How South Asian workers land in modern slavery in the Middle East

E-commerce giant Amazon has built a reputation as a global company that “delivers at the fastest speeds”. 

In 2023, it claimed to deliver 7 billion items the same or next day. This record was possible because of thousands of men like Momtaj Mansur from Nepal. 

In 2021, Mansur was recruited by a labour supply firm to work for Amazon in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He thought this would be his dream job. What he encountered over the next two years not only shattered that dream but made his life miserable, suffering “harsh (working) conditions at Amazon’s warehouses”. Mansur’s story, which was part of a media investigation, revealed how “major American corporations profit, directly or indirectly, from employment practices that may amount to labour trafficking, which is defined as using force, coercion or fraud to induce someone to work or provide service”.

People from Nepal, Bangladesh, India and Myanmar continue to be trafficked to Middle Eastern countries as cheap labour, revealing in many cases that such trafficking is marked by either abduction or recruitment from the source countries from where they are transferred through transit regions and end up as victims of exploitation in destination countries.

This scenario is one aspect of modern-day slavery.

Popular understandings of slavery might recall images of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which was abolished in the 19th century. However, slavery continues today in new forms that include debt bondage, domestic servitude, forced prostitution, forced labour, forced marriage and human trafficking.

In 1999, there were an estimated 27 million people living in modern slavery globally. According to the International Labor Organization and the Walk Free Foundation, that number rose to 40 million in 2018, and the latest estimate under the Global Slavery Index puts it at 50 million. The people who comprise these figures are hiding in plain sight, often as workers in the informal economy, across a wide range of economic sectors.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery has listed domestic servitude as one form of modern-day slavery. Domestic or home care work is reported to be the least regulated sector in all regions of the world. 

Non- or underpayment of wages, long working hours, exploitative working conditions, lack of or limited access to social protection, inability to change employers and tied sponsorship system such as the Kafala system make women, children and migrant workers particularly at risk of domestic servitude.

Kafala system

Introduced in the 1950s, the Kafala system regulates incoming migrant workers in most of the Arab Gulf states. It allows citizens or companies to sponsor a migrant to come and work for them. 

It ties the migrant workers’ immigration status to their sponsor. They are not allowed to change employers, leave the country or even travel locally without the permission of the sponsor.

A sponsor can transfer his sponsorship to another national who is willing to purchase it. This purposeful disenfranchisement of the migrant worker has given rise to modern-day slavery. Workers are denied the right to freedom of association and banned from union membership. Women who leave their employers without “permission” are deemed illegal and face detention or deportation. Such policies dehumanise labour and undermine human rights and fundamental freedoms of migrants. 

Take the case of Indian national Mythili Ezhumalai, who was found unconscious in her Kuwaiti employer’s house in December 2023. She was allegedly forced to work more than 18 hours a day, which caused immobility to her left arm. Later, she suffered a heart attack.

While trafficking continues to negatively impact millions of South Asians, especially those from India, Nepal and Bangladesh, there have been reports of egregious forms of human rights violations in the Gulf countries as thousands of women from these countries are allegedly sold every year in slave markets in the Middle East.

In 2015, media reports revealed that New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata were “transit points for these sex traffickers” and that the perpetrators included airlines and immigration officials. 

Two years later, the Uttarakhand police exposed a trafficking case involving six Nepalese women who were to be taken to the Gulf to work as domestic helpers. In June 2017, the police rescued 16 Nepalese women at the India-Nepal border while they were being trafficked to India.

The human rights violations that these women experience in destination countries remain invisible, as their servitude is confined within the private space of their employers’ homes. 

Domestic workers are not protected by labour laws in any of these countries. As a result, they can become trapped in modern-day slavery and face multiple barriers to accessing justice.

Online slave markets

There is a new dimension to this transnational problem. 

In 2019, a BBC undercover investigation revealed the prevalence of online markets where migrant domestic workers would be bought and sold on various social media apps. A huge number of photographs of such unfortunate women – along with their racial profiles – were displayed. Hashtagged posts would accompany sales settled through private messages.

The sellers advised confiscating the women’s passports, confining them to the house, denying them any time off and giving them little or no access to a phone. This transaction was seen as a means to make profit by the employers. They could buy a maid for 600 Kuwaiti dirham (approx $US1,970) and sell her for 1,000 dirham ($US3,280). This online sale bypassed the recruitment agencies and created an unregulated black market, which made women more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

Despite assurances from Facebook, Google and Apple that the offending hashtags would be removed and they would work with app developers to prevent illegal activity, the Centre for International Policy’s data on Global Social Media Harms published in 2023 again uncovered slave markets on social media.

While UN Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 aims to do away with modern-day slavery, practical policy and practice measures, rather than ideological confrontation, will ensure better outcomes. Most Gulf countries have not taken easily to demands for abolishing the Kafala system, while some have signed bilateral agreements with provider countries.

Saudi Arabia and the Philippines signed a bilateral agreement in 2013 that contained specific joint regulation of private employment agencies. India signed a mobility agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2014, and Kuwait in 2018 started recruitment of Indian domestic workers through government agencies.

Such agreements could give some degree of protection to migrant domestic workers if they lay down provisions pertaining to minimum working age, working hours, transfer of salaries through designated bank accounts, holidays, right to association and bringing domestic work under labour laws.

Eliminating online slave markets should be top priority for not only Gulf countries but also provider states. The app companies should beheld liable if national regulation was to hold them accountable. Legislation ought to be designed to regulate social media companies. Banning migration of unskilled women under the age of 30 to 18 countries identified with history of labour exploitation and abuses merely pushes them to grey channels, depriving them of protective measures.

The main way for provider countries to protect female domestic workers is simply to ban their mobility. However, a 2023 report shows that international migration leads to an enormous jump in income. So, instead of depriving South Asian women of this opportunity, states could draft policies of protection and empowerment.

Nilanjana Ray is faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. She previously worked for UNICEF’s India Country Office in the Child Protection Unit, joining in anti-trafficking efforts. She obtained a PhD in Social Work from Washington University at St Louis. Her core competencies are in human trafficking, migration studies and child protection.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

(Cover Photo: Cities in India are major transit points for trafficking of women to Middle Eastern countries. Tanmoy Bhaduri, Credits Flickr)