The Experiences of Migrant Laborers in the United Arab Emirates

 

   

            

           I recently read a book titled Temporary People by the author Deepak Unnikrishnan. In this book Unnikrishnan depicts the lives of migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E). Using loosely linked short stories, Unnikrishnan explores the difficult and painful experiences of migrant laborers in connection to language, race, ethnicity and economic status. I highly recommend you read it when you get a chance! This book led me to research the U.A.E and its migrant laborer population.

             The U.A.E comprised of its seven emirates, collectively has a population of 9.991 million people. Of this number only 11% of the UAE's residents are citizens of the country. This means that the remaining 89% of the country's population are in the country on a temporary basis. The economy of the nation is largely reliant on migrant labor. The state uses a private sponsorship system known as kafala to control labor migration to the UAE. The kafala system with its rules and regulations creates a setting where only a fraction of the populace possesses citizenship rights. As such, every migrant employee must have an employer sponsor who is a UAE national or resident. The sponsor must typically hold a majority ownership position in the company. As a result, there is a substantial power gap between the sponsor, who is also the worker's legal employer, and the migrant worker.

        Consequently, migrant workers are often subjected to difficult labor conditions such as the confiscation of passports, excessive work hours, unsanitary living quarters, and wage withholding. All this contributes to the rise in demand for the trafficking of migrants as it offers opportunities for recruiters, exploiters, and brokers. Migrant workers who are trafficked into forced labor are frequently charged hefty recruitment fees by agencies to get work permits and jobs in the UAE. However, once in the UAE, victims are forced to sign contracts that frequently contain terms they do not comprehend and that differ from what they were told. Then they must endure grueling, long hours of labor in overcrowded work camps. They also endure low pay, irregular payments, and subpar living and hygienic conditions. Inevitably, the workers are forced to accept the terms and circumstances imposed on them and are placed in debt-bondage situations. This is especially prevalent among domestic, lower-level service, and construction employees. Additionally, many incidents have been reported of women migrant workers who have become victims of sex trafficking. The kafala system continues to provide employers a lot of power over employees, making them more susceptible to forced labor, human trafficking, and other forms of exploitation.

          It is important to note, the role of U.A.E citizens in all of this. The system has established a social contract between the state and the citizen, whereby the latter is basically promised a ready supply of income and extensive control over migrant labor in exchange for less social and political freedoms. The state provides its residents with a wide range of social benefits, including extensive housing benefits, access to free healthcare and education, preferential treatment in the job market, generally better wages, and more—despite the fact that they are subject to limits on their human rights. This has made citizens comfortable enough in this system, so much so that they enforce the system or simply turn a blind eye to the plight of these migrant laborers.

           The experiences of these migrant workers in the U.A.E reminds me of Trauger and Fluri’s book ‘Engendering Development’ which we read in Week 6. Here, their discussion on migration, labor and the vulnerability of migrants stands out. They highlight migration as integral to some sectors of work and the growth of large economies yet migrants are left susceptible and mostly defenseless against profit driven exploitation. Migrant labor work (particularly informal work) is characterized by inhumane hardship while simultaneously integral to connecting local economies to the global networks of capital. All of this rings true in the case of the U.A.E. It is painfully evident that there is a need for change in such exploitative situations. I see this situation as nothing short of indentured servitude! It is my hope that international bodies and external governments step in to help in this situation. However, considering the political, economic and power dynamics involved in confronting states like the U.A.E, will international bodies and external governments ever effectively address these injustices? Only time will tell.

References

https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/07/07/uae-s-kafala-system-harmless-or-human-trafficking-pub-82188

Trauger, Amy and Jennifer L. Fluri. 2019. Engendering Development: Capitalism and Inequality in the Global Economy. New York: Routledge

Unnikrishnan, Deepak. Temporary people. Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2017.

Men’s Contributions to Gender Justice and Equality- Kenya Men Engage Alliance

 

         Kenya Men Engage Alliance (KEMEA), which was founded in 2006, is a nationwide network of non-governmental organizations, governmental agencies, and community-based groups. They engage in research, interventions, and social mobilization projects that involve boys and men in productive ways to tackle gender inequalities and advance the health of women, men, and children. The network focuses on concerns such as gender-based violence (GBV), sexual and reproductive health rights, positive fatherhood, female genital mutilation, and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. The network has undertaken various activities to help address gender inequality and injustice in Kenya. These include: the education of journalists from Kenya's top media outlets on gender issues and how to prevent GBV and HIV, as well as frequent  training workshops with men and boys held to promote positive fatherhood, gender equality, and the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS. Additionally, they have come up with a national strategy to involve men and boys in promoting gender equality, and arranged consultation sessions with important partners including relevant ministries and the National Commission for Gender and Development. Also, they have developed the National HIV and AIDS Male Engagement Guidelines in collaboration with the National AIDS Control Council.

              One of their projects in particular caught my eye, this is the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence against Women. This takes place every year from November 25^th to December 10^th. The campaign usually commences with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and lasts until International Human Rights Day. The theme this year is Lets End Femicide. As per the Global 16 Days Campaign website, “the dates of the campaign were chosen to link violence against women and human rights and to underline that gender-based violence against women is a violation of human rights”. For members of the Men Engage Alliance, who consider themselves feminists and women’s rights activists, the campaign is a crucial time. During this campaign these men strive to prevent and end men's violence against all women and girls and to help demolish the patriarchal attitudes, practices, and institutions that support it. They ask men to join the White Ribbon Campaign pledge, which encourages men and boys to never engage in, excuse, or keep quiet about violence against women and girls. The KMEA uses this campaign as a vital opportunity to draw attention to the fact that patriarchal beliefs, norms, and practices are the foundation of gender-based violence.

                 The KMEA primarily use the campaign to bring men and boys on board as agents and reliable allies who accept and encourage the fair gender norms needed to end gender-based violence at all stratas of society. According to the campaign’s Action Guide, “Engaging with male allies can help elevate the issues facing women and, at the same time, encourage other men to take action and make small changes in their own lives, families and homes. Asking men in positions of power to use their authority to draw attention to the issue of femicide and its precursors, e.g. domestic violence, can help remove stigma and barriers to exposing the occurrence of violence and seeking redress and support.”

              The campaign also shines a light on the significance of recognizing intersectionality, realizing the “heightened risk of femicide that is associated with multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination”. The campaign has also provided information sheets with important information on indigenous femicide, black femicide, femicide in the workplace and femicide as a result of unsafe abortion. Bafana Khumalo, co-chair of the Men Engage Alliance, said: “Narratives of gender-based violence and femicide often stop at framing this violence as a women’s issue. It is important to recognize victims and to prioritize and empower survivors. We must also expose the perpetrators of this violence and the gender norms that underpin it. It is vital that we name the fact that the acts of violence against women and girls we are talking about are at the hands of male perpetrators. It is men’s violence against women that we need to address, and the underlying causes based on male power and inequitable gender relations at all levels of society. If men want to be part of the solution, they must step forward as responsible allies of women, girls and people of diverse sexual and gender identities who are leading the work to end gender-based violence and femicide.”  

                The co-director of the Men Engage Alliance, Joni van de Sand, also remarked: “We need to continue to work with individual men and boys so that they can unlearn those norms and behaviors that associate masculinity with power, control and violence, among other harmful traits. But we also need to work at a systemic level on the laws, policies, institutions and social norms and cultures that allow violence against women and girls to take place and, in many contexts, condone and encourage it. Without transforming the patriarchal systems and structures of societies that are at the root, it will be very difficult to eradicate men’s violence.”

                Reading about these men reminded me of our readings and discussions in Week 8 on Men, Masculinity and Development. Bilgi’s article ’Entering Women’s World through Men’s Eyes’ especially highlighted the positive results that can be generated if men are properly and contextually involved in addressing gender concerns. Thus, it is obvious that there is a need for men to participate in the process of tackling gender inequality for development. As we’ve seen above, men in various positions can help to make strides against harmful patriarchal norms and practices. While these men are not single handed solving gender inequalities and injustices in Kenya, they are making significant contributions to foster gender equality. This goes to show that though men cannot unilaterally solve gender issues, it is necessary for them to properly and contextually take part in the ongoing work to tackle those issues.

References

https://menengage.org/country/kenya/

Bilgi, Meena. 1998.Entering Women’s World Through Men’s Eyes. Pp. 93-99 in The Myth of Community: Gender Issues in Participatory Development edited by Irene Guijt and Meera Kaul Shah. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Reflection on the article "Gender and AI: Addressing bias in artificial intelligence"

Gender and AI, by InternationalWomensDay.com

In the link above, writers from International Womens Day explore the racial/gender bias' that Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines are inheriting from their mainly white and male programmers. AI and other technologies are often times thought of as being unbiased machines, but the reality is they are dependent on learning and schooling, just like a young human mind. The database and instances that the AI algorithm are fed dictate it's understanding of the world and how to replicate it. The article says- "AI appears neutral, but it's made by humans, which means it internalizes all the same bias as we have - including gender bias... AI is a mirror of ourselves."

The Harvard Review has many examples of gender biases in AI creations. And in the same article referenced above, Frida Polli says, “Can you imagine if all the toddlers in the world were raised by 20-year-old men? That’s what our A.I. looks like today. It’s being built by a very homogenous group,".

That all in context I was interested to see what some AI machines would come up with while using some search query keywords from our class. 

I began by exploring an art based AI generator, The Midjourney Bot available on discord- https://discord.com/invite/midjourney

Midjourney bot is a machine that "uses a machine learning algorithm trained on a huge amount of image data to produce unique images." (Images provided by a certain group of humans working at the company).

How it works is, you type: "/imagine (prompt ________ )" Whatever prompt you would like. The AI takes the words and runs four slightly difference algorithms to produce for you four different image options.

In this instance I try four different search query keywords, the terms and their associated AI generated images appear below: 

Gender

Interesting to note the race of all generated images are white people. Classic western cis het male and female appear in the first two. I was surprised that the bottom two images display androgenous features.

Development

Again the theme of whiteness is seen but despite that it presents striking images of cityscapes and the undeniable intertwining of humans and environment and human construction.

Gender and Development
Interestingly this the first time we see people of color represented by the AI, and it comes out with this combination of words, evidently influenced by the current idea of that term being associated with 20th and 21st century "development" efforts that are associated racialized within the context of the "global north and south".

Modernization

Finally, for fun I figured I would check out modernization, and I was not disappointed! The machine conjured up some cool cyber punk dystopian future people and whale buildings. 

All of these images were influenced by the images the AI's originally were fed and the new ones they are given daily by users. Going forward it will be of particular importance that the field of Artificial Intelligence has participation and creation that is ultra diverse and representative of the spectrum of humanity.

Nationhood, Women and Religious Politics

Chery MvEwan states "development is about power – its operations, its geographies, its highly uneven distribution and strategies for achieving it." (p.93), in the Indian context, this power manifests in the political battlefield, where the policy making and control of development initiatives is practiced.  The recent Hindutva movement in India, has given space for the women to enter Indian politics. However, their influence is largely shrouded under the image of a "sadhvi" or an ascetic. In the recent years, India has seen a rise of Sadhvi's in the political arena.

The discourse on nationhood and women is an ideal domain to explore the gendered symbolism used by societies to hegemonize women. With shrinking national boundaries, the transnational feminist movement has allowed greater scrutiny of the marginalization of women within the mythical imagined communities, the nation-state. Yuval Davis (1997) writes that "Women often come to symbolize the national collectivity” and the “collective honour” (p.219) of the country. This power play of signification, wherein women become signifiers of collective honour and bearers of national culture, is increasingly problematic for multiple reasons.

The pedestalized approach of the nation towards women legitimizes control in a subtle manner. According to Mee, the representation of women in the postcolonial context "portray women interacting with their natural environment in ways that represent women ‘purely as “women’”, that is, uncomplicated by reference to men, family, relationships or differences." This claim can be understood by the participation of Indian women in nationalist politics, giving them an “illusion of power.” (Basu, p. 232). Hindu Nationalism allowed Indian women to depart from their normative roles assigned in the private domain to achieve greater prominence in the roles as militant leaders insinuating violence through speech. Hindu Nationalist movement chose female ascetics for political positions in order to tap on the notion of women as symbols of “collective honour” (Davis, 1997). By putting these women on a cultural pedestal of purity and sanctity, the Hindu Nationalists protected them from the slander that women often face when they enter political life. Thus, women’s interest is not served by this pseudo symbolic pedestalization, as the deep-rooted misogyny continues to exist in Indian society. 

The Hindu Nationalists have “fostered activist roles for women around the Ram Janambhoomi issue by using the raped Hindu woman as “symbolic of the victimisation of the entire Hindu community" (Basu, 234) at the hands of the Muslim minority. This symbolic view of the Indian women holding the collective honour of the Indian community is extremely problematic as it plays on the idea of fragmentation of the community, dividing it into religious and sectarian bases. It may materially mobilize the militant leaders in a spirit of comradeship, giving them agency and power, but will not cater to the feminist agenda as it renders the minority women voiceless.

Having discussed the ramifications of assigning “national collectivity and honor to women, it is imperative to  discuss the complexity of these implications as seen by Enloe (1990) when she writes that "Women in many communities trying to assert their sense of national identity find that coming into an emergent nationalist movement through the accepted feminine roles of the bearer of the community's memory and children is empowering.” (p.224-225). The homogeneity that exists when women are assigned the role of cultural bearers of the nation-state, constructing identities that do not dissent or depart from the normative cultural values is again a problematic notion. 

Enloe has argues that the symbolic association of a veil to a Muslim woman inevitably makes her "nation's most valuable possession” (p.224) in the hands of the neo-colonial powers. Muslim women find themselves trapped between divergent loyalties towards the national culture and self-emancipation.

According to Enloe, some women might find the veil as "empowering" (p.224), as the very framework in which they function is without choice. The intervention of the United States in Afghanistan can be considered as an example.  While the US legitimized its opposition to Iran’s repressive policies in the name of women empowerment, the same was not seen in its intervention in Afghanistan, where women were adversely affected by the US presence in Afghanistan. Enloe mentions that “women are like birds in a cage” (p.226) during a nationalist movement that is under siege. 

As seen in the example of female ascetics in Indian politics or the veiled Muslim women, the symbolic use of religious garments in a politicized environment must be questioned, while the presence of women in Indian politics can be advertised as the increasing empowerment of Indian women, it does not allows the woman to express herself, as a woman, rather it gives her alternatives to embrace masculine or normative religious traits to be able to lead a highly patriarchal nation.

Grewal, I., Kaplan, C., & Gunew, S. (2002). Women's studies on its own: A next wave reader in institutional change. Duke University Press. (Yuval Davis and Cynthia Enloe's article derived from an anthology)

McEwan, Cheryl. 2001. Postcolonialism, Feminism and Development: Intersections and Dilemmas.” Progress in Development Studies 1:93-111.

Mee, Wendy. 2016. "The Social Lives of Gender and Religion: Implications for Development Policy." Sustainable Development 24:163-171.