At least 146,000 female migrant workers - perhaps many more - are employed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Female domestic workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Ethiopia, and elsewhere face severe abuse and exploitation by employers and labor recruitment agencies. "I Already Bought You" : Abuse and Exploitation of Female Migrant Domestic Workers in the United Arab Emirates documents how the UAE's visa sponsorship system (known as kafala) ties migrant workers to employers and how the exclusion of domestic workers from labor law protections leaves migrant domestic workers at risk of abuse. The report exposes barriers preventing abused domestic workers from obtaining remedy, including lack of shelters, penalties for "absconding" workers, and justice system failings. Based on interviews with 99 female domestic workers, recruitment agets, employers, and others in the UAE, the report documents abuses that domestic workers face - passport confiscation, non-payment of wages, lack of rest periods and time off, confinement to households, excessive work and working hours, food deprivation, and psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. In some cases the abuses amounted to forced labor or trafficking. The UAE has an increasingly influential role in the international labor arena. In 2014, it joined the governing body of the International Labor Organization. At home, however, it maintains the exploitative kafala system, has failed to adopt a bill pending since 2012 on domestic workers' rights, and has yet to ratify key international treaties on migrants' and domestic workers' rights. Human Rights Watch calls for the reform of the kafala system and the introduction of labor law protections and other measures to fully protect domestic workers' rights. -- back cover.

For over half a century, the Middle East has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. This book Illuminates the multidimensionality of these workers' lives as they engage in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, struggle and accommodation, and movement and stasis.

This book tells the stories of the Ethiopian women who migrate to work as domestic workers in the Middle East. Drawing on qualitative research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, the author reveals how women’s aspirations to migrate are constituted within unequal gendered structures of opportunity in Ethiopia and asks us to consider how gender, race, class and nationality intersect in the construction of migrant subjectivities and agency. By analysing the impact of migration on social reproduction both in Ethiopia and the destination countries, the book offers fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the largest stream of women’s autonomous international migration from Africa.

Despite growing popular and policy interest in ‘new’ slavery, with contemporary abolitionists calling for action to free an estimated 40 million ‘modern slaves’, interdisciplinary and theoretical dialogue has been largely missing from scholarship on ‘modern slavery’. This edited volume will provide a space to reinvigorate the theory and practice of representing slavery and related systems of domination, in particular our understandings of the binary between slavery and freedom in different historical and political contexts. The book takes a critical approach, interrogating the concept of modern slavery by exploring where it has come from, and its potential for obscuring and foreclosing new understandings. Including contributions from philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and English literature scholars, it adds to the emerging critique of the concept of ‘modern slavery’ through its focus on the connections between the past of Atlantic World slavery, the present of contemporary groups whose freedoms are heavily restricted (prisoners, child labourers in the Global South, migrant domestic workers, and migrant wives), and the futures envisaged by activists struggling against different elements of the systems of domination that Atlantic World slavery relied upon and spawned. Revisiting Slavery & Antislavery will be of indispensable value to scholars, students, policy makers and activists in the fields of human rights, modern history, international politics, social policy, sociology and global inequality.

Page 1 opens with a jarring turn: "Filipina domestic worker, employed in Riyadh: 'Really they are good to me. If I say I need rest, they give me rest.' [And if they were not so good to you, if you would have some problem with your employer, where would you go?] 'Madam, I cannot go anywhere, I am not allowed to go outside. I cannot go to the embassy. I will just cry in my room and pray.'" This book explores the duality and conflicts faced by the desperate employee far from home, having signed a contract written in Arabic, her passport held by her employer, and with limited power as a woman to be a witness in court against a man. DOMESTIC WORKERS IN SAUDI ARABIA AND THE EMIRATES is a new socio-legal study of pressing questions of human rights, contractual freedom, transnational markets, and social policy: Which factors influence the emergence and character of conflicts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates between domestic workers and their employers, the social and legal norms both parties refer to, and the related imbalance of power? In what way and to what extent do domestic workers and their employers refer to Islamic, customary, contractual, and formal legal norms? Do conflicts concern disagreement over norms or disputes regarding behavior contrary to the norms upon which both parties agree? Which factors influence the norms that both parties refer to in conflicts? Which party is able to enforce its own norms or to act contrary to norms on which both parties agree and which factors influences the balance of power? Using a grounded-theory methodology involving extensive field research and revealing interviews of workers, employers, employment agencies, human rights organizations, and governmental officials, Vlieger exposes the multifacets and dilemmas of the people and institutions involved. Finally, she proposes pragmatic solutions to prevent the most excessive vulnerabilities and imbalances. This is an upsetting and candid introduction to another world, supported with scholarly research but accessible to the general reader, as well as academics and human rights activists. Part of the Human Rights and Culture Series from Quid Pro Books.

In Israel, as in numerous countries of the global North, Filipina women have been recruited in large numbers for domestic work, typically as live-in caregivers for the elderly. The case of Israel is unique in that the country has a special significance as the ‘Holy Land’ for the predominantly devout Christian Filipina women and is at the center of an often violent conflict, which affects Filipinos in many ways. In the literature, migrant domestic workers are often described as being subject to racial discrimination, labour exploitation and exclusion from mainstream society. Here, the author provides a more nuanced account and shows how Filipina caregivers in Israel have succeeded in creating their own collective spaces, as well as negotiating rights and belonging. While maintaining transnational ties and engaging in border-crossing journeys, these women seek to fulfill their dreams of a better life. During this process, new socialities and subjectivities emerge that point to a form of global citizenship in the making, consisting of greater social, economic and political rights within a highly gendered and racialized global economy.