Whose Home Is It? The Workplace of Migrant Domestic Workers Under Kafala

In this text, former migrant domestic worker and organizer in Lebanon Gemma Justo and Lebanese writer and publisher Ghiwa Sayegh write a four-hand account of daily life and struggle of African and South and East Asian female domestic workers working under the dreadful Kafala system in Lebanon.

Poverty led me, Gemma, to Lebanon. Prior to my life overseas, I had been a daycare worker in my village in the Philippines. But my earnings were very humble and I had three children to support, so I came to Beirut in 1993 as a domestic worker to provide for my family. Having grown up doing household chores such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of my siblings, I excelled in my profession. Despite trying to go back home many times, money kept me in Lebanon, where I spent 24 years of my life, until 2017. Unlike many other domestic workers, my employer gave me days off and allowed me to go on vacation to see my family every six months. Although I was satisfied with my working and living conditions, I longed to live in a place I could call home. The longing for home as political was the quest that drove me to initially volunteer at the Embassy of the Philippines in Lebanon as a community mobilizer. Part of my work consisted in acting as a bridge between distressed Filipino workers and the embassy. In 2006, during the war of Israel on Lebanon, I was part of the team that rescued migrant domestic workers and volunteered at the shelter. It was then that I witnessed how many migrant domestic workers were mistreated. Countless, regardless of where they came from, had been left behind by employers, locked in houses with no food or fresh water. This is when I realized that my political work had to expand beyond the Filipino community. I organized with other domestic workers, but also across movements, linking arms with the anti-racist feminist movement in Lebanon.

This was how we both met. I, Ghiwa, grew up in a middle class home that employed migrant domestic workers under Kafala up until my early adult years. My political journey was radically transformed by Gemma and her comrades at the Alliance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon. My positionality as a Lebanese “citizen” — rather than an “other” in opposition to which a national imaginary is built — makes it my political duty to expose the exploitative nature and dynamics of Lebanese nationalism at both the nuclear and state levels. I left Lebanon in 2020 because of the economic crisis. We both understand these systems as profiting off of the labor of migrant domestic workers and foreigners in order to sustain their racist borders, along patriarchal and classist lines. The only way one can become “Lebanese” (in the administrative sense validated by the state) is through the father line, except in extremely rare honorary or political cases of naturalization. As such, migrant workers and refugees, including those who have lived within the borders of Lebanon for decades, will always be foreigners administratively, and Lebanese “family lines” are preserved. Lebanese supremacy permeates in legislation, policies, and sociocultural codes; foreigners of color are considered workers, therefore inferior, a status they maintain regardless of how long they live in the same geographical borders as other “citizens.”

Home, to us, cannot be reduced to the privacy of a house. Women, trans, and gender-non-conforming people have long bore the brunt of violent structures in the private as well as the public spheres. Home, therefore, is the feeling of warmth, intimacy, and comfort that can be borne out of a space, because of who and what occupies the space, its corners and configurations. For me, Gemma, coming to Lebanon meant searching for a home that never is. As for me, Ghiwa, I left behind a home that no longer was. The resonance between these spatial disorientations and estrangement brought us together, the same way that being in collectivities could act as makeshift, homely reorientations.

What does “home” mean under Kafala? Historically, Kafala (sponsorship) was a system meant to outsource workers for specific periods of the year to speed up the capitalistic process of resource extraction, particularly in the Gulf. The flow of workers and their disposability ensured that the resources stayed within the nation-state borders’ control. This system has seeped into care economies, whereby care work, including child-rearing, has become a nation-state resource to be simultaneously confided to and protected from foreign workers. Today, Kafala is a set of border control and migration policies, labor legislations, privatization of services and agencies, and supremacist entitlement that work in tandem to exploit workers, who are always precarious, always foreign, while reaping large financial profit, for traffickers and “hosts” alike. The strict border controls rigidly regulate the movement of people from sub-Saharan and South East Asian nationalities coming into Lebanon. They cannot apply for a visa in their home countries, regardless of their travel purpose; a “Lebanese” host institution/person needs to do so on their behalf at the General Security in Beirut. In other words, the only mobility that is permitted is one that feeds into the Kafala industrial complex and is controlled by it.

I, Gemma, witnessed the multiple injustices that pave the journey of migrant domestic workers, starting from the roots: our home countries, the point of origin. Recruitment agencies that pullulate in many countries of South and East Asia as well as sub-Saharan Africa give false hopes to their applying recruits that they legitimize with supposedly written contract statements. Once they reach their country of destination, in this case, Lebanon, migrant domestic workers (MDWs) find out that these contracts are void for the simple reason that Lebanon has its own set of labor laws for migrant workers, regulated by Kafala. The new contract that MDWs are shown and forced to sign upon arrival is in Arabic, a language most of us do not read. In that sense, the geographies of legalized trafficking and slavery are also the maps of homes uprooted, in perpetual becoming. The Kafala system stipulates that MDWs are tied to a kafeel, necessarily a Lebanese “citizen,” who pledges to sponsor the worker. This implies that MDWs live inside the homes of their employers-turned-sponsors for years, where the conditions are dire for tens of thousands of them. Employers often apply food restrictions, and MDWs are only allowed to eat what they are given, at the time it is given – some employers can go as far as locking the refrigerator or counting/weighing the food. Most do not eat at the same table as their employers’ — a spatial absence that, when normalized and unquestioned, is symptomatic of a deeply embedded racist supremacy.

In the architectural configuration of middle class, modern Lebanese buildings, the real estate industry is equally complicit in sustaining Kafala, as construction plans include a “maid’s room” designed to take as little space as possible, sometimes not enough for a person to stretch their bodies fully while lying down. A room akin to a prison cell is not synonymous with privacy, but many MDWs find it to be a more decent, less exposed option than what old buildings have in store. When there is no space “designed” for a worker, old architecture is “adapted” to the racist spatial configuration so that MDWs are allocated an attic in the kitchen area, or a cubicle in the laundry room, or even a space in a covered balcony. I, Gemma, witnessed some of my sisters and comrades being made to sleep in the kitchen next to the fridge on a folding bed, or in the living room when the families go to sleep, curled on the floor, in a corner, with a blanket. The humiliation was double when, upon trying to reason with employers, I would hear, “it’s more than enough for a Sri Lankan.” This is what we are all called in the Lebanese slang, because Sri Lankans were the first MDWs to land in Beirut in the 1970s. The exposure and lack of privacy makes MDWs vulnerable to rape or sexual harassment by their male employers. For many, the constant alert state means that they never get the rest their bodies need after their working hours of intense physical labor. Many employers normalize waking “their maids” up whenever they want, for whatever reason in the middle of the night, for example upon returning home from a party. If MDWs are visible in the kitchen or the living room, it makes this practice even more frequent. MDWs who have their own rooms are said to have “good” employers, and are told to be grateful.

In addition to the living conditions inside the workplace — the home of the employers — many MDWs have no freedom of mobility, and are confined in that space for most of their stay in Lebanon, usually a minimum of three years. Some MDWs are allowed out for specific purposes that should also count as work, such as walking family pets or taking care of the children. Under Kafala, employers confiscate their documents (passports and residency permits), and often do not give them days off. Even in terms of clothing, MDWs are further singled out, as they are forced into uniforms designed to show their status of servant whenever they are in the presence of their employers, inside or outside the house. The spatial relationship of MDWs with the nation-state is restrictive, shaped by their systemic/legal/existential dependence on their kafeel. MDWs are deprived of navigating public spaces due to security issues, not being in possession of their documents, or being undocumented. The spaces of labor for MDWs treat leisure, rest, and negotiating terms of employment a luxury to be “grateful” for, when they constitute the basics of decent work.

The horrors of Kafala cannot be summarized in an exhaustive list. But the perverse control and exploitation of MDWs’ bodies are indicative of a systemic problem. Employers often use the argument that they treat MDWs as a “member of the family.” They consider that hosting them in their homes is akin to giving them a home, ignoring the immense benefits they reap at the expense of another person’s well-being and undervalued labor. To whom is the Kafala home a “home,” when it is built, literally and metaphorically, on the premise of servitude? The Kafala home tolerates MDWs only insofar their bodies and labor are exploited. But “home” is for the employer; MDWs are there to work and serve only. The Kafala industrial complex stretches capitalism to its extreme with total impunity: as long as they remain on Lebanese soil, MDWs “belong” to the kafeel, like everything else inside the home.

As of October 2019, with the mass protests that took place over the span of months, MDWs demanding the abolishing of Kafala were more visible in public spaces. Even then, their legitimacy was questioned, as many protestors qualified the uprising of “Lebanese” revolution. The economic crisis hit hard a couple of months later, with MDWs constituting one of the communities at the bottom of the economic chain. Countless haven’t been paid at all since January 2020, meaning that entire families back home haven’t been fed; many were abandoned by their kafeel, finding themselves homeless in the middle of a pandemic and lockdown, in public spaces that are hostile to their very existence. The devastating explosion of August 4, 2020 in Beirut disrupted the concept of “home,” which meant that MDWs’ workplace became even more precarious. For months now, stuck MDWs have been asking to be sent back to their countries of origin. Many have been protesting in sit-ins in front of their embassies and consulates, some of which are conducting mass repatriations. But the evacuation efforts are mostly facilitated by MDW organizations and alliances who, along with their networks, are fundraising, coordinating efforts, providing food and shelter, protesting, and buying flights for MDWs to go back home.

If anything, the current situation has further exposed the gendered paradigms of capitalism — one that is dismissive of care work, yet is sustained in its very infrastructure by free, or largely underpaid labor. With the added layers of Kafala, “Lebanese” labor and lives are more valuable and valued than migrant workers’. By economically relying on and industrializing care economies, the Kafala system is akin to a Ponzi scheme, whereby traffickers and hosts make the most profit, while MDWs’ salaries, livelihoods, and returns are the first to go when sponsors are unable to pay their dues. To treat Kafala as an industrial complex is to recognize its unaccountable, for-profit exploitation of human lives who are promised work. Under such a scheme, and regardless of what treatment they might receive, the workplace of MDWs, or the home of the kafeel, can only be considered exploitative in its very infrastructure and premise. While migrant domestic work is work, Kafala is a scam that makes the spaces and daily realities of care labor precarious, hazardous, and oppressive. ■

Gemma Justo is a feminist and community mobilizer from the Philippines. She worked as a migrant domestic worker in Lebanon for 24 years. She was one of the founders of the union of migrant domestic workers, and a co-founder of the Alliance of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon. She now runs a farm in her native village, and takes care of her grandchildren.
Read more on her contributor page.

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Ghiwa Sayegh is a queer feminist writer, publisher, and archivist from Lebanon. She is the founding editor of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, and the co-founder of Intersectional Knowledge Publishers. She is currently based in Paris, France, where she is pursuing an MA in gender studies at Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis. Read more on her contributor page.