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By Tivia Collins
The cost of late recognition
Domestic workers were not given the opportunities to move freely, but their labour was in demand in Trinidad and Tobago. Seven migrant domestic workers discussed the impact late recognition of their labour has had on their lives. One of the first women I met was Chet in 2019, 10 years after CARICOM approved household domestics as a category under the CSME. Chet moved after she heard that domestic workers could obtain the CSME, but soon realised that the government had not put mechanisms in place to facilitate her move. Chet shared that she thought legal employment was available because ‘CSME say domestic workers equal.’
However, she enquired at the then ministry of foreign affairs and was told that ‘Trinidad did not accept domestic workers’. Because of limited opportunities, she made the decision to stay and work as a return to Guyana was ‘not an option’. Chet explained that the lack of access to the CSME caused her to overstay her time in Trinidad and Tobago and opened her to abuse from her employers, who would regularly threaten to have her deported. Chet described how her employer’s power over her legal status shaped daily life in the household. She was often reminded that she had ‘no papers’ and could be reported at any time, a threat used to justify long hours, withheld wages and constant surveillance.
Chet explained that refusing extra work or questioning pay was met with warnings that the immigration officers could be called. Over time, fear structured her movements. She avoided public spaces, limited contact with other migrants and rarely left the house except for work-related tasks. The home became both workplace and a site of confinement.
Chet linked these conditions directly to the absence of state recognition, noting that without access to the CSME, she had no recourse to labour protections or complaint mechanisms. Her experience illustrates how the failure to implement regional mobility rights produces everyday forms of violence, where employers exercise control through the threat of deportation rather than formal contracts or lawful authority. Deo and CJ also moved when they became aware of the CSME expansion for domestic workers, hoping that Trinidad and Tobago would offer them higher wages.
However, they experienced physical and verbal abuse on the job with no avenue to address this violence. Deo shared that her employer would routinely shout at her, restrict her movement and threaten dismissal if she complained about working conditions or pay. CJ similarly described being physically assaulted during a dispute over wages, an incident she did not report for fear that engaging the authorities would cause her more harm. For both women, the promise of regional mobility through the CSME contrasted sharply with the realities of unprotected labour, where abuse went unchallenged, and silence became a condition of survival.
Violence was an expected occurrence for all seven women interviewed, along with issues of unpredictable pay schedules, long working hours and at times sexual assault from employers, which they attributed to their job, gender and precarious migration status. On the issue of sexual assault, the women shared that lack of protections in Trinidad and Tobago exposed them to high occurrences of abuse. While most of the women were unwilling to detail any experiences, Petal recalled a sexual assault experience at her job 11 years ago, and another a month before this interview in 2018. In the excerpt below, she explained that sexist jokes, sexual advances and sexist comments were normal occurrences when working as a domestic, especially with an ‘illegal’ status.
When I first started working my boss would always ask me if all Guyanese women sweet like me while he would be touching my hands or my back … People have threatened to rape me, they called me names like Guyanese cockroach, they actually say these things to your face just because you are a Guyanese woman. And because they know you don’t have papers so you can’t do anything. (Petal, Migrant Domestic Worker)
Similarly, Suzanne, who moved to Trinidad and Tobago two decades before regional discussions on adding domestic workers to the list of CSME holders, shared that her employment experience was filled with verbal abuse. She moved looking for better wages, and though she was successfully able to secure higher-paying jobs compared with those in Guyana, she endured derogatory comments throughout her working life, including being told that ‘Guyanese are like flies’, ‘Guyanese are stupid’ and ‘a good Guyanese is a dead one’.
These comments were never-ending and hurtful but, because of her undocumented migrant status, she felt ‘forced to endure’ them. These accounts of abuse, exploitation and xenophobia demonstrate how people become vulnerable when they are unable to access secure documentation to live and work, while contending with labour demands in Trinidad and Tobago. This results in systemic exploitation and structural abuse. Richie Daly and I, discussing the experiences of Venezuelan migrant women in Trinidad and Tobago, recognised that failing to protect the most vulnerable migrants in a society opens them to forms of violence in their everyday lives, as well as various forms of labour exploitation, as they remain legally unprotected (Collins & Daly, Citation2021).
The women’s accounts of multiple forms of violence, stemming from the absence of legal protections within CARICOM and Trinidad and Tobago, render both their lives and their labour disposable, not only producing individual vulnerability but institutionalising a condition in which migrant domestic workers are treated as replaceable and unworthy of protection. And while many of these abuses happen during private employment, conditions of precarity extended into encounters with the state, where similar logics of control, exclusion and disposability were enacted through agents of the state. Another migrant woman, Julie, recounted her experiences of violence by immigration officers as she attempted to secure a work permit through marriage to her husband.
I get real trouble to get the work permit. They even question my husband, asking him to confirm I ain’t do he something for him to marry me. You believe immigration officers asking them type of questions so I can stay in Trinidad and get little benefits? (Julie, Migrant Domestic Worker)
The questioning of Julie’s ability to access state-recognised paperwork and the processing delays are indicative of a system that controls access to rights, even when the required bureaucratic process is followed. Julie recalled feeling scrutinised and diminished as officers questioned the legitimacy of her marriage and implied ulterior motives for her presence in Trinidad and Tobago. These interactions left her uncertain and fearful, unsure whether compliance would lead to protection or further punishment. For Julie, the encounter reinforced her vulnerable status, where authority was exercised through suspicion, delay and the constant reminder that her right to remain was provisional and fragile.
Experiences like these were not limited to immigration officers; they also occurred with police officers who conducted raids and demanded money for the women to remain in the country. Aunty’s story is one such account of exploitation at the hands of the police. She came to Trinidad on holiday in 2009 and, at the time of interview, had not returned to Guyana since. She immediately got a job cleaning for a popular business family, sharing that although her employers were well known, there were frequent raids by police officers at the employer’s residence, conducted when no employer was at home, and it required her and other undocumented Guyanese domestic workers to ‘pay to stay’.
I not even supposed to talk about this but every few months, maybe three or four months at a time the police would come with big guns to the house and ask for everybody who working there to produce their papers. I run and hide but if they hold you and you don’t have your documents, you have to pay them. And they know everybody there don’t have no papers, so it is strategy. If you don’t have the money they would take you down to immigration for processing. But most times it’s not about no law and keeping people out the country, it’s about fulling the police pocket and paying to stay and work. So, we pay to stay. (Aunty, Guyanese Domestic Worker)
In the excerpt above, we witness the political and economic implications for undocumented Guyanese migrant women in Trinidad and Tobago who face a process of monetary exchange for the opportunity to stay and work. And unfortunately, this story is not unique. Similarly, Suzanne and Petal shared that police officers conducted checks and demanded money from them once a month, as payment not to take them to immigration or to hold them in the detention centre. They described that each month the officers patrolled outside their place of work, waiting for them to leave, at which point they would arrest them and order a percentage of their earnings or receive ‘a one-way ticket back to Guyana’. Suzanne and Petal complied with payments, noting that it is a small price to pay to be able to work, save money and provide for their families.
The delayed gap in legislation impacts domestic workers who are literally paying the steep price of this failure to recognise the value of their labour. The abuse, violence and precarity of their lives demonstrate how restrictive migration policies produce a system that profits from migrant vulnerabilities, positioning the state as complicit in maintaining a system of exploitation while benefiting from domestic labour. The women’s experiences illustrate broader intra-regional contradictions of promises of freedom against nationalist exclusionary practices that create harmful, violent conditions for migrant domestic workers to live and work within.
- Tivia Collins, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, USA.
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