by CHLOC GHALEB
Amid the chaos of Lebanon’s economic collapse, political elections and a large exodus of its most talented and educated, an integral part of its population and workforce has once again been forgotten. A vast amount of the domestic workers who clean the houses of the masses, nurse Lebanese babies and raise Lebanese children, who clean the dishes in the restaurants and fill cars with gas, are either being left unpaid for years of hard work or abandoned to find a way home under Lebanon’s infamous Kafala System.
The Kafala System is a migrant worker sponsorship system that enables indentured working and slavery. It originated in the Gulf Region and is practiced throughout the Middle East. Under the system, a national citizen can act as a sponsor, or kafeel, to a migrant worker, tying the worker’s legal right to live and work in the country to their employer. As such, if an employer decides to fire the worker, they can be detained and deported if their recruitment agency does not connect them to another sponsor. If the worker wishes to quit, they do not have the freedom to do so without the explicit approval of their employer. Employers have the right to confiscate and retain their worker’s passports, so if a worker is desperate to quit or leave the country, they are trapped if the employer will not return their documentation. Domestic workers are guaranteed no basic labor rights under the Kafala system — no guaranteed day off, no set working hours, no freedom to terminate a contract, no social security, no compensation for unfair termination, no parental leave and not even a minimum wage.
Recruitment agencies in Lebanon prey upon the most vulnerable In the world, advertising to the impoverished in countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and the Philippines. They make grandiose promises of a dreamland where workers will be paid in US dollars for easy work; often, contracts are written in Arabic, and the recruited workers who typically do not know the language must sign them before entering the country. Once they arrive in Beirut, the reality of the system they have tied themselves to becomes evident when they are not allowed to even leave the airport without their employer picking them up.
The system is resultingly rife with exploitation, abuse, and in the worst cases, modern-day slavery. Many civil cases have been brought against employers by migrant workers who never received full or any payment for their work. Many more have come forward exposing experiences of being psychologically, verbally, physically, and sexually abused. Some were fully enslaved or trafficked. On average, two domestic workers die per week in Lebanon, often trying to escape or by suicide, although their deaths are rarely properly investigated. Now, with the snowball of crises suffocating Lebanon, domestic workers are more neglected than ever. Thousands have been abandoned at the doors of their respective country’s embassies as their employers can no longer afford to pay them. Many of these essential workers constantly exposed to COVID-19 were left behind in Lebanon’s stunted rollout of vaccinations during the pandemic. According to Freedom United, 400,000 migrant workers in Lebanon are currently at significant risk for exploitation.
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