<論文>香港における中国人雇主 : フィリピン人メイド関係の考察 : 役割をめぐる創発的関係形成と境界維持について

Abstract

In Hong Kong today, Filipinos form the second largest ethnic group after the host group, the Chinese. Since the majority of these Filipinos are women migrant workers employed as housemaids, their lowest occupational status largely prohibits them form associating with the host community. Their contact with the Chinese is usually limited to the work domain -- the relationship of a maid to her immediate employer. The ethnic boundary that limits the chances of inter-group contact is basically set by the restricted legal status of Filipina migrants but it is also affected by the emergent relationship that develops between the employers and the maids. This paper examines such generative process of their relationship and its effects on boundary maintenance between the two groups. In the role-taking process, the employer's attitude to the maid is inevitably limited by one condition where the employer is concerned with achieving a stable, lasting relationship with the maid. For this reason, neither extremely hostile nor friendly attitude is preferred since they threaten the stability of the basis of employment. Instead, employers tend to develop quasi-familial relationships with their maids by taking the role of the senior for themselves and expecting the role of the junior form their maids, which enables them to effectively control their maids by reducing innate strains in the employment relationship. Such quasi-familial relationship eventually transforms into a patron-client relationship, and this tends to be re-created through kinship networks both of the employer and the maid. The effect of this process is that, despite its informal outlook, it reinforces the preexisting ethnic boundary and thus reproduces their fixed social statuses: Chinese as employers, Filipinos as maids.