One Household at a Time: Ethical Recruitment and the Engineering of Professional Relationships in Malaysia's Live‐In Domestic Workplaces

ABSTRACT

Major labour‐importing countries like Malaysia have become fertile grounds for experiments in ethical recruitment, the latest policy innovation in global migration governance. Initially taken up by corporate entities to ensure regulatory compliance in their labour supply chains, ethical recruitment is also increasingly being attempted in the migrant domestic work sector across major labour‐receiving countries in the Asia‐Pacific. Based on ethnographic research conducted in an ethical recruitment agency in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this article examines how the discourse of professionalism is deployed to transform masters into managers and servants into workers through internal processes of comprehensive matching, contractual education and counselling. Despite their inability to fundamentally rectify the structural power asymmetries inherent to migrant domestic work, ethical recruitment agents strive to engineer professional relationships in live‐in domestic workplaces and transform generations of future Malaysian employers one household at a time.