Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers

Migrant Agency and Social Change

Bina Fernandez

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030240547
• eBook ISBN: 9783030240554
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book tells the stories of the Ethiopian women who migrate to work as domestic workers in the Middle East. Drawing on qualitative research in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Kuwait, the author reveals how women's aspirations to migrate are constituted within unequal gendered structures of opportunity in Ethiopia and asks us to consider how gender, race, class and nationality intersect in the construction of migrant subjectivities and agency. By analysing the impact of migration on social reproduction both in Ethiopia and the destination countries, the book offers fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the largest stream of women's autonomous international migration from Africa.

© The Author(s) 2020

Bina FernandezEthiopian Migrant Domestic WorkersMobility & Politicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24055-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Will to Change

Bina Fernandez¹

(1)

University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

Bina Fernandez

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter introduces the ‘will to change’ of the Ethiopian women who migrate to the Middle East in large numbers each year, to take up jobs as migrant domestic workers. Their primary aim is to change their own lives and those of their families. This chapter describes the aspirations that contribute to the women’s decisions to work abroad and then goes on to lay out a theoretical framework for understanding their agency, drawing from migration studies and feminist scholarship. The chapter argues that we should move beyond the dominant depictions in media and policy discourses of migrant women as victims of abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. Instead, I outline how this book proposes to interpret the actions and inactions, the words and silences, of these women as multiple dimensions of their agency, even though such agency may often be heavily constrained by their employment circumstances. Further, I use the concept of social reproduction to understand the transformations their migration brings about in their own lives, the lives of their families, and at a broader level of social change.

Keywords

EthiopianMigrant domestic workerAgencySocial reproductionSocial change

End Abstract

When asked why they want to migrate to work in the Middle East, the commonest response given by young Ethiopian women is, ‘To change my life for the better’ and/or ‘To change my family’s lives for the better.’ The compelling force of this ‘will to change’ is evident in the continuing flow of women to the Middle East. These women remain largely undeterred by the now widespread knowledge of the dangers and difficulties involved in migration, and of the high potential risk of abuse and exploitation. Even the temporary legal bans on migration periodically proclaimed by the Ethiopian government have not stemmed the flows. Many migrants persist in their chosen course, opting for irregular, often more expensive and dangerous, routes, when regular routes are closed. Although reliable data on Ethiopian migration is difficult to obtain, conservative estimates of its scale suggest that over half a million Ethiopian women are currently migrant workers in the Middle East (Kuschminder et al. 2012: 33), and at least as many are returnee migrants.

The migration of Ethiopian women to undertake contract domestic work in the Middle East began in the late 1990s, after the fall of the Derg regime and the liberalisation of emigration controls in the country. The majority of women travel as documented migrants, employed on contracts as live-in domestic workers. Lebanon was the initial and primary destination for nearly all migrant women from Ethiopia until the early 2000s. However, in 2008, the Ethiopian government officially banned migration to Lebanon due to the high levels of abuse and deaths suffered by Ethiopian women there. By 2008–2009, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had emerged as the new preferred destinations, followed by Dubai, Qatar, Yemen, and Oman.

Women migrate to the Middle East from a number of countries to find domestic work. Those who come from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Nepal tend to be married women with children. The typical Ethiopian migrant woman, by contrast, is unmarried and slightly younger, normally aged between 18 and 30. Unpublished data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA) in Ethiopia shows that, in 2009, 91% of the documented migrant women were single, 83% were aged 20–30, and over 60% had completed secondary education . Almost all these women were employed as domestic workers or nannies on short-term contracts for 2–3 years, and over 90% of them earned US$100–150 per month. The migration trajectory of documented migrant women workers is often circular: many women complete one employment contract , return to Ethiopia for a break, and then take up another contract, sometimes in a different country. Women who are undocumented workers often find it difficult to exit the country.

While a sophisticated body of scholarship has analysed the phenomenon of increasing flows of migrant domestic workers in the current globalised economy, this literature has tended to focus on the experiences of migrants from South America, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka (Anderson 2000; Constable 2007; Gamburd 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hochschild 2001; Parrenas 2001; Moukarbel 2009; Liebelt 2011; Briones 2009). The present book departs from this geographical trend and offers an analysis of the largest stream of autonomous migration by African women to countries outside the continent. The migration of Ethiopian women between Africa and the Middle East has only recently begun to be documented (Fernandez 2010, 2011, 2013; de Regt 2010; Jamie and Tsega 2016; Kuschminder 2016; Atnafu and Adamek 2016), and is relatively undertheorised. This book aims to provide an empirically grounded analysis of the gendered dimensions of agency and social reproduction within this migration trajectory.

Dominant media, policy, and academic discourses tend to explain the continued momentum of Ethiopian women’s migration by reference either to ‘cultures of migration’¹ (RMMS 2014) or to the ‘trafficking’ of women into working conditions that are akin to slavery (Beydoun 2006; Endeshaw et al. 2006; Minaye 2012; Kubai 2016; Atnafu and Adamek 2016). However, such explanations are simplistic and offer insufficient analytical insight into a complex socio-cultural phenomenon. This book aims to offer a richer analysis, based instead on the notion of the ‘will to change’ that is expressed by many Ethiopian migrant women. I examine how women’s agency is constructed in this desire for change and offer a closer consideration of the often contradictory social meanings attributed to their actions, practices, and choices. I identify the ways in which the exercise of agency by these women is contingent on the location-specific identity markers of gender, race, nationality, class, age, ethnicity, and religion. The book also interrogates the multiple, complex registers within which ‘change’ occurs: at the level of the individual self, the family, and the community in Ethiopia; and within the context of migrant domestic work in countries of the Middle East (with a specific empirical focus on Lebanon).

In focussing on Ethiopian women, I build on the rich genre of analysis of migrant domestic workers and ‘global care chains’ that examines how migrant women from countries in the Global South undertake care work at destination countries primarily in order to provide support for their marital families (Hochschild 2001; Parrenas 2001). I extend these analyses to the experiences of the predominantly unmarried Ethiopian migrant women who work to support the welfare of their natal families . The book argues that the labour of these young women has important implications not only for the depletion of individual women’s resources but also for the social reproduction of families and communities in Ethiopia. In doing so, I also build on the work of scholars of migration and social reproduction (Truong 1996; Kofman and Raghuram 2015) to enable us to better appreciate the women’s labour in relation to a conceptualisation of social reproduction that is spatially extended across national borders.

The aim of the book is, then, to analyse the diversity of migrant women’s experiences and to add breadth and depth to the extant literature on migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. This introductory chapter lays the groundwork for this study. First, I provide a profile of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers and introduce their aspirations for change. I then go on to draw on migration and feminist studies to briefly outline the conceptualisations of agency and social reproduction that I deploy in my analysis. Finally, I discuss the methodologies and the scope of the research that has informed this book, and provide an outline of the cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Will to Change
• 2. ‘We Are Like Oil to Our Government’
• 3. (De)Constructing Docility at the Destinations
• 4. ‘We Ethiopians Are More Sociable People: We Cannot Live Alone’
• 5. ‘Now We Welcome the Birth of Daughters’
• 6. On the ‘Cutting Edge of Change’
• Back Matter