“Growing Awareness to Reduce Labor Abuse: An Experimental Test of a Migrant Domestic Workers’ Rights-Awareness Campaign,” Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, UC Berkeley
AMERICAN & COMPARATIVE POLITICAL BEHAVIOR WORKSHOP
Abstract: Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) are highly vulnerable to labor abuse. We conducted an original survey and a randomized-controlled trial with MDWs and the general population in Hong Kong to understand MDW experiences and assess whether rights-awareness campaigns can help reduce labor abuse by improving knowledge about MDWs’ rights and decreasing tolerance of MDWs’ mistreatment. The studied campaigns had little impact on MDWs, given high baseline levels of rights awareness and resignation that some mistreatment is inherent to their job. Yet, these campaigns increased the general population’s knowledge of MDW labor rights and reduced tolerance of MDWs’ mistreatment, suggesting that rights-awareness campaigns could improve MDW work conditions by shaping the views of individuals who employ or interact with MDWs. This impact on the general population is important, as MDWs themselves often have very little leverage to improve their working conditions.Nevertheless, the limited impact of campaigns on MDWs themselves underscores that awareness raising is no substitute for the more complex tasks of addressing the economic, political-legal, and socio-cultural underpinnings of labor abuse.
Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at University of California, Berkeley. She is also a former W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She is concerned with basic research on behavioral political economy and aspirations-based models of politics, and her applied work focuses on understanding and addressing important social problems related to human trafficking, immigration, inequality, migration, and prejudice.
Dr. Mo has significant experience with experimental methods, impact evaluations, quantitative methods, and survey methods. She has conducted field research in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Nepal, Rwanda, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. Dr. Mo has acted as the Managing Director of Research and Evaluation for Teach For America, and has provided expert opinion to develop research protocols and research instruments for the USAID EDGE-IE Guatemala Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices and Human Trafficking Victim Identification Survey. She has been working on Humanity United, U.S. Department of Labor, USAID, Stanford University, Terre des Hommes, UC Berkeley, and Vanderbilt University supported research on human trafficking vulnerability and public opinion around human trafficking policies in China, Guatemala, Jamaica, Nepal, and the United States, as well as World Bank supported projects on national service programs. She has published research in numerous outlets, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is also the recipient of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) 2015 Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award, the 2018 Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Award, a three-time winner of APSA’s Best Paper Award in Political Behavior (2016, 2018, and 2019), and the Emerging Scholar in Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Award (2020).
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The series is sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.