“I am a woman working as a domestic worker. I am non-Lebanese and I have no legal papers [a residence permit], if I report to the police, they will arrest me.”[1]
This was the answer that “Mary”, an Ethiopian domestic worker, gave me when I asked her if she would consider filing a complaint against her employer for withholding the last six months of her salaries and confiscating her passport. “Mary’s” answer summarized the interlocking systems of oppression as well as the social, legal and economic discrimination that trap migrant domestic workers in a web woven by the kafala system, an inherently abusive migration sponsorship system.
Without this intersectional lens, one can neither understand “Mary’s” reality nor the reasons preventing her from turning to the police. Gender, ethnicity, color, class, and legal status are all factors that overlap to isolate “Mary” as well as many other migrant domestic workers who find themselves marginalized socially, economically and legally by the kafala system.
On the first of May, which marks International Workers’ Day, we pay a tribute to these workers who exemplify the cruelest and clearest forms of exploitation that take place when a worker is unrecognized and unprotected by the Labour Law and is governed instead by an abusive migration system. A system that can turn a victim of exploitation into an offender for being undocumented, leaving the worker with little prospect of obtaining redress. “Mary” is a case in point.
The kafala...
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