CORRUPTION

State-Sponsored Slavery: Migrant Labor in the GCC
Saudi Arabia. While Kuwait became the first GCC country to proffer enforceable rights to domestic
workers, its legislation falls short by failing to stipulate enforcement mechanisms such as labor
inspections; specify fines for employers who retain identity documents; and grant collective bargaining
rights such as the right to strike and form unions. Bahrain’s law fails to provide basic protections such
as a minimum wage, weekly rest days, and limits on working hours.
The lack of governmental protection for domestic workers leaves them open to abuse and
exploitation. Due to their positions in private homes, domestic workers are largely isolated, and their
employers regularly take advantage of them. Employers often restrict them to the home and force
them to work as long as 21 hours a day. Domestic workers are also highly vulnerable to sexual and
physical abuse, and employers often use threats of abuse and rape to force domestic workers to
obey them.
Physical and sexual abuse of domestic workers is so rampant that many source countries have
banned workers from obtaining visas to GCC countries. Indonesia has placed a ban on female
domestic workers from working anywhere in the Gulf, and Uganda has banned its citizens from
specifically working in Saudi Arabia.
Given their lack of legal protections and the abuse that they endure, some domestic migrant
workers resort to fleeing from their employers. Those who successfully escape are often left without
passports, without money, without in-country contacts, and illegally in the country. Many domestic
workers do not know Arabic or English, leaving them unable to read street signs or even identify their
current address. Employers often confiscate domestic workers’ phones with their passports upon
their arrival at the home, further isolating them and making it extremely difficult for them to contact
their embassies—assuming they know how. Such intense isolation in a foreign location leaves them
especially vulnerable to exploitation and sex trafficking.
International Affairs Forum
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Prostitution, whether in hotels, private apartments, or massage parlors, is the primary manifestation
of sex trafficking in the Gulf. Domestic workers fleeing abusive environments are often further
trafficked into prostitution. Their experiences are almost identical to those of women who are
directly sex trafficked from their home countries, lured by false promises of better jobs and wages.
Traffickers subject their victims to tight physical control, regularly threatening both physical and
sexual abuse. Many women are kept locked in small, cramped apartments while they wait for their
next appointments with clients, which are usually set up by their traffickers. If the women are forced
to work in hotels, they often operate under the strict supervision of their traffickers, who ensure the
women meet with enough men to keep their profits high. If at any time the women do not follow
orders, their traffickers usually beat or starve them into submission. If women do happen to escape
While all six GCC countries have passed anti-human trafficking
legislation, the laws generally lack adequate definitions of
the term “trafficking”, as well as appropriate punishments for
traffickers.