This is a significant book and an important addition to our series for a number of reasons. As the title suggests, it locates the language of servitude critically within a much larger picture of mobile domestic work. It thus situates the language, work and mobility of these women in relation to the global market, shedding light on the intersectionality of gender, class, ethnicity, migration and language. This work brings important insights into the commodification and regulation of language within the neoliberal world order, the gendered nature of particular forms of work, the implications for employment, abuse and discrimination, and the mobility of many current workers in insecure and underpaid jobs. Such concerns matter deeply at this particular historical juncture with the rise of new forms of populist, xenophobic nationalism and isolationism in wealthy nations confronting mobile populations of refugees and an emergent class of itinerant, impoverished and insecure laborers. It is often this precarious and peripatetic workforce (on construction sites, in private homes, in health care facilities) who support the growing extravagances of the wealthy, as capital is concentrated in the hands of the very rich while huge economic disparities are ideologically normalized, and the very idea of welfare and the public good is increasingly on the retreat.

Anyone who has spent time in a city such as Hong Kong will know that its Filipina domestic workers are an 'issue', as they flood the city streets on Sundays to meet and socialize (having little other time or place to get together), in what might be seen as an alternative precursor to the Occupy movements that sought to reclaim public space (Martín Rojo, 2016; Chun, 2014). On these Sundays, there is also much of the busy work of globalization from below (Mathews, 2012), as Balikbayan boxes (to ship goods home from overseas Filipinos) are filled with items sourced from the lower end of Hong Kong malls to be sent back to family and friends in the Philippines.