Bilateral Labor Agreement with Gendered and Unfree Labor: Vietnamese Women Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

What is it about?

The Vietnamese labor brokerage state and the Kafala system, as part of the Vietnam-Saudi Arabia bilateral labor agreement, are forms of structural violence which contribute to gendered and racialized labor. This gendered governing instrument fails to provide transnational social protection for Vietnamese female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. This governance system is also racialized, with the Vietnamese quasi-state and private recruiters travelling to poor rural areas to entice migrants, including underage ethnic minorities, to sign up to work in Saudi Arabia as “free” agents. These workers were robbed of their labor power and subjected to many forms of abuse in Saudi Arabia. However, actions by local and global NGOs and human rights organizations offer some rays of hope by exposing their precarity and debt cycles, even with the ILO office in Vietnam turning a blind eye to these violations.

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