Organizing the Unorganized: Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

A study of workers’ rights in a non-unionized field in Lebanon

This study examines the process of unionizing domestic workers in Lebanon, highlighting the potentialities as well as the obstacles confronting it, and looks at the multiple power relations involved through axes of class, gender, race, and nationality. The author situates this struggle within the larger scene of the labor union ’movement’ in the country, and discusses the contribution of women’s rights organizations in rendering visible cases of abuse against migrant domestic workers. She argues that the ’death’ of class politics has made women’s rights organizations address migrant domestic worker issues as a separate labor category, further contributing to their production as an ’exception’ under neoliberalism.

Farah Kobaissy is senior research assistant at the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut (AUB).