to workers' attainment of adequate social determinants of health, which challenges the migration as development paradigm. Neo-liberal policy instruments such as privatization, marketisation and commercialization of migrant labour have led to both host and home countries benefitting, but at the expense of the migrant domestic workers' well-being.