Living and working as a domestic worker in the Middle East: the experience of migrant returnees in Girana town, North Wollo, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the migration experiences of Ethiopian migrant returnees from domestic work in the Gulf countries and Lebanon. The returnees reside in the town of Girana located in Habru sub-district, North Wollo zone of Amhara region. There is much female work migration to the Arab Middle East from the town, particularly to Saudi Arabia through Muslim pilgrimage. Employing a qualitative method, the study examines how the returnee women perceived and experienced labour migration and analyzes the impacts of labour migration on childcare, family survival back home, and debt payment. The returnees made voluntary regular and irregular labour migration to the region and engaged in domestic work, which is not preferred by the host society. However, domestic work is unregulated by the labour policy of the destination countries. This made the returnees’ employment situation rather exploitative, exacerbating their vulnerability to abuses, ethnic denigration, and undermining of cultural identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Work migration
• returnee women
• domestic work
• labor exploitation
• abuses
• debt payment
• care for families

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All figures above are obtained from Archive (2007) from the Agricultural Office in Girana. It is assumed that the female population is less than that of males due to work migration or population imbalance.

2. Archive (2009) obtained from the Municipality Office in Girana.

3. Archive (2009) obtained from the Municipality Office in Girana.

4. According to the Municipality Office in Girana, Kebele houses were confiscated by the Socialist Government of Ethiopia in 1975 from individual owners. The current government also took over the houses with no change in policy to return them to the owners. As a result, very poor families are allowed to rent the houses cheaply.

5. Archive (2009) obtained from the Municipality Office in Girana.

6. Archive (2008) obtained from Habru Woreda Islamic Affairs Council.

7. http://blogs.worldbank.org (accessed 29 November 2010), page 11. The author places emphasis on the nature of domestic work by foreign migrants in the Middle East and discusses how contractual agreements between employers and employees make the latter suffer abusive living and working conditions as housemaids.

8. According to Jureidini (2003, 15), ‘Abed’ is an Arabic term that refers to both a black person and a slave. It is often used by employers of foreign domestic workers in the Gulf region and Lebanon.

9. When the returnees arranged labor migration in 2002/2003, the amount of money each returnee owed was 10,000 Birr (1000 USD in 2010), page 16. But with increasing inflation rate in Ethiopia since then, labor migrants to the Gulf region and Lebanon currently need probably threefold of this sum.