“Beyond ‘a few bad employers’: the structures that facilitate slavery in the Lebanese Kafala system”

• In Event: Criminology of Mobility. Panel 3. Migrants, labour and exploitation

Abstract

The Kafala system is a set of customary norms developed to monitor migrant workers entering the Middle East, and has been globally condemned as a form of modern-day slavery. Amidst wider calls to abolish the system, this paper highlights the need to account for the structures that maintain it. Narrowing the focus down to Lebanon, allows for an in depth analysis of the way that this system enslaves Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) today. I begin by outlining the limitations of current research, namely the emphasis on the employer-employee relationship, which abstracts the structural issues that maintain the subjugation of MDWs in Lebanon today. Pinning the exploitative treatment of MDWs on the behaviour of a few “bad employers”, ignores the systemic marginalisation they face at the hands of (1) society, (2) the state and (3) recruitment agencies. A historical overview of domestic work and the racialisation of MDWs in Lebanon will be conducted, before moving on to explain how this manifests itself in the societal permissiveness around domestic work, with the Kafala system codifying a relationship of domestic servitude. The paper moves on to note how the state abstracts its duty to provide legal protection for these women, by not including them in the labour law. It delegates responsibility over the women to individual employers, in an attempt to distract from its failures at governance, justifying greater control over MDWs freedom. Finally, Lebanon is situated into the larger context of modern-day slavery today to draw attention to how agencies capitalise on the feminisation of poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth globally, to push vulnerable women further into marginalisation. This paper concludes that more investigation must be conducted into how the structures surrounding the Kafala system (society, the government and recruitement agencies) uphold the domestic servitude of MDWs today.

Author

• Marya Al-Hindi, The University of Edinburgh