When good people become labor traffickers

By Allen Gaborro

Professor Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is well-versed in the field of global migrant domestic workers and the many challenges and adversities they face. She is an award-winning writer and scholar on the subject.

In her 2025 publication, “The Trafficker Next Door: How Household Employers Exploit Domestic Workers,” Parreñas presents a cogent, in-depth, and humanitarian effort that is sure to draw people’s attention to the plight of domestic laborers, with a focus on women from the Philippines (the feminization of labor).

She employs 20 years of researching (personal examinations and analysis, statistics, interviews, external sources) Filipino migrant laborers. Parreñas’s fact-finding explorations took her to such far-flung, disparate locations as Los Angeles, Singapore, Rome, Dubai, and Copenhagen.

For Filipinos, thousands of their fellow countrymen and women provide their labor overseas in order to financially-support their families back home. In far too many cases, these unsung heroes—many of them women—have endured a variety of abuses and forms of exploitation.

Their willingness and readiness to work hard in a foreign country could not prepare these workers for what awaited many of them. Female workers especially became victims of circumstances that one would not wish on their worst enemy.

Commensurate with the rubric of human trafficking, the most exposed domestic female workers have found themselves running the gamut of involuntary servitude, bonded labor, unpaid wages, undernourishment, theft of personal property, job insecurity, and elevated stress levels.

What is singularly unsettling about the human trafficking and abuse of domestic workers that Parreñas reports on is the normalized social, moral, and ethical veneer put forward by the manipulative home proprietors. Kind and conventional as they may appear to be, these employers, in Parreñas’s judgment, can “otherwise consider themselves good people yet may unwittingly become traffickers themselves.” Hence the title of her book.

Par exemplar, the banality (to borrow from Hannah Arendt) of abusive behavior towards domestic female workers is the story of Alex Tizon which is included in “The Trafficker Next Door.” His narrative was featured in a controversial 2017 article in The Atlantic magazine. Titled “My Family’s Slave,” Tizon wrote about Eudocia Pulido, a domestic from the Philippines in the service of his family for 56 years in the United States.

For all intents and purposes, Pulido was a virtual slave. She was not paid a wage for being a household servant for Tizon’s parents. Monetarily taken advantage of and contemptuously maltreated by Tizon’s mother and father, Pulido’s story is a tale of moral and ethical negligence in a common American home. It is also a deplorable microcosm of the larger existence that trafficked women domestics live out in pain and injustice all around the world.

The Tizon story leads the reader to what Parreñas terms as the “employer savior complex.” She defines this as such: the employer  maintains that “the worker would have a much worse life if not employed in their house­hold, and that one’s employment of a domestic worker provides the worker a pathway away from poverty and suffering.”

It’s as if these unscrupulous employers were “socially worthy” (to use the author’s phrase) actors in that they literally saved these individuals from a life of hell from whence they came. As a result, binding words like gratefulness, obligation, and even guilt enter this perverted employer-worker power dynamic.

Parreñas shines a light on the structural influences that are interwoven with the intrinsic impetuses that drive each person involved. Poverty in their homeland, a dearth of economic choices, and the irresistible lure of greener pastures across oceans, form a chain of potential exploitation in the new world. Domestic laborers’ subjection is structurally buttressed by “social norms that help [employers] justify pushing aside personal morality and participat­ing in exploitative systems.”

In “The Trafficker Next Door,” Parreñas intervenes on behalf of domestic workers with an incisive exposition into their employers’ covert and overt malpractices. The compelling clarity of  her content rises to the challenge of putting exploitative employers on the spot.

In the process, Parreñas’s book valorizes domestic workers for withstanding their long and cynical baptism of fire, thereby placing them on the pedestal of something close to being salt of the earth martyrs. 

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