Compass Gender Spotlight: Lebanon's Kafala System — The Dark Underbelly of Beirut’s Financial Meltdown

Migrant workers push to abolish Lebanon’s exploitative kafala system. (Flickr)

The 2019 Lebanese protests, also known as the 17 October Revolution, lasted for months and have been recognized as a movement of unity. Protesting financial reform and poor banking practices, the uprising transcended religious, ethnic, and class divides. However, the protests neglected the country’s most vulnerable population—Lebanon’s 250,000 migrant workers, a group predominantly composed of women, who are attached to an exploitative labor institution known as the kafala system. Migrant workers have been excluded from consideration in economic reform, exacerbating gender inequality in the face of the country’s financial meltdown. 

Since October 2019, Lebanon’s economy has been mired by hyperinflation, skyrocketing unemployment, and a growing debt crisis. More than half of the country’s population lives in poverty and struggles to access basic amenities such as food and medicine. However, the people hardest hit by the financial collapse are the migrant women trapped in a regime of regulations excluded from Lebanon Labor Laws and who are scrambling to return to their home countries.

Under the kafala system, the state gives local individuals permits to employ foreign workers. Each sponsor, or kafeel, is given undue power and influence over laborers, often resulting in physical abuse and labor exploitation. Sponsors must sign a release waiver for a worker to change their employer or break their contract, binding migrant women to the behest of their sponsor. In addition, sponsors must give permission to their employees to resign, travel, or return home, immobilizing migrant women trying to escape Beirut’s economic and political crisis. 

In more prosperous periods in Lebanon, the system attracted large numbers of women from South Asian and African countries—including Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia—who hoped to earn wages as domestic workers and send money back to their families. However, the Lebanese pound has since lost more than half its value, limiting migrant women’s ability to be a source of financial support. The country’s declining economy is also reducing the demand for domestic labor, sending migrant women further into poverty. 

While many migrant workers have tried to escape financial distress and return to their home countries, Lebanon’s standard unified contract for migrant domestic workers has regulated status by the kafala system, meaning work contracts are the only legal document most workers have in the country. Consequently, thousands of undocumented women have faced penalties attempting to leave, some willing to risk jail time.

Lebanon’s economic collapse, compounded by the current pandemic, has also exacerbated abuse and violence under the already exploitative system. In many cases, employers have chosen to withhold wages if a laborer contracts COVID-19. Moreover, stay-at-home orders and lockdown measures have forced kafala employees to live with their sponsors, increasing the propensity for sexual violence. The threat of sexual abuse and rape by an employer has surged— the Lebanese Security Forces reported a 110 percent increase in domestic violence hotline calls in March 2020. 

In the context of the economic crisis, Lebanon’s healthcare shortage has widened health disparities between migrant women and non-migrants. With reduced capacity in Lebanese hospitals, most citizens are unable to receive necessary care, but migrant workers are likely to be admitted last. Migrant women also cannot depend on their employer to provide health insurance, furthering gender and racial disparities in Lebanese healthcare. 

The kafala system fails to meet international labor standards and establishes an institution of legal marginalization for African and Asian women. The construction of domestic work as a symbol of status for Lebanon’s pre-crisis nouveau riche has additionally denigrated the position of African and Asian migrants in the country, illuminating a gendered national disparity in the impacts of the country’s economic meltdown. 

The international community is urging Lebanon’s Labor Ministry to adopt a new standard unified contract that recognizes domestic workers under the law, and fourteen governments have called upon Lebanon to abolish the exploitative kafala system altogether. It will not be until the country’s most vulnerable are emancipated that all of Lebanon will be liberated.