The story so far:
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest recipients of migrant domestic workers (MDWs), will roll out a new domestic workers law in September. The six GCC states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain) employ close to 5.5 million migrant domestic workers, and all of them exclude MDWs from labour laws, with only four having passed specific domestic worker laws.
In Saudi, as of the first quarter of 2024, there were 39,13,925 migrant domestic workers with 27,32,344 males and 11,81,581 females, making up 25% of the total workforce. The exclusion of these workers from the labour law leaves huge gaps in protection, as monitoring mechanisms such as labour inspections, complaints mechanisms, and the Wages Protection System do not apply to the sector. These vulnerabilities are further exacerbated by the systemic marginalisation of migrant workers under the Kafala system. The employer-tied visa system leaves lower-income migrant workers at the absolute mercy of their sponsors. In effect, the state has outsourced the immigration regime to individuals, the majority of whom are citizens.
The current and upcoming MDW laws do not address these protection gaps sufficiently. It is common knowledge that female MDWs face extreme abuse at the hands of their employers within households and by officials when they seek remedy. Saudi Arabia’s regulations have failed to address these issues, and the broader...
For the past several months, a coordinated digital campaign has targeted community archivists in Bangladesh who document and preserve audiovisual material related to the July 2024 Student-People’s...