Abstract
In Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas provides a compelling in-depth ethnographic examination of the lives and labour conditions of Filipina domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The book powerfully interrogates what it means to be unfree under the kafala system, a sponsorship-based employment structure that operates in Middle Eastern countries like the UAE that legally binds migrant workers to employers, severely restricting their mobility and autonomy. Parreñas soundly explains the problems associated with the kafala system, but also challenges dominant narratives that equate migrant domestic work under this system with outright slavery or human trafficking.
Parreñas’ book is structured around five key chapters, with an introduction and conclusion framing its theoretical and empirical insights. The introduction establishes the central theoretical question: What does it mean to be unfree in the context of migrant domestic work? Parreñas mentions how most studies of the kafala system rely on either Marxian theories of exploitation, or liberal perspectives emphasizing individual rights and autonomy. After critiquing these theorizations of freedom, Parreñas elucidates how she finds the republican notion of freedom, offered by Philip Pettit, to be the most useful for her analysis, which views freedom as something that is achieved through non-domination or the inability to be dictated by the arbitrary will of another.
In Chapter 1, Parreñas explores how the kafala system legally binds domestic workers to their employers as subjects. Through her interviews with employers in the UAE and Filipina domestic workers, Parreñas illustrates the divergent ways in which employers exercise considerable control over the workers’ wages, mobility, and daily lives. Some employers recognize the humanity of their workers and are consistently generous in a manner that the workers appreciate, giving them days off and offering salaries that exceed the minimum amount. However, there are several employers who are generally compassionate but choose to infantilize the workers in certain situations, such as requiring them to be accompanied by a chaperone while outside the home. However, other employers infantilize them by insisting on chaperones when outside the home, or blatantly dehumanize them by withholding time off or paying them the bare minimum. This variability in workers’ experiences stresses the arbitrariness at the heart of the kafala system, with employers being able to choose how to treat their workers at any given moment.
Chapter 2 shifts focus to the role of the Philippines as a sending state in regulating and managing labour migration. The government makes workers well aware of the risks of overwork, starvation, physical violence, and sexual assault, though most do not experience extreme abuse. Using government documents, interviews with recruitment agencies, and participant observation at pre-departure seminars, Parreñas argues that government’s policies often exist more as aspirational standards than enforceable rights, with its emphasis on migrant self-reliance essentially leaving workers responsible for negotiating their own labour conditions.
Chapter 3 draws on Pettit’s idea of antipower and empirically illustrates the ways in which morality acts as an informal mechanism through which both employers and domestic workers deploy moral arguments to navigate their terms of employment. We witness how employers can see themselves as benevolent patrons rather than exploiters, and how workers can leverage moral claims to seek better treatment. Some workers report having respectful and positive relationships, distinguishing between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ employers. This chapter underlines how moral mediation functions as an informal check on employer power but does not fundamentally alter the hierarchical structure of domestic work, for the employer still has arbitrary discretion to choose how to treat the worker.
In Chapter 4, Parreñas addresses the criminalization of domestic workers who flee from employers who are abusive and critiques how state policies reinforce workers’ dependency on employers. Here, the limits of moral mediation are particularly evident as legal systems overwhelmingly favour employers and often punish those who try to escape mistreatment, further entrenching their subordination.
In Chapter 5, Parreñas considers the question of why Filipina workers continue to migrate despite the risks of infantilization and dehumanization. Workers are often caught between two choices, the unfreedom of poverty in the Philippines or the unfreedom of servitude in Arab states like the UAE, with many of them choosing the latter. However, while migration may offer a level of financial mobility for some of these workers, Parreñas reveals through her interview data with domestic workers that it rarely translates into long-term economic security for them.
Parreñas’ conclusion effectively ties all the themes from her chapters together, emphasizing that unfreedom in domestic work is less about apparent universal coercion and more about the structural conditions that engender persistent subservience on the part of the workers.
One of the book’s major strengths lies in its rich ethnographic detail. Parreñas’ extensive fieldwork, including 85 interviews with Filipina domestic workers and 35 interviews with employers in the UAE, allows her to present a wide range of positive and negative experiences, Parreñas adds to this interview data by conducting participant observation in government-mandated pre-departure orientation seminars in the Philippines, which sheds light on the role of sending states and how they often try to protect the interests of their migrant workers. This qualitative data coupled with surveys conducted with outgoing migrants and return migrants in the Philippines and content analysis of media reports on migrant domestic workers in the UAE allows Parreñas to paint a comprehensive picture of a case of migrant domestic work in the Global South, challenging simplistic narratives around unfree labour as akin to slavery and underscoring the variability in domestic workers’ experiences.
Another strength is Parreñas’ theoretical sophistication. By engaging with Pettit’s concept of freedom as non-domination and other theories of freedom, Parreñas offers a fresh analytical lens that bridges political philosophy and empirical work in migration studies. Her demonstration as to how both workers and employers invoke morality to justify or contest labour arrangements is rather compelling, and this discussion of moral mediation as a mechanism that limits the use of arbitrary power is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of labour conditions in the Global South.
Building on this theoretical sophistication, Parreñas also constructively critiques the Orientalist perspective taken up by Western scholars and organizations that often underpins the dominant discourses of domestic worker abuse in the Middle East. These discourses of abuse stereotypically portray the Arab world as backward, uncivilized, and dangerous in comparison to other nations. Parreñas rightfully complicates this narrative by not only pointing out the diversity in migrant workers’ actual experiences, but also demonstrating that many of the employers in countries like the UAE are in fact from the West themselves.
Nevertheless, there are areas where further exploration would be beneficial. For one, Parreñas speaks a great deal about the unfreedom of servitude and its theoretical underpinnings, but the unfreedom of poverty is given very limited attention. A more thorough discussion of economic freedom and social mobility in this context would have strengthened her overall argument for a republican conceptualization of un/freedom.
Additionally, the book does not fully develop the concept of morality as a social phenomenon. While morality is presented as an informal check on domination, Parreñas does not devote much attention to theorizing what morality itself entails. A more thorough engagement with sociological theories of morality, such as Durkheim’s work on moral regulation or Boltanski and Thévenot’s theory of moral justification, could have strengthened the book’s central points, particularly given her emphasis on moral pressure as a counterbalance to arbitrary employer authority. By leaving morality largely undefined, the book misses an opportunity to explore how moral norms develop and function in employer-worker relations. What social factors could be shaping moral obligations? How can broader social, religious, or legal frameworks influence moral behaviour in the domestic work sector? Addressing these questions would have provided a deeper understanding of the limits and possibilities of moral mediation as a tool for improving labour conditions of migrant workers.
In the end, Unfree is a gripping and accessible addition to the sociological scholarship on migrant labour and domestic work. Parreñas successfully challenges reductive narratives about the kafala system, offering a more nuanced understanding of unfreedom that accounts for both legal structures and interpersonal negotiations. The book’s blend of ethnographic depth and theoretical innovation makes it a valuable read not only for work and migration scholars, but for policymakers and advocates interested in labour migration and human rights. For those studying gender, labour, and migration, Unfree will likely become a key reference. Its discussion of freedom as non-domination opens up new avenues for examining labour precarity beyond traditional exploitation frameworks. Ultimately, Parreñas’ book is a powerful call for rethinking the structures that govern migrant labour on an international scale and a reminder that even in work arrangements where workers are not being blatantly mistreated or physically constrained by their employers, workers can still remain effectively unfree when their conditions depend on another’s arbitrary will.