Comparing Governance of Social Reproduction, Agency and Strategizing of Migrant Domestic and Care Workers in Selected Middle Eastern Countries

Within the Middle East, much attention has been paid to the operation of the kafala system and the way migrant women are locked into it by recruitment agencies and employers eg Lebanon, UAE, Saudi Arabia to provide familial and societal social reproduction in states with minimal public welfare provision. However, the focus on kafala fails to recognize the diversity of configurations between workers, employers and intermediaries in the governance of labour migration and overlooks the scope for migrant domestic workers’ agency and strategizing, individually and through informal and community networks.

Through a comparative analysis, this presentation seeks to advance the understanding of the transformations and complexities of South-South domestic and care worker migration drawing on empirical research in a multi-country study (Gender Dynamics of International Labour Migration, part of the UKRI-funded Gender, Justice and Security Hub 2019-2024) involving women migrant domestic workers of different nationalities and migratory trajectories, and working within different systems of governance in Turkey, Lebanon and the Kurdish Region of Iraq. Amongst these countries, only Lebanon has a standard kafala system for which attempts to reform through legislative initiatives have failed.

However MDWs’ exploitation is crucially connected to factors other than the simple operation of the kafala system, such as specific racialized hierarchies; different practices, roles and regulation of recruitment agencies; the different positioning of MDWs in relation to local domestic work; the informality of domestic work and absence of standard labor regulation and protection; the profound social devaluation of this gendered form of labour and the lack of clear-cut governance of social reproduction. At the same, there exists scope for agency, bargaining and strategizing, individually and collectively, within gender and racialized systems of stratifications.