Nannying, cleaning and sex work look like private, one-off arrangements inside a home, but they are links in a worldwide system built on migration and inequality. The global economy leans on this labor while leaving the women who do it poorly paid, insecure and unseen.
When a migrant woman leaves a poor country to look after children or elders in a rich one, she eases the care shortage there while opening a new one in the family she left. The care isn't created, only moved from one household to another along lines of wealth.
Poor countries once supplied rich ones with gold and silver; now a main resource drawn out of them is women's care and affection. The extraction runs through private homes, nurseries and brothels rather than mines.
When one woman's freedom to work outside the home is bought by hiring another woman to do her household duties, the relationship between them is close yet deeply lopsided. The employer depends on the worker intimately while holding nearly all the power.
When married women, rather than men, leave to earn abroad, their relationships with the husbands and children left behind change. The pressures of the global economy reach into these families and rearrange who provides money and who provides care.