‘The Biggest Problem We Are Facing Is the Running Away Problem’: Recruitment and the Paradox of Facilitating the Mobility of Immobile Workers

Katharine Jones, Leena Ksaifi and Colin Clark
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Katharine Jones: Coventry University, UK
Leena Ksaifi: Independent Scholar, Lebanon
Colin Clark: University of the West of Scotland, UK

Work, Employment & Society, 2023, vol. 37, issue 4, 841-857

Abstract: Fee-charging recruitment industries in Asia have become gatekeepers to temporary employment in low-wage occupations for millions of migrant workers. One of these jobs is live-in domestic work in private households. Increasingly, workers’ recruiters are depicted as contributing to their precarious, sometimes exploitative, working conditions. However, these narratives misunderstand the systemic and regulatory functions of agencies as transnational labour market actors. This article analyses the relationship between domestic work placement agencies in Jordan and Lebanon and their clients (the employers) as they negotiate the recruitment of women from Bangladesh. Drawing on data from 146 qualitative interviews, it addresses the mechanisms of how exploitative, controlling practices are constructed and normalised by agencies in their everyday interactions with their clients as well as with workers. The article argues that placement agencies play a paradoxical role; whilst facilitating global mobility they also broker worker immobility.

Keywords: Bangladesh; domestic workers; Jordan; Lebanon; migrants; placement agencies; recruitment; trafficking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:37:y:2023:i:4:p:841-857

DOI: 10.1177/09500170221094764

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