Extended Summary

Domestic work constitutes one of the most invisible and least regulated sectors of the labour market, particularly in countries where public care infrastructure remains weak. This study examines the structural problems faced by migrant women employed as live in domestic workers in Türkiye — specifically in Istanbul and Ankara — between 2021 and 2022, the struggle strategies they develop in response, and the solidarity networks they build among themselves, all within a feminist theoretical framework. The central research question guiding the study is: How do migrant domestic workers form solidarity networks in response to the problems they face, and how do these networks shape their daily lives?

The study situates itself at the intersection of three interlocking processes: the feminisation of migration, the global care chain, and the structural invisibility of domestic labour. As Toksöz and Ünlütürk Ulutaş (2011) demonstrate for the Turkish context, the retreat of the welfare state from care provision has transformed migrant women’s labour into an economic buffer mechanism that fills the care deficit left by public policy. Consistent with Yeoh et al.’s (1999) foundational insight for Singapore, these women occupy a dual structural void — neither protected employees in the public sphere nor family members governed by non-market relations. This double exclusion makes them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation, yet simultaneously compels them to develop creative, if fragile, coping strategies.

The study adopts an interpretive phenomenological design, drawing on an emergent research approach shaped by the researcher’s direct fieldwork engagement. Three data collection techniques were employed in triangulation: document analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. The researcher occupied the position of an insider researcher, having accepted live-in childcare work in Bodrum before the formal research process began. This position enabled three months of sustained participant observation across two different households, allowing the researcher to witness, rather than merely report, the labour dynamics, informal networks, and power asymmetries that govern this sector.

Participants were reached through snowball sampling. Eight migrant women — predominantly from Turkmenistan, with participants also from Kyrgyzstan and Moldova — were interviewed using a semi-structured interview form; sessions were audio-recorded with informed consent. The most significant ethical challenge involved the irregular status of several participants who lacked work permits. The researcher addressed this through strict anonymisation (participants are identified by flower names), careful scoping of sensitive disclosures, and adherence to a university ethics board-approved protocol. Interviews were conducted in Turkish, as most participants were long-term residents with functional Turkish proficiency; the researcher’s unfamiliarity with participants’ native languages represents an acknowledged limitation.

The findings cluster around three main coping strategies, each of which simultaneously enables short-term survival and reproduces longer-term structural inequalities.

The first strategy, seeking support from employers, emerges directly from the absence of legal and institutional protection. Women manage health crises, legal identity problems, and safety risks by relying on employers’ personal goodwill — obtaining informal medical care, or in one documented case, a falsified identity document. Participants addressed employers using kinship terms such as “brother”, “sister” and “mother” a practice analysed through Yılmaz and Özaydın’s (2020) concepts of paternalism and maternalism. While this personalisation of the employment relationship offers momentary protection, it deepens dependency and obscures labour exploitation.

The second strategy, building solidarity networks with women like themselves, is the study’s most original contribution. The research documents how migrant women form regular gathering spaces — cafés, community associations, informal agency networks — that function simultaneously as job-finding channels, emotional relief spaces, and sources of practical knowledge. Consistent with Kaşka’s (2007) findings on Moldovan domestic workers in Turkey and with Koç and Göker’s (2022) analysis of Senegalese Mouride networks in Istanbul, these spaces provide what Bayraktar (2019) theorises as familiarity, belonging, psychosocial support, and transnational cultural continuity. However, as Ünlütürk Ulutaş and Kalfa (2009) forewarned, these networks remain confined to primary, informal relationships and cannot coalesce into collective or institutional forms of resistance — a stark contrast to organised migrant worker movements such as the UK’s Waling Waling initiative.

The third strategy, adapting to patriarchal norms, manifests as self-regulation of dress, behaviour, and silence in the face of violence. Drawing on Kandiyoti’s (1988) framework of bargaining with patriarchy, the analysis shows that women modify their appearance and conduct as a shield against sexual harassment — a practice that provides immediate protection while simultaneously displacing structural accountability onto individual bodies. Coşkun (2023) documents the same pattern among Kyrgyz women in Turkey, noting that the fear of deportation renders formal complaint mechanisms effectively inaccessible.

Taken together, the three strategies reveal a contradictory logic: they are indispensable survival practices for women who have no access to formal rights, yet each one, in different ways, reproduces the patriarchal and informal labour structures that generate the original vulnerability.

Consequently, the urgency of formalising domestic work as an employment relationship, extending social security coverage to undocumented workers, and establishing accessible multilingual support mechanisms cannot be overstated.