Professor Lisa Blaydes, director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, examines the treatment of migrant domestic workers in Arab Gulf states as part of the King Center’s initiative on gender-based violence.
For years leading up to last fall’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar, human and labor rights organizations pointed to what they described as the systemic abuse of migrant workers who traveled to the small country on the Arab Gulf to build the stadiums and infrastructure that allowed the global sporting event to take place.
But a new paper by Stanford political science professor Lisa Blaydes draws attention to a lesser-known migrant population in the Arab Gulf region that is perhaps even more vulnerable to exploitation: women who cook, clean, and care for families as domestic workers in private homes. The paper, “Assessing the Labor Conditions of Migrant Domestic Workers in the Arab Gulf States,” was published in January 2023 as part of a special ILR Review issue on labor transformation and regime transition in the Middle East and North Africa.
“There’s so much more attention paid to construction workers,” says Blaydes, one of the core faculty members of the Stanford King Center on Global Development’s research initiative on gender-based violence in the developing world. “When you go to the Gulf, you see them walking around in their orange jumpsuits. Domestic workers are an invisible population. These women work in homes and may not even have the ability to leave those homes very often.”
In Blaydes’ original survey of several hundred Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers who had previously worked in Arab Gulf states but since returned to their home countries, more than 50 percent of respondents indicated they had been subject to at least one type of abusive situation, with the most common abuses being economic in nature, such as excessive working hours, late payment, and denial of days off. Smaller percentages of women reported having limited access to food (12 percent), forced confinement (7 percent), non-payment of salary (7 percent), denial of medical treatment (6 percent), physical abuse (4 percent), and sexual attacks (2 percent).
According to estimates compiled by the International Labour Organization in 2019, there are millions of migrant domestic workers in Arab Gulf countries—Saudi Arabia alone has more than 3 million—so these percentages represent huge numbers of women (the vast majority of domestic workers are women).