The Limitations of Using Women as a Lever of Development

Hailed by international organizations as a model country for using its surplus labor as a source of hard currency in remittances to finance its development strategy, the Philippines is the largest labor exporter with a documented migrant population of over four million. Women constitute 60.2 percent (1.10 million) of migrants, concentrated in “elementary” occupations, primarily domestic work. ¹ As early as 1974, in response to the world oil crisis, the Filipino government designed a multilayered structure that promotes, organizes, and regulates the migration of women and men overseas. The success of the strategy is such that the state increasingly relies on private agencies to carry out the recruitment and placement of migrants. Although women workers are scattered around the globe, the majority work in the Middle East, especially the Gulf states.

Despite the paucity of information on their background, evidence indicates that the women generally come from poor rural areas of the Philippines, where they live mostly in precarious homes without electricity or drinking water and have never traveled outside their villages. Hence going overseas means to them not only an opportunity to earn money to help their relatives and put their children through school, but also a social and cultural challenge as they must learn new ways of communicating and working.

In Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas traces the various stages of this highly organized export of female labor from the Philippines to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which accounts for 20 percent of all workers. Although focused on the UAE, the book is replete with information about neighboring countries as well. It documents the experiences and struggles of migrant domestic workers as they navigate the complexities of a new cultural milieu, adjust to endemic violations of their labor contracts, and learn how to manage their abuse. It provides a comprehensive picture of the methods of recruitment of women by state and private agencies; their mandated training prior to migrating, which includes budget management; their placement in their new jobs; and the reinsertion of those women who return home. The research relies on content analyses of government documents as well as reports from migrant help groups, participant observation, interviews of domestic workers prior to and after their migration to the host country, and conversations with employers of various nationalities.

The study of women domestic migrants cuts across international migration studies (stressing the economics of migration), the feminization of poverty, and global social inequality. The economics of migration is typically concerned with the size and management of remittances, or the role played by women’s earnings in comparison with men’s in the Filipino economy. Foregrounding women’s lived experience, as Unfree does, eschews the hackneyed debates on the relative weight of the economic and social factors in understanding migration in favor of a more integrated and in-depth view of what migrants’ domestic work entails.

The author, an expert on migrant women, rightly contends that the bulk of the literature on domestic workers in the Arab world is biased in its emphasis on the mistreatment of the workers, frequently equated with forced labor, slavery, or human trafficking. Qualifying this one-sided literature of victimization, doom, and gloom as orientalist, she adopts a “sequential anthropology” that gives voice to the women workers themselves to characterize their experiences with their employers, describe the kind of work they do, and define what they consider abusive behavior. The method further lets women explain why they stay in their jobs or in the host country if they feel unhappy. Throughout, the author stresses the role played by political, economic, and juridical structures in framing women’s experiences as workers.

What emerges is a complex picture in which states and private agencies operate as structures, tied together by a web of overlapping interests that promote migration and claim to protect the “rights” of the workers but are either reluctant or powerless to enforce labor contracts or bring about lasting change.

Central to the story as told is the host country’s law, Kafala, regulating foreign domestic work. Kafala in Arabic means to be responsible for or providing for one’s family. In Islamic law, it means to be answerable for the security of a ward, or a prisoner. Under this law, employers are responsible for their workers and must ensure that they do not run afoul of the law. If a worker leaves her employer without his or her consent, becomes pregnant, or commits any other infraction, employers can incur a fine. Best known in Maghrebin countries for defining the responsibilities of adoptive parents and the rights of their adoptees, the law establishes and regulates the power of the Kafil (the person in charge) and makes a domestic worker the de facto ward of her employer. It creates the potential for abuse of power in, for example, serving as cover for denying a worker freedom to move about or her weekly day off. Since employers’ interest is to get their money’s worth by protecting their investment in the worker, they frequently take restrictive measures to ensure that a worker will not abscond and become an illegal alien. Although the book documents some extreme instances of physical abuse, including undernourishment, to keep women in line, it also provides evidence of employers (most of whom are expatriates, not Emirati) who are mindful of the welfare of their workers as well as that of the children they left back home.

The book argues that Kafala law ensures the “infantilization” of domestic workers by depriving them of agency, thus permitting their “servitude.” However, given that employers’ treatment of their workers is variable, it is unclear why abuse occurs in some instances and not in others, as it also happens in non-Muslim receiving countries. Is it because the occupation of domestic workers belonging to a different social class, socialized in a different culture, and speaking a different language compounds women’s vulnerability by facilitating prejudice and the ensuing abuse? Or is it the endemic lack of enforcement of the labor contract spelling out the rights and duties of the workers, as the book intimates? At any rate, women find themselves in a bind, unable to put up with various forms of abuse and unable to leave without the authorization of their employer. The book’s answer to women’s bind is to invoke their appeal to the good will of some employers and their sense of fairness. Labeled as a claim to “morality,” women’s appeal is defined as a process through which a woman worker negotiates with her employer the terms of her employment to secure more food, better treatment from violent children, more autonomy in the exercise of her occupation, and so forth. The author finds that women judge an employer’s moral character by his or her management of food, including its quantity and quality. They perceive free access to food as a recognition of their personhood and acceptance of their humanity. Hence, a poignant thirst for recognition, dignity, and belonging matters more than being denied a day off or the freedom to use the internet or the cell phone.

Although moral claims indicate that some women may not be passive sufferers who take abuse quietly, the strategy may not always work or cannot be an option in cases where employers are not amenable to changing their behavior. Furthermore, where women were advised before their departure from the Philippines to show deference to their employers and abide by their demands, standing up for their rights in the absence of a viable alternative may not be feasible. Thus women who can no longer put up with the conditions under which they work but do not wish to be repatriated by the Filipino Embassy often go underground, living in fear of being caught by the police, as absconding is considered a crime. Such women may find precarious employment and housing thanks to a network of volunteers. In the end, abuse is inevitable when it is the market, aided by the state, that drives and reproduces structural powerlessness.

Do women who return home after years of work abroad lead a better life than before their emigration? The book shows that the capital the women saved is usually insufficient to sustain their valiant efforts at small entrepreneurship given inadequate rural infrastructure at the mercy of climate-related calamities that often ruin whatever business a woman may have set up.

The book’s critical perspective, its focus on women’s experience, and the comprehensiveness of its approach set it apart from others dealing with the same subject matter. Ironically, in strenuously attempting to strike a new path, it ends up falling prey to several difficulties it intended to avoid. First, like a great deal of the literature on the same topic, it is woefully undertheorized. It tends to treat theoretical concepts (like “orientalism”) as self-explanatory, or resorts to unwieldy and cumbersome philosophical concepts such as “unfreedom,” “antipower,” and “negative” and “positive liberty,” among others. Similarly, it splits hairs to distinguish “infantilism” from “dehumanization,” without delving into their linkages.

Furthermore, the pre-departure “training” women receive is credited with having molded women’s subjectivity in a process of “subjectification” (another undefined concept) that predisposes them to accepting subservience. Yet time and again, the book documents the various (legal, political, and social) structures that limit the range of women’s options. In this respect, the book does not sufficiently appreciate the role played by women’s geographic, cultural, or domestic milieus in facilitating tolerance of abuse. By the same token, there is no comparative information to help gauge the degree to which diverse rural regions with different economic resources (no matter how limited) inflect the success or failure of businesses started by women who returned home. Indeed, migrants come from various rural areas, yet these are treated as one, having the same negative impact on returning women’s chances to lead a better life. Finally, the book relegates the (important) discussion of fieldwork as well as definitions of terms deemed orientalist to appendixes, thus giving the text a hurried character.

Nevertheless, these questions do not detract from the significance of this book. Unfree gives a vivid picture of the cost to women of being cogs in the global machinery of the export of their labor power. It provides valuable insights into a state-sponsored strategy of poverty alleviation all the while pointing to its limitations. Undeniably, migrant women’s income may help a child’s schooling, but it does little to prevent the cycle of poverty from reproducing itself as migrations expand with an increased demand for cheap labor compounded by the state’s hunger for an easy source of hard currency. In shedding light on this process, Unfree is a contribution to the literature on structured gender inequality in the global era as well as the feminization of poverty.