From Victims of Trafficking to Freedom Fighters: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

Abstract

Throughout the Middle East migrant women are employed to work in people's homes. While some experience good working relations with employers, others experience forms of abuse and labour coercion. This chapter evaluates critically different ways that system of unfree labour has been variously described and analysed as a form of 'contract slavery', 'debt bondage' and 'trafficking'. It also shows how migrant women who describe themselves as 'freelancers' exit their original employer's home both to escape that relation and in hopes of securing a better situation outside of the regular system of employment. Freelancing is more than simply a form of resistance. Rather, women who work as freelance migrant domestic workers challenge directly that state enforced control over their mobility and are on the vanguard of those migrants who are seeking through their own actions to effect social change.

Long-range continuities in comparative and historical sociology: The case of parasitism and women’s enslavement

“…A second problem with the slavery-as-exploitation framework is that it is vague with respect to historical continuity. The specific economic conditions that illuminate the workings of sex trafficking in Southeast Asia for example have superficial similarities with the market conditions for itinerant construction labor in the Gulf States, but are rooted in very different historical and cultural logics (Gardner 2010;Hoang 2015;Johnson 2018;Mahdavi 2011). When slavery is dehistoricized and distilled to economic forces, we lose sight of the broader social factors that explain slavery's embeddedness and its changes and continuity over time.…”