Super global casualties of worker exploitation: for today's nannies, even a spoonful of sugar doesn't much help their bitter-pill situations. (culture in context).

QUICK, WHO IS THE MOST FAMOUS MOVIE nanny of all time? My money is on Julie Andrews. She took home the Oscar for Mary Poppins, setting the gold standard for magical, musical, and motherly nursemaids; and the only "problem with Maria" in The Sound of Music was that no other family in the world was ever going to find a governess that perfect. After all, how many nannies can fashion haute couture summer wear from tattered drapes, turn a clan of yodelers into Austria's version of the Partridge Family, and deliver her employer and wards from the grasp of the Third Reich? The best nannies, it would seem, come from nunneries.

Admittedly, there have been other great Hollywood governesses cut from the same lace: Joan Fontaine as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Deborah Kerr as Anna in The King and I or as the mysterious Miss Madrigal in Chalk Garden. And who will ever forget Robin Williams as the redoubtable Mrs. Doubtfire? Perhaps none of these nannies could sing a lullaby like Julie Andrews (apologies to Ms. Kerr), but each served up the same Disney or Rodgers and Hammerstein version of the indomitable but compassionate British rent-a-mum, famous worldwide for tutoring and caring for her often difficult wards with grace, charm, and aplomb.

Still, Whoopi Goldberg is almost certainly Hollywood's hardest working nanny. In The Color Purple Goldberg played nursemaid, cook, and washerwoman to Danny Clover and his brat pack, receiving little thanks and lots of abuse for her efforts. In Clara's Heart she was cast as a Jamaican maid imported to suburban Maryland to care for the child of spoiled parents. The Long Walk Home has her portraying a woman who must leave her own children behind to keep house for a white family. And in Corrina, Corrina Goldberg is a college graduate who takes up housekeeping in a widower's home, but who shouldn't aspire to romance with her white employer, even if "somewhere in her youth or childhood she must have done something good."

Goldberg, who has played a singing nun twice as often as Andrews, may not have Ms. Andrews' voice, but she's done more on-screen housekeeping and childrearing than Mary Poppins and Maria yon Trapp put together, and the only reason that most of us don't think of her as nanny of the year is that when women of color take up this kind of domestic labor of love they tend to be called housekeepers or maids.

And though Goldberg may not fit Hollywood's image of the premiere nanny, she offers a much more realistic picture of the swelling ranks of underpaid women of color being recruited to manage our domestic labor. In Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (Metropolitan, 2002) Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild report that more and more of the nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers tending to our homes, children, and elders are underpaid and unprotected women of color from the other side of the tracks or the global village.

Unlike Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp, millions of these women have left their own families and children to care for the youngsters, parents, and households of middle- and upper-class professionals in far-away places with strange sounding names. According to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, the dirty little secret of globalization is that we are witnessing the rise of a new servant class, and that a growing number of the people taking care of our homes and families are poor women from the Third World who can find no other way to pull their families and indebted nations out of poverty.

WOMEN NOW MAKE UP HALF THE WORLD'S MIGRANTS--much more than that in many poor nations--and the vast majority of these women find work abroad as domestic laborers. In the 1990s women made up more than half the Filipinos migrating to wealthy nations, and Sri Lankan women greatly outnumbered the men migrating to the Middle or Far East. In the same years women made up the majority of immigrants to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel.

As a result, the majority of domestics working in the U.S. today are Latinas, many from Mexico, while more than half of all domestic workers in the European Union are women from Third World nations like the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Colombia, and El Salvador.

Poverty and debt drive these women from their homes and families and lead their countries to encourage this "mommy drain." Each year migrants send home over $70 billion, and Third World families and nations count on this money to escape poverty and pay down their debts.

Meanwhile, households in wealthy nations are eager to hire poor and foreign women to shoulder the domestic labor that First World mothers and wives no longer have the time to do, and that First World fathers and husbands have not stepped up to share.

The costs to women who migrate to care for the homes and children of the middle and upper class are high. Many if not most are mothers who have left their own children to be raised by relatives or friends and who must give the milk of their mother's love to someone else's daughters and sons. And their new "families" usually expect them to care for their charges as doting parents while being treated as servants or even slaves.

In a patriarchal and capitalist society the "woman's work" of tending to households and families is invisible and endless, meaning that the women who do it will be underpaid and overworked, all the more so when they are poor women of color from another country.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild report that the Third World women caring for the homes, children, and/or elders of First World employers receive inadequate compensation, housing, rest, and respect for the long hours and loving service they provide. They are all too often victims of harassment, abuse, and exploitation, victims who not infrequently have no other option but to suffer in silence.

Like the other Hebrew prophets, Jeremiah (22:3) instructs Israel to "do no wrong to the alien, the orphan, and the widow," for, as Deuteronomy (10:18) notes, "the Lord God executes justice" for these little ones. The exodus of Third World mommies from their impoverished families and nations has left a rising tide of orphans forced to sacrifice their mothers so that the children of First World professionals will have someone to watch over them. And these migrant women who mother to two sets of children have become widows and strangers in their new land.

THESE OVERWORKED WOMEN HAVE accepted the burden of exile to secure a better life for their children and families, and their domestic sacrifice and labor generates billions in foreign currency for their impoverished homelands, while providing First World households with inexpensive care for the children and elders many no longer have time to tend to. Justice demands that those whose labor and sacrifice serves so many should at least receive adequate compensation, protection, and regard, and that the most disadvantaged and strained among us should not be further abused and exploited.

At the same time, this nanny crisis is also a crisis of missing fathers and husbands. Millions of poor and foreign women of color are being drafted into domestic service because First World husbands and fathers have not taken up their fair share of the labor of raising children, caring for elders, or keeping house. First World Sarahs have recruited Third World Hagars to nurse their children and tend their homes because so few Abrahams (or Peters, Carls, or Timothys) are willing to shoulder this task.

The problem is not, as Martha imagined, that her sister was letting her do all the woman's work of caring for a full house. It's that there were 13 men in the living room who never thought of lending a hand. Maybe they were expecting Mary Poppins to drop in.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.