An Indonesian domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. Steve McCurry for the ILO/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Direct action, a defining feature of political practice in progressive social movements is ‘the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free’. I contend that migrant domestic workers in the Middle East practice direct action when they live and work as freelancers outside the regular system of sponsorship known commonly as the kafala system.
The kafala system of visa sponsorship confers largely unregulated powers on employers to control their migrant employees and restricts the latter’s ability to transfer to another employer without the consent of the initial sponsor. The kafala system applies to many sectors of employment, but in this article I focus on migrant domestic workers. If employment ends, then the migrant domestic worker’s documented residency status also ends. The transfer of state powers to employers is further strengthened by the notion that governments ought not to interfere in the private sphere of the home and family. This is now widely interpreted to include the employment relationships that exist within this sphere. Migrant domestic labour is not regulated by employment law and those laws that nominally protect domestic workers are mainly unenforced.
