Organising Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Abstract

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 22 Volume 22 Issue 4 2015 REPORT ❐ LEBANON The kafala is a ‘system of control’ through which the governments delegate responsibility for migrants to private citizens or companies to organise domestic workers was compelled and supported by the ILO Bureau of Workers’ Activities (ACTRAV) in Beirut and in cooperation with other local NGOs. FENASOL’s involvement in assisting the organising of domestic workers involves standard trade-union concerns, such as collective bargaining to ensure the domestic workers’ rights for a day off, formal recognition of domestic work under the labour law, minimum wage, and ending the kafala system. These are concerns that emanate from the socio-economic injustices that the migrant domestic worker faces. The kafala The kafala, which is not limited to migrant domestic workers, but include all migrant workers, is a ‘system of control’, according to Motaparthy, through which the governments delegate responsibility for migrants to private citizens or companies. The system gives sponsors a set of legal abilities to control workers. ‘Workers whose employers cancel their residency visas often have to leave the country through deportation proceedings , and many have to spend time behind bars’ (Motaparthy, 2015). In addition to the precariousness created by the kafala system, the labour law explicitly excludes domestic workers from its protection and denies migrant workers the right to establish a trade union. The fragile conditions of migrant domestic workers are further exacerbated with the discrimination they face as poor migrant women who work in a profession that lacks social and formal recognition. The union organisational process focused on livelihood and common experiences of exploitation , lack of social and formal recognition of the value of domestic work, and its exemption from legislation regulating workers in the formal sectors , which revealed a form of labour politics that seeks to forge an understanding of shared working experiences of domestic work. These concerns acted as a gravitational pull necessary to bring the domestic workers together from different nationalities. However, prior to the union, Asian and African workers in Lebanon used to organise by forming migrant communities. These communities sought to forge solidarity among community members and to forge new modes of sociality and social interactions and being in a community. These community spaces were the first instances of politicisation for many migrant domestic workers who became later union militants. These communities also created, and continue, new avenues of access and mobilisation and definitely provide the ground for new political subjects to emerge. A lmost a year ago, on the occasion of International Workers’ Day, hundreds of domestic workers, predominantly migrants, and their allies in Lebanon, took to the streets that their union be formally recognised by the Lebanese government. The union has been denounced by the Labour Minister as ‘illegal’, arguing that it will only ‘generate problems’ instead of solving them. The Minister suggested that the ‘protection’ for domestic workers is best guaranteed through ‘new laws’, not through union organising. In other words, rights are unequivocally the ‘governor’s grant’, not to be claimed for or bargained. He added: ‘protection takes place through procedures, not through the introduction of the domestic workers into political and class games’. The Minister’s last statement blatantly expresses the state of fear from workers organising, migrants in particular, who through their attempt are putting a foot out of the ‘zone of exception’ into the political and the social space of the nation. Since the 1990, with the end of the civil war and the beginning of the so called ‘reconstruction era’, Lebanon has increasingly become a receiving country of both Arab and non- Arab migration . Palestinian refugees and migrants from different ethnic belongings from Syria and Iraq came to Lebanon long before 1990 and have settled in the country. Furthermore, there are large numbers of migrant workers from Asia and Africa employed as domestic workers. A 2011 World Bank report states that migrant workers represent 760 thousand of a total workforce in Lebanon of 1.2 million (for a population of around 4.2 million ) who are predominantly condensed in the informal sector. That means that migrants constitute almost half of the workforce and 17.8 percent of the population. These figures preceded the large...