Dr. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas describes the lives of Filipino women who are domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates based on her ethnographic interviews and observations. They are cleaning, cooking, caring for children, and keeping households running, for their employers, who may be UAE citizens or foreign-born people employed in the UAE. We learn their struggles and limited rights due to employer abuses, and the constraints of the kafala system–the employer contract system that UAE and other countries use. Although there was a new law regarding the kafala system, offering worker protections in 2016, Dr. Parrenas wrote that these reforms have not reportedly been experienced by domestic workers. Here is her piece. In her book, she notes that a survey of nationals in neighboring Qatar–which also announced reforms–found that 88% opposed the reforms because “it lessened the dependency of foreign workers on their employers.” (Parrenas, Unfree, p. 26)
In September 2022, the UAE passed a new law specific to domestic workers. Among the provisions is this: “forbids hiring anyone under the age of 18 as a domestic worker and prohibits discrimination, sexual harassment, forced labor, or any act that is considered to be a potential act of human trafficking.” There are requirements for time off and limits to the number of hours per day that workers can be expected to work. Will these reforms make a difference? The question can be applied to any new human-rights / anti-discrimination laws globally. How are they implemented and enforced? Do workers understand their rights? How do they claim those rights, particularly if they are not honored? There is something about the intimacy of the closed-door household that invites a particular vulnerability to workers inside those spaces. Here is the new law.